While I love the structure and simplicity of Bullet Journal, there’s no denying that the basic system is weak on planning. Unfortunately that’s something I have to do a lot of, both in my day job and at home. For example if I’m attending a convention I need to make sure to book my train…
George R R Martin calls them architects and gardeners; most other writers call them plotters and pantsers. Either way, there’s general agreement that all writers fall somewhere on a spectrum between detailed up-front planning and complete seat-of-the-pants improvisation. I fall towards the latter end of the spectrum. I wish I could plot a novel before…
Following my decision to start a bullet journal, I had to decide what kind of notebook and pens to use. I considered using my LiveScribe Echo, but that would limit me to black ink and the narrow range of available dot-paper notebooks, so I’ve opted to go completely analogue this time – which gives me…
The good thing about getting away from the social media circus for a while is that you don’t get so easily distracted by trivialities; the bad thing is that you miss out on a lot of the cool stuff that everyone’s talking about. Like Bullet Journal, which I only heard about the other day when…
Over the past year or so I’ve been gearing up to write a new novel, and I’ve had to rediscover my own writing process all over again. Writing The Alchemist of Souls took so long that I barely remember how I got from vague idea to first rough draft, and whilst the two sequels are very recent,…
This weekend I knuckled down to sorting out the overall plot of my work-in-progress. I have a setting, several main characters and some ideas for conflicts, but nothing was pinned down, hence my struggles to get on with writing the book. This is pretty par for the course with me; I tend to get bogged…
Unlike many organisation methods, Getting Things Done works in a bottom-up way; that is, you start with the small tasks and work your way up to the big picture. This has the advantage that you can get to work right away and only have to worry about the long term once you have the day-to-day…
This week’s post is a tad later in the day than planned, as I’m back at the day-job this week and – more crucially – forgot to put “Write next GTD blog post” in Things (the ToDo app I use on my phone and various Macs). A good example of why you should write things…