Procrastination by Preparation

I’m back! My folks were in town so I was a wee bit busy. My father is very ill – we probably have years left before the end, but perhaps not as many as we would like. Such are my most excellent excuses!

Yesterday I upgraded my iPad’s OS (thank you, parents) and joined the global chorus of guilty groans upon seeing my time spent on social media (AKA Facebook) accrued to the tune of hours! Hours I could spend doing other more useful, impactful things, like laundry and dishes and yard work. Oh, and writing, too.

Chagrined, I set out on a quest to rectify this poor use of my time, much of which is admittedly spent lying in bed nursing my infant. Yes, I am doing that right now. Sorry.

The top Google results review and recommend some great looking-apps that cost a pretty penny, such as Scrivener and Ulysses. The fancy apps can help you organize and format your work for easier e-publishing to Kindle and the like. But I’m a budding, mostly unpublished author, so these would probably be too much sword for the moment.

So, I visited the App Store and searched for free apps to help me work on my various writing projects. I came up empty-handed – nearly everything requires a subscription and many reviews complained of work being lost in the magical cloud. Losing hours or years of work is the stuff of nightmares for writers. I’m not going to pay for someone else to ruin my life’s work!

I’ve used Google Docs in the past with no problems, so I think I will set that up again. I also downloaded a bunch of other Google Apps that I’ve not used before because they hadn’t been written yet when I worked there! I look forward to trying out what my former colleagues have made in the interim. Google Keep looks like an interesting tool, and I’ve already mentioned Google Docs (and Google Drive to manage it all). I also downloaded the Google Arts and Culture App – it looked fun and I am homeschooling my eldest – I won’t be using the face scanner though!

Outside the Google-verse, I’m also going to try out Microsoft OneNote – it’s probably similar to Google Keep. And of course, Apple Pages comes with my iPad, so I might try that out as well, although I am a bit baffled as to how to manage iCloud – the PC side of iCloud is buggy and won’t let me clean it out, which will definitely hamper my ability to use Pages. I should also take advantage of the other iLife suite apps on the iPad – maybe you will hear my voice or see a video from me in the future!

As for hardware, I have been pining for an external iPad keyboard, though to be honest since I spend so much time lying down feeding my baby I probably wouldn’t be able to use it enough to justify purchasing it. I have used the Swift keyboard (it lets you swipe to type) in the past and I liked it, but it was a bit buggy and I gave up on it. I may try it again to see if it has improved in the past few years.

Feel free to comment with your own technological (or stone age) solutions to prepare yourself to buckle down and write! I haven’t actually written anything other than this blog post with my new setup yet – I have been procrastinating by preparing to write, which is probably a subconscious effort by my internal saboteur to avoid actually doing it.