I thought I would do a similar thing just to see how it changes in 2017.
My Primary Workspace: is the guest bedroom/office, which we call the “Goffice.” We share a desk with two drawers, one drawer is for my wife and filled with her various knitting needles, notebooks, and sewing supplies. In my drawer is everyday office needs: post-its, pencils, pens, notecards, and pocket notebooks. The pocket notebooks are always in the drawers for the quickest access to work notes. This year I primarily used Word Notebooks and Field Notes for my daybook. I went through fifteen this year, on daybook notes alone. I have separate notebooks for specific projects like ABD, Walden, Thought Balloons, and the Emerson Novel.
There’s a mattress in the Goffice and with my newborn we use the room to change when the kid is asleep upstairs. There are two book cases split between the two of us. Drawers in the bookshelves hold old files from the file cabinet that will get put away in a banker’s box and put in the attic during the break. I cherish this time of year. It’s a way to clear the deck and start fresh from an organizational standpoint.
My Secondary Workspace is also where I start the writing day in the winter—the dining room table. It looks out on our front yard and the street ahead and is surrounded by three windows that expose absolutely delightful views. It’s always interesting to watch the people poke around in my little Adirondack town.
In the summer, I use the back porch and have a table setup out there in case I want to work on my laptop while outside, which is rare. Sometimes I’ll migrate to the picnic table in our back yard, but that doesn’t provide much cover and the glare makes it hard to see the screen so I stick to the back porch. I’m not the sort of person who sits in the couch or chair and types away on the laptop, because usually I’m referencing a notebook, or looseleaf pages and it’s awkward. I would sooner get a standing desk then write on the couch with my feet up on the coffee table.
Usually, I spend a half hour writing morning pages or whatever project I’m working on that day. I almost always compose my zero (handwritten) drafts over breakfast and coffee. I like it because it gives me a view and gets me off a screen to start the day. I try to stay off the screens in the morning and in the evening after dinner. That’s family time, and usually I have a hard time focusing at night—my best time is in the morning though I’ve gotten over that with concentrated bursts of writing—usually for a half hour to forty minutes. I’m a big believer in the Pomodoro Technique and writing sprints. Writing on a computer for two or three hours at night has never been something that worked well for me. Sometimes you just gotta go with instinct, and short bursts of concentrated work better at night when your body wants you to wind down.
Technology: I have a Motorola Droid Maxx, because it’s not hard core unless there are double xxs. To be honest, I’m not thrilled with this phone. Sending videos and such come out garbled and I’ll probably switch to an iPhone when the time comes to get a new phone. It’s got a big screen and I use it mostly for messaging and photos. I don’t take notes on it or anything. It’s primary use is the timer for concentrated writing sprints that minimally go for a half hour though I do get distracted—especially now that I’m home with a newborn most days during the holiday break.
I have a MacBook Pro, running Yosemite. I’ve had this computer since early 2011 and I’m a total Mac user for life. Every PC I’ve ever used dies screaming within a year or decides to erase itself. You can imagine my anxiety as a journalism student at St. Bonaventure with my P.O.S Compaq Presario. Those four years scared me for life and often you’ll hear me complaining amongst my colleagues about Windows because we’re a Microsoft campus. So I always bring my laptop to work and my own printer because I don’t trust PCs, or rather PCs don’t trust me.
My wife has an iPad that I will use from time-to-time but only to read comics. Eventually, I think I’ll get an iPad and make more use of it while traveling. It’s part of the reason that I’m spending the holidays learning Scrivener as it’s a solution that I might make use of on the iPad / iPhone.
Software / apps: I use Word for everything. I have Final Draft, but it’s been a long time since I turned that thing on and wrote a screenplay–at least three or four years. Writing for television or movies is not where my head is right now. I’d rather write books and comics. Dropbox and Google Drive backup my files. I just got a terabyte so I’m using that and the Time Machine functionality to transfer old files that live on my hard drive and remove a lot of the stuff that I don’t really need anymore. I take a lot of photos with my phone and those go directly to a private Google Photos archive. Photos don’t live on my hard drive unless I have files from artists and other things that I use for reference materials. I use Spotify to create project specific playlists, but I almost always buy tracks and use Amazon Music to add them to my iPod. I don’t have much music on my hard drive. Really, I only use iTunes for Podcasts. My frequent listens are Matrimoney, Freakonomics, Lore, the Memory Palace, This American Life, and the Comics Experience Make Comics Podcast. I miss the great interview comics podcasts like Let’s Talk Comics and find most of the comics podcasts out there really annoying.
