The Digital Writer – The Climb #596

Saturday 10^th October 2020

I made a decision some years ago to go fully digital with my writing.

My reasoning was many-fold. The first was that I wanted to be able to index my work and be able to find it with a search rather than trying to find the right notebook. Secondly, I wanted to be able to write anywhere. If I went to a convention or on holiday, I didn#t want work on a novel or story to have to stop.

I’d already been embracing other aspects of digital working for many years. Back when I ran Action-Figure, and went to New York Toy Fair or San Diego Comic Con, I’d need to run that website from a hotel room with shitty dial up – and not just content creation, but all the digital tools needed fix it when the server inevitably got hot and – as happened one time – got so hot it set itself on fire. That was close to 20 years ago when there were no phone apps or cloud storage.

Things are easier now. I sometimes wonder how easy it would be to cover an event like New York Toy Fair or SDCC these days. But for my writing, there were three areas I needed to digitize.

The first was the easiest. I’ve written on a computer for over thirty years. I’ve sometimes experimented with writing longhand as a way to break blocks but the vast majority has been digital. There was a time I emailed manuscripts to myself as a way to back up in case of computer failure, and as recent as the last 6 years, I’ve had issues where I would to have to transfer documents to a laptop before I went somewhere else to write.

The second area, was my admin. This is largely comprised of my tasks. I’ve done a lot of work on productivity management over the years. For that I’ve relied on tools I could access anywhere. I started with the app Remember the Milk but moved to ToDoist about 5 years ago. I did a lot of reading on productivity (I still do) and implemented a task tracking system that works for me. I can be insanely productive with this system but I find every few years the system itself needs revisiting, refocusing and sprucing up a bit.

What I like is that my tasks can be accessed on my desktop, my laptop, and my phone. After using it so heavily for years, I take it a bit for granted.

The last area, and one I’ve probably only really started to heavily tackle this year is my notes. I’m not a great one for notes, but I have tepidly used Evernote to store a few things. I’ve moved to Notion over the last couple of years and whilst I’m still figuring it all out (and awaiting an api so I can connect it to ToDoist), I’ve used it to track goals and plans. With its table capabilities I’ve experimented with moving some spreadsheets across, and now there are backlinks I’m toying with ideas for a wiki.

The result, although it is a work in progress, is that I’ve gone fully digital. A lot of that is process rather than tools. If the internet collapsed tomorrow and we were reliant on typewriters and notebooks again, I think my systems would be flexible enough to cope.

The next stage for me (coming in 2021) will be treating any writing as a project and being able to do work forecasts and block out time. The challenge there is to be flexible enough to work round delays (So if a deadline gets moved forwards or backwards, I can quickly adjust to accommodate minimising the need for a last minute flurry of activity).

I know writers are traditional in many respects, but I think the move to fully digital is a large part of the reason I am able to be productive during this pandemic and how I intend to be more productive going forwards.