Writing on a computer can be one of the most harrowing experiences of the modern era. With a bevy of Internet distractions including endless pictures of puppies, videos of people falling down and social media, it’s a wonder anything actually gets done anymore. How can anyone stay focused while simultaneously drowning in thousands of procrastination catalysts just one click away?

Flowstate, found on Product Hunt, is a writing app for OS X ($14.99) and iOS ($9.99) that wants to keep you focused. You select a font, timeframe and title, then start writing. If you stop typing, your text begins to fade, and it's completely deleted after five seconds of inactivity.

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You can choose timeframes between 5-180 minutes, although one of the creators Caleb Slain told Mashable you’ll only really start to lock in at 15 minutes or longer. After completing a session, you can make as many edits as you want. Flowstate also allows you to view how many words and characters you wrote, change the font and download or share your work.

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The app sounds intense — and it is — but in my short time with Flowstate, it kept my nose to the grindstone better than any cup of coffee ever could.

Hitting a flow state

Slain and his best friend Blaine Cronn make up Overman, the company behind Flowstate, and their goal is to get you in the zone by not giving you a way out.

“You as a person want to keep the things you own, it’s your natural instinct,” Slain said “So if you make a sentence, you make a paragraph, you don’t want it to go away, but the only way to keep it is to write more.”

The more you write, the more you have to lose.

“Before you know it, you have page, or two pages,” he said. “Nothing in the world matters anymore except for keeping what’s yours.”

This phenomenon of getting “in the zone” is called hitting a flow state, which is the app’s namesake.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes a flow state as being in a highly focused mental state, where your attention is only on a single task. This could include watching an engrossing movie, writing a novel or working on a piece of software.

“In an ideal scenario, a flow state is the loss of identity,” Slain said, meaning that you forget yourself in your activity.

While Flowstate is not ideal for reference- or research-based writing, it allowed me to flex my creative writing muscle and plow through a short diary entry about a cockroach I saw the other day. The short window to type makes it very difficult to click around and fix past sentences, so it really separates the writing and editing process.

When I couldn’t think of a word, I would hit space and backspace until I could. Even though that would occasionally stop my flow, it still kept my mind focused on the document in front of me.

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Inspiration for Flowstate

Flowstate is designed after a writing technique Slain learned from Emmy-award winning writer Stewart Stern, Slain said. In a screenwriting program led by Stern, Slain was taught about writing in timed sessions, which he had never heard of before.

“[Flowstate] is designed around what I needed and wanted in order to continue exploring this different version of writing,” he said. “I’ve personally been using this thing for three-and-a-half years for everything I’ve done.”

Slain said production on Flowstate started four years ago, and it has gone through iteration after iteration to become what it is now.

The core function of what Flowstate does — deleting your text — wasn’t actually a part of the original iteration. The app would freeze your sentences after typing so you couldn’t edit them and had to keep moving forward, Slain said, but that wasn’t enough to stay focused.

Currently, while Overman would like to expand Flowstate onto more than just Apple devices, Slain said he can’t make any promises.