At a time when most of us are glued to our computers, constantly connected and ready to respond to every e-mail, Facebook poke, tweet or instant message, it may seem counter-intuitive to argue that our best thinking could be done at an empty desk with a pad of lined paper and a few Post It notes, but that's pretty much exactly what the author of Meshwrite advocates.

The idea's simple enough: an electronic pad that sits in the middle of the screen (run it full screen to remove any distracting icons and menus) to which you can add a bunch of associated, colour-coded sticky notes. Pads are organised into projects which in turn are given a context - for example 'active' or 'unfiled' - and it's possible to have up to four 'desks' each with their own pad and notes open at once.

Pads stay stuck to their own desks but notes can be dragged from one to the other, so it's useful to arrange them into categories using colour codes so you can see at a glance the kind of notes you're dealing with. And that's about as structured as things get using Meshwrite.

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The notion of clearing the decks in order to get things done is interesting (there are still fans of WordPerfect 5.1 out there and our review of Writeroom, the full screen word processor for the Macintosh was very complimentary) and the inclusion of a selection of handwritten fonts contributes to the sense of working in the real world with real materials.

In use, it really concentrates the mind on what you're trying to do, rather than getting obsessed with the tools you're using to do it. Interestingly, the clever integration with Twitter doesn't detract from this - although it should - since it's so quick to tweet or re-tweet that you're back to work in a few seconds.

Available in Windows and Mac versions, Meshwrite is an interesting product with a distinctly amateur feel. On the one hand this is good (free updates for life, and owners are encouraged to feed back feature suggestions for inclusion in future versions) but on the other it means that there are some interface quirks.

The main pad's not resizeable, text highlighting and formatting doesn't always behave in a consistent way and the cursor has a habit of disappearing; cutting and pasting text from other applications can also mess up the display of the pad. Against this, there's a genuine sense of freedom and focus which makes Meshwrite a good program for creative thinking.

An intriguing ideas organiser that promotes the notion that you can get more done by clearing away the clutter and working in an environment that mimics real world pen and paper. There are a few interface clunkers, but the Twitter integration is excellent and makes it easy (some might say too easy) to tell the world whatever happens to be on your mind.