Saturday, August 25, 2012

Organizational Me

Those people who know me are quite familiar with my lifelong preoccupation with organization and its scion, time management. That’s not to say in this area I’m practically perfect in every way (to quote a description of Mary Poppins) -- God knows my wife can point to examples of my LACK of organization, to be sure. However, in certain areas of my life, most notably my writing, I’m forever actively pursuing my ideal world and devote much time to the effort.

For many years, I’ve used Microsoft OneNote to keep my writing organized. OneNote allows you to create a notebook-like structure that you can arrange to handle all of your writing needs. For example, since I write many different types of pieces, I break mine down from top down beginning with Movies, Television, Non-Fiction and Fiction. Both Movies and Television are broken down into Comedy, Drama and Action / Adventure. Under Fiction, there are Novels, Novellas and Short Stories. Under Non-Fiction, you’ll find General Essays, Technology and Blogs. Each of these is split further until I finally get to different sections for each work-in-progress, with a separate section for story ideas and snippets, the latter of which is just a container for fragments of prose I compose out of the blue with no other intended purpose other than to get an idea out of my head and maybe use some day.

Unfortunately, OneNote is not a cross-platform product, leaving me bereft when I migrated to the Macintosh. For a while, I continued to run OneNote on a Windows virtual machine, but that grew old pretty quickly. Then I discovered Evernote, a true cross-platform product that allows you to maintain your data in a cloud and makes it accessible to all your IOS, OSX and Windows devices. I found my nirvana! The only challenge was moving all my data from OneNote to Evernote. There was no easy migration path that I could figure out, so I did what anyone would do - I avoided it.

For the last few years, I adapted Evernote into my organizational system, only moving some of my active WIPs from OneNote into it, but leaving 90% of my older unfinished material to gather digital dust. Until recently, that is.

I finally broke down and began the long arduous process of moving all my old data into Evernote. It took several weeks to go through everything I had and then rearrange Evernote to accommodate it all. I tried to maintain the same organizational system in Evernote that I had in OneNote, but I had matured that process significantly in Evernote. Besides, since Evernote doesn’t have multiple layers of hierarchy (unlike OneNote), I had to learn to live within the two-layer system they have and then figure out how to go from conform my old structure to my new one. Trust me, this was a lot more work than it sounds like.

In the end, I’m pleased with the results. All of my legitimate projects (current and future) now reside in their own Evernote folder, with story ideas, snippets, fodder (web articles with potential story material), articles and the like all occupying their own folders. I have documents in a general Writing folder dedicated to Titles (book, story, whatever), Names (people and places, of either real or made-up names), Opening Lines (starting sentences that just come to me) and Loglines (single sentences describing a film idea, like “An amateur scientist discovers the secret to immortality, only to discover that the government will do anything to prevent the invention from getting into the wrong hands.”).

The best part of this exercise is not only did I pick out the next twelve stories in the last of the Foothills collections (tentatively entitled Life Beyond the Foothills), I have another dozen as back-up (for another collection down the road), PLUS I have thirty-six more for a three-book sci-fi series of twelve stories each. Not all of these stories are complete yet -- some are merely titles and general plots, others are halfway through the first draft, etc. However, I’m now ready to start the next book for real!

Stay tuned for more …

Michael

2 comments:

marty mankins said...

I'm an Evernote user as well and have found it to be one of the best note taking/storage/cloud syncing tools around. I started fresh with Evernote over 3 years ago, not importing a single note I had elsewhere.

I do still use OneNote, but it's all used for my day job as a network admin (mostly because I didn't want to integrate my personal notes with day job notes)

I also use SimpleNote, which is actually all of the notes I've had for over 25 years in digital form (Word, various PDAs like the HP 95LX and Outlook notes). At some point, I might just import these into Evernote and retire one of the note apps I use, but for now, it's where all of my text-only notes go and live.

Michael C. Cordell said...

Somehow I KNEW you were the organized type, Marty :-) Hard to be a netadmin and not have skills like that, though.

When I was on vacation, it was great because all I needed was Evernote on my iPad for my writing.

MCC

PS Traveling is an excellent catalyst for The Muse :-)