Thinking about workflows

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Nov 2, 2009 at 07:35 PM

[Note: This is my at-home-personal-project-MacBook workflow response.]

I’m working on a small book in my spare time, a guidebook to an historic site where I do volunteer work. I had done a lot of the research for this book several years ago, so I did not really need to capture and organize a lot of notes. However, it does have several modular componets—history, hiking, nature, etc. So I’ve been using Scrivener to put these pieces together. Where Scrivener sort of breaks down for me, is visually—the gridded index card approach just doesn’t work the way my mind does. So I’ve found Tinderbox to be extremely useful for getting me over humps.

For instance, in writing about the sites visitors will see, I’ve found it helpful to use Tinderbox’s map view to arrange notes on these sites in a quasi-geographic way based on where they are located on the landscape of the historic site (which is a 300-acre penninsula on Lake Champlain). This has helped me because I realize that the proper order for the site descriptions are to group them geographically.

Essentially, what I’m say, I think, is that Tinderbox is like a little playground that I can go to whenever I get stuck, and it often helps me to think through the project in a creative way I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do.

This is more like work un-clogging than it is workflow, but it does help get the work flowing again.

Steve Z.