Writing Advice
How You Can Become More Organized as a Writer
Or any other type of creative
If you’re anything like me, you have a lot of ideas in mind, but you’re not always quite sure how to go about organizing and storing them, especially the partially-baked ideas that are still in the works. If you’re exactly like me, you have an assortment of blog post ideas, script ideas, short story ideas, and book ideas (or some variation of them), and you’re not sure which ones you even want to prioritize, let alone where you should keep those ideas until you’re ready to complete them. If any of those writer-related problems sound familiar, then these tools I’ve been using as well as the steps I’ve been taking to become more organized as a writer may be just what you’ve needed to stumble on.
For Planning Daily and Weekly Tasks: The Elephant Planner
The Elephant Planner is like most others when it comes to the usual monthly, weekly, and notes sections. The things that really put it above many others in my mind are the planner’s level of flexibility and the built-in bookmarks that it comes with. The planner isn’t dated, so when planning out a given week or month, you can fill in whatever dates you need. You don’t have to worry about wasted pages because if you don’t have anything to write in your planner on a particular day or month, you can simply wait until you do.
You have plenty of empty space to jot down the projects you’d like to get done and when you’d like to accomplish them, so if you’re someone who likes to lay pen to paper while planning, that’s a bonus to consider. With the built-in bookmarks, no matter what month or week you’re currently sorting out, you can keep up with where you are. There are three bookmarks in the planner, so you have the option of using one for each section, using two for one section, and so forth. Whatever floats your boat.
I grabbed my own planner from Amazon, so if you’re interested in picking up this planner, you can do the same with the link below:
For Organizing Those Writing Projects: Notion
If you’re looking for a simple, customizable way to keep track of all those beautiful ideas you’ve got floating around up there, then checking out Notion just might set you on your way to living your best-organized life.
Notion is an online workspace for note-taking, file storage, and project organizing. The wide array of features gives you plenty of options for sorting out the things you’re working on. You can even use Notion’s calendar features (which can be integrated with Google Calendar) to do some planning if you prefer digital planning.
Since Notion’s a pretty vast workspace with a ton of flexibility, if you’re a beginner on the platform, it can be a bit overwhelming, so here are some of my go-to features I love to use throughout my own notion pages:
- Quick Links and Table of Contents: Create a couple of sections where you can lay out some quick references for yourself as well as the sections you have throughout your page, you can make it easier to navigate the info you’ve stored.
- Callouts: Not only is this my go-to feature for my quick links and table of contents sections, but I use this feature for everything from my section titles to organizing the drafts of my blog posts. It’s a great feature for both organizing and for adding some splashes of color and visual appeal to your pages.
- Tables: These are usually my go-to for lists I’d like to keep track of, such as literary agents and publishing companies, or simply contests that I’m considering submitting to. Features within the table allow you to further categorize the items within your lists. For instance, I can specify that a literary agent prefers sci-fi manuscripts with a multi-select tag.
- Galleries: This is a great way to keep track of the blog posts you have on your page. If you’re a blogger for instance, you can use this as a way of planning and drafting your articles/posts. You can store a ton of info while still keeping things neat.
- Progress Trackers: A great way to keep up with the things you’re actively working on, they can be used as a brief preview of the projects you’re actively preoccupied with, without having to browse through all of the projects you have on your page.
Since I’ve incorporated Notion into my daily routine, keeping up with all of my ideas and the direction in which I’d like to head with them has gotten drastically easier, and I’ve officially said goodbye to just dumping all of my thoughts into my notes app.
Adding a Table of Contents to Your Notebooks:
Though much of what I write eventually ends up in digital form, I still appreciate working through my ideas in notebooks, but I keep in mind that those can easily become even more disorganized than digital organization methods. So I’ve started setting aside a few pages at the beginning of my notebooks that are meant to keep up with what I’ve jotted down. It’s simple, yet reliable, and because I tend to keep everything from poetry to drafts of what will eventually become blog posts in my notebooks, I prefer having a straightforward way to refer back to what I’ve written down.
Hopefully, these tips and tool suggestions can come in handy as you decide how you’d like to sort out your creative projects going forward. If the idea of incorporating Notion into your life sounds like something of interest to you, but you don’t have a Notion account, you can sign up for Notion using this link here.
If you’re interested in planning your blogs on Notion, but don’t feel like building out a template for it, feel free to use the one that I’ve been using for my writing so far:
Coming up with ways to organize your writing can be a game-changer that improves how you get things done and can even help you save more time in the long run for actually completing the projects you’d like to get done, or for just simply spending time with your loved ones. Happy organizing!
Rosalyn Broddie — writer who loves chatting about anything storytelling. She lives in Georgia, where she loves attending artist workshops and meeting new people. In addition to here on Medium, you can find her on Substack and Instagram, where she shares her poetry, and other forms of writing, and details her journey as a writer. She can also be emailed at rosalyn.broddie@outlook.com
Disclaimer: Some of the above links may be affiliate links, meaning if you purchase a product or service via these links I may receive a small commission/reward, at no additional charge to you!
