If I’m writing an essay by hand, I can’t just flip over my binder paper and read a news article on the back. But if I’m working on an essay in Google Docs, I can do just that—I create a new tab, I go to BBC News and suddenly my focus is lost. In a world of incredible technology and productivity software, preventing distractions is a major challenge.

Certainly, technology brings its advantages. When I write timed essays by hand, I often lament the inflexibility of working on paper. Instead of being able to move around paragraphs and remove inelegant sentences with a few strokes of the keyboard, I have to laboriously cross out sentences and write in the margins. On a computer, I have the freedom to delete entire sentences without leaving an ugly scribble on the paper. And let’s not forget the beauty of spellcheck.

But it’s incredibly easy to get distracted and lose all of the productivity benefits that technology offers. When I’m typing an essay or taking notes, I can quickly become distracted adjusting page margins, tweaking line spacing and searching for that perfect font (which I usually don’t find, by the way). And then there’s the threat of wasting time checking email, social media or just random news articles. If I’m not working on my essay, then I’m not going to make any progress no matter how powerful my word processor is.

And that’s the problem with technology—no matter how much it helps me write or study, I ultimately have to do the writing or studying myself. I have to figure out what I want to write about and what words I want to use. My brain has to absorb the information I’m studying so that I remember it. As much as the computer can help, it can’t do that for me.

Beethoven didn’t use a computer to write his nine symphonies. Shakespeare never typed his sonnets into Microsoft Word. What made their works revolutionary was not the paper that they wrote them on, but the thoughts that they expressed.

What is most important to remember for creative work—whether on a computer or not—is that the greatest asset that you have is your mind. If you are distracted, your mind will not be able to work at full productivity. Admittedly, this is less true for rote tasks than it is for those which require full mental focus and creativity, and what distracts one person might sharpen the focus of another.

You can identify what tasks requires your greatest mental presence and prevent technology from distracting you while you work on them. Productivity software can have hundreds of options, ranging from formatting to autosave. But if these settings don’t help your mind focus on the work, just ignore them. That might be the reason that minimalism and clean user interfaces have become more common in recent years. They help support the mind instead of working against it.

And be careful to avoid other distractions, like browsing Facebook or surfing the web. Try taking an application into fullscreen mode to single-task or hiding the tab bar in Google Chrome so that you aren’t tempted to switch over to Facebook from your essay. If you’re working on an iOS device, you can use Guided Access to prevent switching applications without entering a password.

And above all, remember to prioritize your mind over the computer.