The Productive Solopreneur — On writing
Tools that can help you organize thoughts and transform ideas into good quality content
People just tend to google for “best writing tools” whenever their writing tool fail them — that is human.
Sometimes though, the problem may not even be the writing tools — rather the way information at hand is organized. Think of drafts and notes and ideas — just scattered in every place you can imagine, be on paper or digital media.
This article suggest a couple apps that can help manage the flow of ideas — using simple yet powerful methodologies, from inception to finished product. The product being blog post, email or even a book.
This blog is a part of “The Productive Solopreneur”, a series of articles about tools that help Solopreneurs to stay sane and productive. If you are more into technical stuff, read “AppEconomy” series instead.
Medium is quite fine when you have to write something. It is simple, clean and keeps people focused. Its shortcoming is that It was not designed to organize ideas .
There is a catch though — the content is yours and accessible as long as the platform is up and running. But the time the platform ceases operations — the status quo doesn’t allow easy transfer to other media.
Keeping that in mind, the POSS — Publish(on own site) Syndicate Elsewhere principle will be integral part of suggestions made below.
This is a non-exhaustive list of applications that help to organize thoughts into publishable articles.
- Gingko App — Built by a friend of mine. It is a really good tool for Grad School Essays, plays and scientific publications(or projects) alike. The concept is to start with one idea as a root of a tree and build on top of that one card at a time, as branches of the tree. I’d recommend it anytime.
- Write As — For fans of “write once, share anywhere”(WOSE) this tool can also be good. It is good for crossposting, with fewer restrictions. I never tried it but kept it just in case I revisit my writing process.
I adopted this platform as the default home of all my personal writings, and products’ related content.
- GetHermit — In addition, to be a clean writing tool, It is also a distribution channel. It provides ability to write anonymously, participate in Pen-pals the network. This aspect makes the platform kinda unique — who knew pen-pals would around 2010s’?
- Draft In Can be added to the same category as Write As, but with versioning in mind. It also has the ability to connect popular Cloud Services that are not designed for writing purposes.
- Workflowy Follows in steps of Gingko. It uses points instead of cards. The idea is you start with a list of ideas, and expand a point as you get more to say about the idea. The caveat: last time I checked it was not supporting Markdown.
- Dynalist, Fits well Workflowy on steroids, with more focus on technical(engineering) writing.
- Calculist Works as two above with stress on calculations. It can be used for budgeting. Ideal if the writing is “number heavy”.
- Mindomo is a mindmap app spanning to writing mode. It works well for mindmap junkies, but may not be ideal for minimalists.
- Typora — is your ultimate preview-as-you-type Markdown editor. It is perfect for static sites and code documentation. The UI should be familiar if you worked with iA Writer or Vellum, which along Scrivener, kicks ass in the writers' world. Quiver is another application good for developer writers.
Thanks for reading, if you have any product to you’d love me to try out, please let me know! Happy new year.
Reading list
- An interactive course for software developers
- In browser Markdown Editor ~ Adding Graphics with Markdwon extensions ~ Ludwig.guru is like Google but for Sentences.
- Unified Collaborative Workspace: wiki, notes, tasks and editing
- Quora Answers ~ this thread has a trove of information that can also be helpful to you.
