Chad’s Blog
Pragmatic Technologies for Life and Business Success®
Organizing your reading and writing.
A question was asked today on one of the online forums I help implement and moderate:
“How do you organize potential book commentary, blog posts relevant to an upcoming article, news stories that could be adapted to a speech, etc. so you can find them when you’re ready for them?”
I find my organized digital world much more efficient and faster to search than my paper world. To solve this challenge I created multiple folders on my disk drive. Here are a few to help me better organize myself:
Chad’s Publishing – Is my resource folder for my writing ideas. It contains a word document labeled “Titles” with the headlines of future articles I would like to write. Each time I think of an idea for an article or a blog post, I add it to this document. In this document you will find titles such as: “How and when to fire your web master”, “What they haven’t alerted you about Google alerts”, “Why technologies fail and what to do about it”, which are all articles, blog posts or Podcasts I am planning on doing in the future.
When I read interesting articles on the Internet, I copy and paste each one (and only the important sections) into a word document and I assign it the appropriate title I choose. Assigning it the proper title when saving the document is the most critical step as it allows me to quickly find the resource I am looking for in the future. Inside each document is the content with the date and attribution information. So if I just read three articles about three different subjects such as: disaster recovery, Internet marketing and security, I would name my articles starting with these words and followed by more identifying information in the title. When reading Books, magazines and other publications, I summarize interesting things I read and use the same concept as above. When writing my articles, if I wish to quote another source, I quickly scan my folder and use the proper article with the proper attribution.
Review Articles – This folder contains web articles I copy and paste into that I did not have the time to read yet but I feel they may be of interest to me in the future. I review this folder when I have time and either purge the document if I have no interest or rename it and place it in the “Chad’s Publishing” folder for future resource.
Process Visuals – This folder contains the charts I find or create to be used in my future writing.
Screen Shots – This folder contains the screen capture of various web sites I visited (good and bad) that I plan on writing about.
Stories – This folder contains stories I like to use in my speeches and my writing.
I know all about Google Reader, Internet browser’s favorites, social bookmarking sites, making hard copies and cutting out articles from newspapers and magazines and other methods. Although they have their place and benefit, when it comes to organizing my writing, I find them to be ineffective and a big waste of my time. The system I outline above keeps my writing organized with the proper resources available when I need them. Occam’s Razor – “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually the best.”