I use Gmail and Google Calendar so my wife and I are constantly up to date on where we are and what we’re doing during the course of the day. That said, Todoist is my primary task manager. I use it to get a bird’s eye view of the week’s tasks and schedule events which autosync to my Google Calendar so my wife knows that usually after class is over at 3:45pm I’m writing a Thought Balloon script for a half hour or something. Todoist is great, I like that I can write sentences into the field and it generates the due dates, labels, and project folders it goes under. By far the best $29 I spent this year.
I used Evernote for a while, but I’m finding it less useful now. I just started playing with Scrivener and I’m pretty sure I’ll replace Evernote with Scrivener just so I can have all of my project materials in one place while I’m working on said project and not have to be synced to the internet.
Social Media: I’ve deleted my Snapchat and shifted to Facebook, which is pretty locked down. I will allow people to friend me but they get sorted into specific groups and then most of my family-related posts go to a specific group of about 20 friends and family members. People are welcome to follow methough, but most of the public posts you get if you follow me on Instagram or here, so there isn’t much reason to add me on Facebook. Instagram is probably my primary social media app because it goes to everything—here, Twitter, and Facebook. I use Messenger now as a way to communicate with students after hours and send them Today’s Message bursts, which were inspired by @kellysue ‘s @bgsd-archive. Messenger is by far the most useful thing about Facebook and I don’t look at the app or the website very much because it’s filled with political discussion and consistent negative updates—I just have better things to do with my life. Twitter, I’m using less and less and it’s mostly used to shoot-the-shit with people I like and post updates from my blog. I know the cross posting across three platforms from one service might be breaking some kind of social media rule but I don’t care. I use the things that I find most use of, and I’m looking to scale back my use of Twitter and Facebook totally in 2016 to anything but the promotional. Messenger, Instagram, and my seasonal newsletter will probably be my primary places of contact.
Writing Tools: I’ve used the Pilot G-2 pens as my carry around pens and Blackwing pencils for handwritten drafts of stuff. While I think Moleskines are by far the best pocket notebook, the amount of notebooks I go through in a year makes it tough to justify the cost of the Moleskines. With that in mind, I’m revising my approach to notebooks in 2017—I’m getting a Bullet Journal and seeing how long that lasts as my primary daybook and a bunch of Word and Field Notes notebooks as project-specific notebooks. I’ve been using the Bullet Journal system for a year and a half now and replenishing the little pocket notebooks—which last about three weeks max—with the month log, collections, future log, etc. has been a pain so I’m going to see how long a big primary daybook lasts in 2017.
Travel Gear: day-to-day I carry my MacBook, a legal pad for class and meeting notes, whatever project notebook for that day, and my Kindle Paperwhite, or whatever non-fiction book I’m reading. I can’t read more than two books at one time, and I usually have one nonfiction book going along with a fiction book on my Kindle. I get overwhelmed and have a hard time choosing which one I’d rather focus on so Austin Kleon’s post about choosing to read books helps me out. For long trips I have an EMS backpack and includes all of the above including the cables, along with a roller suitcase with clothes and especially my iPod nano and running clothes. Most of all, I plan through redundancy and that’s why I’m going to start using Scrivener so all my story notes are in one place where I am and I can pick up and work whenever I need to for ten minutes or so. I’ll just have to get over my situational working mindset of not writing on the phone or not at a table. I just don’t like using the laptop on the chair or something, and shit spending less time on a screen and more time in notebook form helps me get the junk out of my head.
Finally: This is mostly as a placeholder for what I’m using right now in 2016 before it changes next year. I hope this was helpful and I’m a big believer in having a good organizational system that offloads a lot of prep before hand so that when time frees up I can just work for however long I have. That’s the biggest writing lesson I learned in the last sixteen weeks with my kid is that being organized and taking advantages of naps and other down time goes a long way in writing.
Thanks for reading and have a happy holidays. See you in 2017
David Press 