Two Surprising Programs That Help Organize Your Writing

I’m a busy dude. No doubts aboot it. Writing, editing, tweeting and blogging, working, a million other things. How do I stay organized?

Back in the very late 80’s, I went to a seminar “Doing music and nothing else”. The presenter gave a memorable seminar on music business, and he absolutely hammered on some things that people don’t think logically through. I think the idea was, “buy gear. Get in band. Rehearse. Record company finds me practicing guitar in my bedroom and offers me $100,000,000 to sign record contract and ‘We’ll give you a year to write songs!’”

He debunked that pretty quickly by pointing out the common plan is steps 1,2,3, 46.

steps 19-45 were missing, let alone steps 5-18.

DayTimer

He gave us all three month trials of Daytimers. Nice little cardboard box, little booklet and telephone number storage book. All matching, fit in the pocket case – all sized for bomber jackets. Yes!

I immediately asked him for the area code for Los Angeles, and wrote a made up phone number in the phone book. Entry name? “Artie Fufkin, Polymer Records”.

Some of you get that joke. It caused a big laugh during the seminar. Unfortunately, as I acquired phone numbers over the next two years, a road manager stole that phone book from me.

I wonder if he ever tried calling Artie.

But I still had the Daytimers!

Digressing aside, I spent about two weeks before deciding on which Daytimer would work for me. The biggest problem I had was… I forgot to use it.

Teaching music for many years, I had my DayTimer open on my amplifier and would just… forget to use it. And it was in front of me! After 2006, I finally had to admit – I was wasting a lot of money buying a daytimer and having blank page after blank page. I would throw away blank ones and archive the used ones. After 20 years, I had a lot of pages – but amounting to perhaps two months of used entries per year.

Cue Michael Hyatt

So I took an online seminar a few years ago with Michael Hyatt – one of those great seminars he’d do for free. Yes, he’d try to hook you on selling something at the end. He’s got to make a living, just like you and me. BUT… he gave away a LOT of stuff in those seminars.

He talked about Scrivener. No kidding, I was hooked on Scrivener myself. Then he talked about Evernote. “It’s my brain on the internet.” He’d say.

I don’t get it.

Mike talked for about five minutes and I just didn’t understand a thing he was saying. It works how??? So… I still don’t get it.

Evernote

So I decided – He recommended it and it’s got a free plan. What have I got to lose? I’ll try it. I don’t know if its my heritage, my Galizianer background or perhaps the broader German heritage as a whole, but when I try something, I have to learn everything about it. If I buy something and it comes with accessories, I want those accessories.

So I got Evernote on a free plan. Yup. Nicholas Reicher, Evernote user. I watched three or four of those generic “How I use Evernote to combat halitosis” videos that abound by professional YouTubers, and got the browser plug in.

Michael Hyatt Was Right

My whole world was upside down by Monday Morning.

I used to print out articles to PDF and save them on my hard drive. It was a nightmare, because I had no way to see which was which, what the point of in downloading them.

Now I could save directly to Evernote. Tag them. And now, in the latest version, I can open the PDF’s to show every page.

Yeah!

Using Evernote

There’s no end of ways to use Evernote. Journal, make notes, to do lists, clip articles for later review, write articles, a billion things!

I mostly use it for clipping articles – over 11,000 articles in four years. I also do todo lists, and I use the web clipper for another thing – to buy reminders. Just create a tag “.to buy” and I can instantly track them that way.

It’s just not as good for project tracking.

Asana

Then a movie producer I was working with had me working on a miniseries project. He set up an Asana project to monitor the progess of five million parts of the miniseries. I mean, MAN, the plot was complicated, actors, scripts, plot points, music score, a thousand other details.

I could add my own stuff if I signed up for Asana too. So I signed up for it. Asana had two different methods of tracking, a list or a board. The producer preferred lists.

I’m a checklist kind of guy, so… yeah. Love it. Good to go.

Then later I saw someone demonstrate how to use the board style.

D’oh!

Your DVD/Bluray box set of that miniseries could be gathering dust if I’d just moved everything to board method.

Just create a board…

The important thing is that deadlines must be set. A project with no deadline is a dead project. What gets measured gets done.

I really need to set up a language board in Asana where I can track the progress of learning other languages!

You can do something similar for almost any project.

Michael Hyatt is fond of saying “what gets scheduled gets done.” This also includes consistently using either Asana or anything else. Just like you say 4:00 to 4:30 is workout time, you must have a 7 pm – check asana time. It doesn’t have to be specifically that time – just PICK a time that you’ll log in and at least REVIEW Asana. This is the only way you’ll stay on top of things!

Conclusion

Ultimately, you have to find what works for you. This works for me, between Asana and Evernote.

What programs do you use to keep your writing organized? Do Evernote and Asana help you? What alternative programs do you use?