As I wrote them down, I could start to see how messy and unmindful I was about using them. Initial versions were a thicket of arrows going hither and yon a real mess! And every time I thought I’d finished, I’d realize I’d forgotten another one.

Over the next few days, I started a list of the tools I used in my daily work and before long, it had become much, much longer than I thought possible. It got me thinking about the tools I use and how I do use them, and should use them.

You should also check it out if you’re interested. When I got home, I revisited her website to look at her post on her academic workflow. We sat next to each other at MCN2018 and had a deep conversation about daily writing practices, bullet journals, mindfulness, and studying.

How to take that list and think about it in a way that helps me be more efficient and mindful? Here I turned to another inspiration, Beck Tench, whose intentionality and grace I admire as much as I do the boundless creativity she brings to her life and work. At the end of that exercise, I started thinking about the kinds of tasks that that these rhythms comprise and I started thinking about types of tools I will need to use, like: In the previous post, I talked about the rhythms of writing. Welcome to the second post on my writing process.

Evernote help toc