Keeping Track

Lucy made a huge spreadsheet to help her see the status of her project and hot dang it looks scary to me:

This was actually hugely helpful, because I've been watching my overachiever tendencies flare up during meetings with Susan, whispering "Surely you can get this done in a year and a half. That's so much time! Don't be unreasonable and ask for more." But I also have a strong sense of self-preservation standing on my other shoulder hollering "YOU DESERVE A PUBLISHING SCHEDULE THAT DOESN'T REDUCE YOUR BONES TO DUST, BITCH."

Likewise, Dave Rupert made a spreadsheet to help him blog:

Another problem I had with all my folder full o’ posts strategy was that I didn’t know whether a post was nearly done or a scrap of an idea. I was lost. Every two months or so I’d have to click through each file to repopulate my memory buffer with the statuses of each post. A lack of a system made it more difficult and time-consuming maintain.

Right now I have two big pieces I’m working on; one on my relationship with Tik Tok (that’s the most embarrassing sentence anyone has ever typed) and another post on pain and prestige and work. But they’ve stalled, lost in the enormous stack of Markdown files I type out in a blur via iA Writer.

For years I’ve only had a disorganized mess of files in that folder, and it works, but…reading these posts above makes me think I need something more organized. Maybe it’s not working for me any more.

I know I’ve been writing less lately, too. I’m all out of the writing juice. And yet, and yet… perhaps a list of all the posts on the go—and the current status of each post—would give me that push to, ya know, get the darned things done.

Maybe I need an upgrade.