Writing Productivity Helpers
Tools to Keep Your Writing Life on Track
Today we’re talking tools of the writing trade. I talk about tools a lot and I think about tools even more because anything that is worth doing is worth doing in the most effective and efficient way possible. When you think of an editor, you might picture someone poring over a text to remove all the errors or otherwise improve it (eg, a copyeditor or development editor) or you might picture someone reading a text to determine whether to sign it for a publishing company (eg, an acquisitions editor). Probably you’re picturing someone with their nose in a manuscript.
But editors—almost all editors, freelance and in-house—do some amount of workflow and project management, too, by necessity. Nobody is working on just one project at a time. What would that even be like? None of my editor friends have any idea. We’re always working on a pipeline of projects with overlapping deadlines and tasks. Most of us have picked up a few tips and tricks along the way for keeping a never-ending tide of writing projects organized and on track, which is what I would like to share with you in today’s article.
Maybe you’re someone who is working on writing just one thing. If so, this article is for you. Maybe, like me, you are working on writing many things at any one time, with writing projects of various types at various stages of the writing process, from ideation to revision. If so, this article is for you. The tools you’ll find in today’s article scale from the project level up to the “writing workload” level. They’ll serve you as well for one project as they will for one hundred. I hope you don’t have one hundred projects. Or maybe I hope you do have one hundred projects. Sounds exciting, actually, but also exhausting.
Take me for an example. I write this thing you’re reading right now, which means each week (or thereabouts) I need to complete two articles for the newsletter of approximately 1850 words (more or less, but usually more). I have some tools I use to keep track of the Shelf Life articles I have written that are scheduled to go live, the ones I am currently writing, the ones that are done and live, and the ones that I’ll be writing in the future. That’s already a lot to keep track of. But I also have a handful of other writing projects I’m working on or in the pipeline to work on in the future. Right now there are about twenty of those.
So in this article I’m going to review four tools to keep organized and keep writing day after day. From broadest to narrowest, I’ll cover a tool to track your entire writing workload, a tool to quickly create and maintain writing schedules, a tool to log your writing, and finally a tool to help you focus on writing when you actually sit down to do it.
Notion
The first tool is Notion, which you can find at Notion.so. As I discussed in a previous article, I prefer software that offers a stripped-down free version versus a timed trial that will lock me out of my content when time’s up. Notion offers a free personal version that has most of the features you’ll need and never expires so you won’t lose your hard work, and if you absolutely must have some extra functionality, then the Personal Pro plan is very affordable ($4/month). Notion has a desktop app (for Windows and Mac), a web app, and mobile apps (Android and iOS) and they all sync your content so you have access to it anywhere.
Notion lets you organize a tremendous amount of content through various customizable page templates or linking and nesting pages you create from scratch. You can use it for anything from quick to-do lists to complex wikis. A couple of my most-used pages are my Project Status Page, where I keep track of all my writing projects, and my Writing Log where I track writing activities, running word counts, and time devoted to writing. The possibilities for custom pages and trackers are pretty endless. You can create a project master page with subpages for your characters, settings, mind maps, and outlines. If you have projects in the submission phase, build out a query and submission tracker to keep tabs on the agents and editors you’re talking with. Install the Notion snipping tool to your web browser to quickly capture anything you see on the web and send it to your collection of links for later review and use. Transform a table into a Kanban board, gallery, list, or calendar on the fly to see your information through different lenses.
With a little MacGyvering you can even build a global tagging system that will quickly show you all the content across your Notion account that has a given tag.
Over the years, I’ve tried a lot of tools to keep my writing projects organized: Pen-and-paper journals, OneNote, Trello, Milanote, Google Drive, and others. This is the best one I have found. I considered including the Online Writing Log tool for this article but it takes about five minutes to build all of the OWL’s functionality into Notion, so there was no point.
Pacemaker
Pacemaker Planner is a really cool tool for planning out how to attack a piece of writing. You input the specs of your piece first (a unique name for your project, the number of words you are targeting, and the date you want to finish) and then you give Pacemaker some information about how you would like to work, the pace you want to set, what days you’re available to work, and so on. With that information, Pacemaker will spit out a project plan for you to let you know your writing goal for each day from now till your deadline.
