Get Everything Done

Good afternoon,

I write and publish poems. Over the years, I’ve amassed over 1,000 .doc files (and other formats) of poems at varying stages of completion. A good number of these files are different drafts of the same poem.

Many of the poems are in different folders in my Dropbox, which I have organised in different ways at different times. At one point, I was putting them in folders labelled [month-year]. At another time, I used a folder structure of ‘In Progress’, ‘Finished’, ‘In Submission’, and ‘Published’. Still other times, I’ve used folders named after the published collections I was working on at the time. (Collections are made out of poems some of which have previously been published in magazines.)

I still have all three kinds of folder hierarchy in my Dropbox. To avoid further confusing all the files, I don’t have duplicate files across these different structures. Thus, a draft poem from January 2011 might either be in the folder ‘January 2011’, or in ‘In Progress’, or be in one or more of the folders for named collections because I was at one time thinking of including that poem in that collection.

I have tried using Scrivener to organise these poems, as there are certain advantages to using Scrivener, such as being able to easily reorder the poems in a collection, label them with their completion status etc., but I find the learning curve in Scrivener too steep.

And to be honest, Scrivener (along with various markdown writing apps like Ulysses) is not really designed for poetry. It doesn’t handle line breaks and other layout instructions well. In the writing of poetry, formatting and layout are very important, but Scrivener is designed for format-agnostic writing. So I end up spending a lot of time in Word formatting things that are already written elsewhere when, really, that sort of thinking needs to happen at the same time as I compose. Once I have formatted in Word, that now becomes the latest draft of the poem, superseding the draft in Scrivener. But I have no visibility of that fact from within Scrivener.

The last problem with Scrivener is that, because all the magazines take submissions in .docx format, I have to export individual poems separately into Word anyway. So I might as well stick with working in .docx format, which is what I am used to and which offers more layout options. A What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get text editor is essential in other words.

Here is what I am trying to do.
* I want an easier way to get an overview of the completion status of poems I am working on—this was the point of system 2 (‘In Progress’, ‘Finished’, etc.)
* I want a way of building collections that allows me to remain agnostic about whether a poem will finally belong in there.

Basically, I am looking for a way of organising the files that supports my workflow, which is typically as follows:

1. Draft a poem (sometimes on paper, but typed up later)
2. Revise the poem multiple times, without overwriting the earlier drafts
3. When the poem is finished, send it out with a few others to a magazine for publication
4. (Optional) Collect the poem in the manuscript for an ongoing book project, in such a way that I can flexibly reorder, add, and remove them without losing visibility on their location.

So my question is,
* how would you organise these files
* track their completion status (perhaps 2 and 3 require a separate solution)
* and track their status with regard to being included in one or more collections?

Thank you. I know this is a lot. I’ve done much googling and racked my brains trying to figure this out. I wouldn’t have written such a long question if I wasn’t feeling stuck.

I would use one Word document per poem, and create all revisions in the same document, perhaps labelling each one "Version 1", "Version 2", and so on. Copy and paste the last version to a new page, increment the Version number, and start revising. If you put the version number at the top of each page and give it a Heading style, you can use the Naviagation Pane to make it easier to get around.

Next, if you use OneDrive with your system and save the Word documents there, OneDrive will save versions of the file each time you save it. You can then go into OneDrive and download a previous version. It isn't perfect because the versions are distinguished only by the date and time, and as far as I know you can't search the versions for specific text inside the document, which would be handy.

Copy and paste the final version of the poem into a new document and save it in a folder called "Completed" or similar. For collections, copy the individual poem files into a folder named for the collection. The disadvantage here is you will have two copies of the final version, and if you change either of the copies you will need to remember to change the other one too, or re-copy the file over the old version. However, once it is marked as final, it should stay final.

Use a spreadsheet to record submissions to magazines.

I hope this helps, though I am unsure how this fits into the theme of Mark Forster;s site. However, it was an interesting thought experiment.

Wooba and Mark,

Thank you for your suggestions. Really useful. I am going to go with the Evernote idea, organising things as follows:

* Tag notes based on completion status—it's faster and more flexible than moving the file/note into another folder/notebook.
* Use one notebook for the poems, other notebooks in the same stack to track submissions, research and ideas, and scratch writing.
* Each poem note will contain the .docx file for the poem, with the file contents pasted into the note body as well
* Each poem note will be titled with the poem title and version number

For tracking and fiddling with the contents of collections, I remembered that in Evernote you can create what are essentially 'table of contents' notes: notes with links to several other notes. These I will use to organise the poems into collections.