Plan the Work, Work the Plan

Now that the end of February is here, it’s becoming obvious that I need to buckle down if I want to meet my writing goals for the year. An effective way to get started is to follow the wise counsel: “plan the work, work the plan” hence, the title of this post.

What work, though?

To give me a push, I’m going to get my arms around the extraordinary proliferation – in the thousands, no less – of untagged and uncategorized bookmarks on multiple platforms I’ve generated over the past 10 years. For instance, I have over 8,000 entries on Evernote alone. Those seem like a good starting point. I can actually USE the Evernote app to organize my bookmarks in support of what I’m writing instead of letting it be a study in how to build random and largely useless collections.

To do that, I have five major (“monster” might be a more appropriate term!) tasks:

1. Reconcile the wide assortment of tags (basically, out of control – almost as bad as the number of bookmarks!);
2. Restructure the notebooks by purpose and title (not as bad as tags, but nonsensical nonetheless);
3. Transfer bookmarks and files from my Evernote business account into the personal account so I can close the business account this year;
4. Tag and categorize all the yet untouched bookmarked items most of them in my default folder; and
5. Establish a consistent routine to stage bookmarked items as drafts in Ulysses, which prompts me to actually write rather than talk about it and make excuses for not taking action.

The web version of Evernote shows the complete list of tags in alpha-numeric order. To start, I’m consolidating tags beginning with the numbers, first. I do NOT want hundreds of tags. The search capabilities with Evernote are robust enough to let me conduct key word searches and find what I’m looking for without having to resort to tags for recall.

As I’m going through the tagged items I’m checking each URL for duplication, broken link, and relevance. I’m commenting on some and moving them into the queue for drafting in Ulysses and eventual posting on WordPress. That prompts me to keep writing and not get caught up in the details of the technology. Very freeing!

Actual writing of the posts will be in Ulysses using Markdown. From there I can easily “publish” to WordPress or in other file types for further editing, archiving, or public release.

The sequence of Evernote-to-Ulysses-to-WordPress makes it SO EASY to document thoughts / ideas and convert them into intelligible, readable text that can be handily posted, edited, and revised depending on commentary and changing conditions. I have no reason not to do it. And I’ve given myself permission to never be finished with a posting but keep it as a work in progress or ongoing experiment. Eventually, my current life cycle will close and what’s done is done. Until then, though, I reserve the right to keep the channels open to new and different ways of writing about topics that are important to me.

Let the experiment begin!