My top five writing companions
Organization and being able to access information as quickly as possible is very important to me. Multitasking whether it’s because you have multiple businesses, multiple clients, multiple responsibilities, all of the above can be tricky. I am always on the lookout for tools that will help me make the best use of my time. All of the tools listed below are free. I have them bookmarked to my writing tool-bar and they are my constant companions whilst I write (all other than the first one):
If I get out of the routine of avoiding distractions such as Twitter, email and Skype this is the first application that I turn to. It’s a bit like putting yourself on the naughty step! This application literally stops you getting distracted by blacking out your screen leaving you with a no frills text editor. Staring at this screen soon gets you back into a routine…
Every feed that I subscribe to whether it is a news feed, a Twitter search or a blog feed goes into one main Google reader account. Each feed is fed directly into folders that sort them by topic or by client. I review Google reader once a day or for client folders when I am next working on their portfolio.
This application acts as my digital compendium (swipe file) of documents, webpages, notes, business cards, articles and so on. I do have manual files as well but you cannot carry those around with you to work on the fly. With Evernote you can tag everything for easy searching. Evernote indexes all the images that you send to it and makes them fully searchable. I have not found a device that I cannot use it on yet!
A totally awesome online dictionary that lets you search for words and phrases using a whole variety of search variables. Ways of searching that you couldn’t even imagine and they search it all against 1052 dictionaries.
Ever trip on a word? You know what you want to say but the word has vanished and your mind has gone blank. This will solve your problem. You just put in the meaning you want in the search box and it returns all the words that match that description. Pure genius!
This is also a great tool for looking for topic and content idea generation. Say you want to write an article about forest mushrooms. You just search using this term and it will return all words associated with forest mushrooms for you to pick and choose from.
Well those are the application that I cannot do without they are invaluable. I am sure that there are alternatives out there but these are the ones that seem to fit me best. I suspect that there are many alternatives to Evernote out there now but I simply have not had the time to investigate, what do you use?