Calendars, schedules, deadlines: how work-at-home writers organize, part 1

How do work-at-home writers stay organized? Inside an ad agency, it’s a no brainer. In fact, aside from the free beer, one thing I miss about working in agencies is the calendar wranglers. Be it the traffic manager, account coordinator or some other clock Nazi, they sure can be annoying, interrupting both your workflow and your train of thought. Death for a writer on a deadline.

But they can also save your bacon.

When I was a younger, less tolerant, more arrogant copywriter, I resented all the poking and prodding. I was infamous for a less-than-courteous response when my intercom buzzed at the hand of some well-meaning, unfortunate account person. The call would go something like this:

“How’s that thing coming?” the hapless account person would inquire.
“Well. Funny you should ask,” came the reply from the arrogant young copywriter. “I was working on it. But now I’ve stopped working on it to answer your call. Is that what you wanted?”

Jeez, Louise. They should have just tattooed asshole on my forehead. Fortunately, as my career and psyche matured, I did a complete 180. I realized the account folks were providing a valuable safety net that could very well keep me from making a real fool of myself by missing a deadline.

After that epiphany, I stopped resenting the interruption. I’d give a brief status report and offer earnest thanks for the reminder. I guess I am living proof that the state of asshole doesn’t have to be permanent.

But when you work from the home office, unless you have the staff, you need a system that doesn’t depend on needling from others. That is, if you don’t want to be the shmuck who misses deadlines.

In my case, I abandoned the paper calendar years ago, without much regret. I was never very good at it. OK, to be fair, I was terrible at it. My wife claims the part of my brain that is supposed to comprehend calendars never developed.

She might be right. I had more than a few problems. First, you have to actually look at the thing for it to do you any good. And, back in the day, I nearly missed more than one event by failing to look at the calendar in the morning. I kid you not. I also have really crappy handwriting, so the very real possibility existed that when the event rolled around, I could not read what I had written, days or weeks earlier. And, the bane of every paper calendar user, to have access to it, you must have it in your possession. I rarely carried the infernal thing around.

Once the smart phone came into the picture, it was a logical place to manage the schedule, since I rarely go anywhere without mine. Now, I organize myself exclusively with electrons and only rarely screw things up. When I do, it’s almost always human error, not a failure of technology.

I’m also a search junkie. I like to get as much as I can for an assignment or project into my computer so I can search for it later. My brain is good at remembering that I have something in my possession, but not so good about details of the asset. I’m very disciplined about keeping my hard drive organized by project folder. (If only I could organize the rest of my life so well. But that’s another story.) Like most writers, I tend to stuff those folders with material very quickly; emails, websites, PDFs, word docs, photos, you name it. So, I am constantly tapping command-F to send my Mac OS search robot plowing through the folder hierarchy. I just type a few keywords and locate the source, within seconds. Harder to pull off with a Filofax.

I started with the Apple app, iCal. It’s better than nothing, but not great. It’s been so long since I stopped using it that I can’t tell you exactly why. But once I discovered Google Calendar, I found it superior for managing multiple schedules: work, personal and other family members. Each shows up in a different color so it’s not difficult to keep things straight. When I need to schedule an event or deadline, I plug it in immediately, via desktop or phone. I can set one or more reminders to pop up both on the phone and the desktop. It can also send you an email, although I never use that feature.

If I’m in a spot with no coverage, that’s one of the few times I scramble for a scrap of paper to record the details of the event to enter later. Other than that, about the only time I put pen to paper is when taking notes at a meeting or interview or spec’ing out a home improvement project. It’s amazing how many days I can go without writing a single thing in freehand. Even my shopping lists are on my phone.

My other digital poke-and-prodder is Evernote, a truly marvelous, mostly free app that I can’t imagine being without. It’s essentially interactive, searchable stacks of notes or virtual index cards, to which you can add text or clip images, PDFs, websites and who knows what else. (Kind of like Hypercard, on the cloud, if you’re old enough to remember Hypercard.) It updates automatically across multiple devices. And it has its own reminder system. It’s my auxiliary brain. We’ll devote a future post to the wonders of the Green Elephant.

I also use Tiny Calendar, a mobile app that’s nicer and more intuitive than Google’s native mobile interface, which kind of clunky. It’s like a streamlined remote control for your Google Calendar.

What I’ve learned is that I am not very proactive when it comes to calendars, so I need to be prodded. Getting those pokes digitally via phone and desktop has been my lifesaver. If the cloud evaporates or Google goes belly up, I’m screwed. (In either case, I suspect we’d all have bigger problems.) But in the course of researching this blog post, I did learn how to back up my Evernote notebooks. Now I have new homework: figuring out how to schedule Google Calendar backups. Fortunately, it looks like there’s an app for that.

Stay tuned – in part 2, we’ll take a look at a few other writers’ solutions. And you’ll discover that getting your own system down is very much an exercise in whatever works.

As a solo act, I’m responsible for my own schedule. Free beer, I’m still working on. But, let’s be realistic. If it comes with the condition of being chained to a desk until the wee hours of the morning, it isn’t really free, right?

=SE

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