Thinking about workflows

Posted by Hugh
Nov 14, 2009 at 10:46 AM

There are at least three ways of doing this (apart from flying by the seat of your pants).

One is to use an outliner with columns (or an Excel or Numbers spreadsheet) to create your writing outline, and then add a couple of columns that record daily word-count progress and dates.

A second is to detach your daily progress from your writing outline and record it separately in a spreadsheet or journaling software such as MacJournal. There are several Excel templates skating round the Internet, but this one, created by the husband of the writer Kristal Shaff, does the job and is certainly one of the prettiest: http://www.kristalshaff.com/Links.html.

A third is to add daily records and targets to the task meta-data stored in a project-management application like Merlin, a task manager like Omnifocus or project-conceiving software like Curio.