How I work
If I were to break my work down to essentials, it becomes two tasks:
- come up with ideas for articles that will sell
- write them
This means I spend a lot of time looking for things to write about (via incoming email, browsing web sites, and monitoring feeds), and roughly the same amount of time writing.
I write ideas and rough drafts in my todo.txt file, a large single plain text file that includes all my work in progress, things to do, shopping lists, addresses, notes and ideas. As I write this, the file is just over 3700 lines, or 12000 words, long.
I edit the file in BBEdit, using split view so I can edit two different sections of the file at once. To me this is a natural and very efficient way of working; I know the structure of my file well, and can easily find the section I want to edit next by searching for keywords and section headings (marked with an asterisk, eg *todo or *weather or *books).
BBEdit is set up to display white text on a blue background; I've found this much easier on my eyes when spending many hours a day writing.
Usually, an article will start life as a snippet of text, or a couple of URLs somewhere in this file.
That snippet might get expanded to something much longer - several hundred words - before it gets cut out and moved to a file of its own. This happens when I need to know the exact word count of what I'm writing, and it's easier to do this when the piece is in a file of its own. And anyway, the article needs to be filed away in a logical place on my hard disk.
Because I write a lot of stuff for publication on the web, I often have to file copy in HTML. To make this easy, I write everything in Markdown markup language, and have got into the habit of doing this all the time. BBEdit makes using Markdown very easy and it's a function I use several times a day.
Copy is always filed by email; soon after filing, I send an invoice (usually by email, but some clients like to have a paper copy in the post).
I'm a part-timer, working on Mondays and Wednesdays when my son is in nursery, and looking after him on the other days of the week. Since some of my work needs to be spread over the week (especially Rising Slowly posts), I often write things in advance, setting them up in handler apps like MarsEdit so I can post them with a couple of clicks when the need arises.
Being a part-timer is wonderful because my life never feels dominated by work. If anything, work has a minor role to play alongside my other regular duties. The downside is that sometimes, I have more than two days worth of work to do within the week. That's when I have to work evenings and weekends, as long as it takes to meet the deadlines. Thankfully these situations are rare.
And that's how I work. It's a very simple process, the result of a very simple set of demands.
I'm very interested to know how other people work. I want to explore the mundanities of work processes; what tasks are people required to complete, and what tools (sofware and otherwise) do they use? How do they use these tools? What changes do they make to their work environment to make the work easier to do?