You then have some options for how to update your plan as you go. You can record your progress either by putting in what you do each day or by putting in your totals, and Pacemaker will do the math. The most useful progress-tracking feature is Pacemaker’s ability to recalculate on the fly if you get ahead of or behind your plan. Pacemaker will either show you how far ahead or behind plan you are or it will adjust your plan accordingly to maintain a relative pace till the end and still meet your deadline.
When I am setting up a project for myself or helping a friend or author set up a plan, I ask all the same questions as Pacemaker. When do you want to be done? What days can you work more, or less, or not at all? Do you want to work on weekends, and if so, do you want to go even harder on weekends than on weekdays? What will you do if you get off track? How will you adjust your plan? Pacemaker automates all of the work planning and shows your plan and progress in a few different views (calendar, graph, and table).
You could build a simple tool to do most of this with Excel or Google Sheets, or a very complicated tool to do all of this with Excel (or maybe Sheets), but Pacemaker already exists so there’s no need. You get two plans for free. The paid subscription has additional functionality like showing all of your plans together on one calendar, unlimited plans, and archiving completed plans, but the monthly cost is steep for the functionality.
750 Words
Okay so, sad news. 750 Words was free when I first encountered it, and it’s not anymore, but it has also added a lot of cool functionality since then. 750 Words is a site where you go each day and write. When you have written your 750 words for the day, the site gives you an X in your checkbox for the day signifying that you have met your goal. Cool, right? You get to check off a box, which as I've told you before is one of my favorite things. The text window you type in doesn't have any neat customization. You can't underline or italicize, you can't really put in meaningful headings or anything like that. But when you reach your goal of 750 words, you not only unlock a checkbox but you also get access to a really cool dashboard of data on what you've written for the day in the form of colorful charts and graphs.
If there's one thing I like more than putting check marks in boxes, it's data visualization. You're going to have to take my word on that because I don't do much of it in Shelf Life but, trust me, it's a thing.
Anyway, you'll receive stats on how much you wrote how quickly, that’s easy to figure out on your own. But you’ll also receive some analysis of the language—thoughts on what your mood was like while you were writing, what broad topics you may have been concerned about, what words you used most frequently, and so on. There’s also a badge system that will reward you for long writing streaks.
I find that 750 Words helps motivate me to write by gamifying the writing process and then rewarding me with some fun analysis of what I have written. As I mentioned in the above-linked prior Shelf Life article, I’m also highly motivated by a string of checked boxes to keep checking more boxes. If you, too, get inspired to do stuff by the fear of disappointing an empty box, this tool is excellent for getting you into a daily writing habit.
Focuswriter
Finally, there's the good old standby Focuswriter. Focuswriter is a free word processor for Windows and Linux (there are unsupported Mac versions out there as well but I don’t have a Mac to try them out on so your mileage may vary). You download and install Focuswriter (for free) and when you run it it takes up your entire screen. No distractions. You can adjust the way the screen looks by changing your Theme (I like the solid gray-blue background but there are plenty of others), or you can change a number of other technical aspects by navigating to Settings and then Preferences.
There’s a little extra functionality in terms of setting goals, tracking streaks, and providing writing statistics, but otherwise this is one of the most stripped-down word processors you’ll find. It’s excellent for distraction-free writing sessions. It hides all your other applications and even the ribbon at the bottom of your screen. Obviously you can still alt-tab to other applications, and mousing to the top or bottom of the screen gives you menus to click through, but for the most part this interface drowns out all the other garbage that is calling for your attention, at least visually. I recommend pairing Focuswriter with your favorite long-running, ad-free brown noise video and muting notifications from the other applications that make noise to get your attention.
If you have trouble focusing on writing with so many other applications on your desktop crying out for you to look at them, this is a great tool to help you ignore the clutter. Sadly, Focuswriter does not have an official mobile app so I can’t use it on my tablet or phone—not that I do any meaningful writing on my phone.
So that’s it! Four tools, several of them free, to keep your writing organized, assist you with planning and motivation, and keep you writing day after day. I hope you’ll check out a few of these if you have a writing problem to solve, and let me know how you like them! I’ll be back on Thursday with one of those pedantic posts I know—but don’t understand why—you look forward to. Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss out!
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