I do blogging for a living, I am fortunate to choose my own working hours, the place where I want to work from and the tools I want to use to get my work done. Even though I mostly write from my home office, I do go out to work from cafes once in a while.
And I use a different combination of tools to get my work done. Sometimes, I am writing posts just inside the WordPress Post Editor, Sometimes I use Windows Live Writer when I am working from my Desktop and sometimes I use Blogo to publish my posts when I am working on my Macbook Air.
I keep my workflow in a way that I can access all my files from anywhere. It was months ago that I moved away from traditional desktop apps and started using cloud-based services so that I could work from any Computer and still get the same kind of environment.
Coming back to the point of choosing the best tools for working from anywhere, there are plenty of options that work fairly well, like the Google Drive, which offers Google docs for writing articles and you can also save files in it.
There are apps like Writebox that give you a distraction free environment to write and also let you work on multiple files by giving you the ability to sync the with Google Drive or Dropbox.
Plus it is available for every platform, I use it on Desktop PC, my MacBook, my Android Phone, and my iPad Mini.
Using this setup along with Trello makes me super productive while I am away from my home office.
But as I am constantly looking for ways to improve my workflow and I came to know about Scrivener from multiple sources, many big names have been making the best use of it for writing books, manuscripts, and even blog posts, this article on alpha efficiently made me think about trying it.
Using Scrivener
Scrivener is a paid tool, but the good thing is that it offers one month of free trial, which is perfect for trying out and see whether it works for you or not.
Scrivener offers a lot of options for managing writing projects. You can literally write series of books in it and can work on them all together, the organisation part is awesome and gives you all the options you want to organise your files in a better way.
There are books and courses available to learn about this tool and make the best use of it.
While I was using scrivener, it reminded me of OneNote from Microsoft Office suite that I used to rely on, many years ago, before opting for a better tool to keep my writing in the cloud.
I was aware that Microsoft has improved OneNote a lot in these last few years and it’s now available on multiple platforms.
I wanted to try OneNote earlier but was too lazy to change everything that was working too perfectly. Search for a new workflow gave me the opportunity to try OneNote again and see how it works for me now.
So, after a week of using Scrivener, I started using OneNote also.
Using OneNote
OneNote pretty much works like Scrivener but is also available for multiple devices and your work is synced to them in real time.
Scrivener, on the other hand, is available only for Mac and Windows, they say they are working on an iOS app but it isn’t going to be released anytime soon.
Though you can still keep all your work synced between Windows and Mac by keeping all your files inside Dropbox, but I didn’t find the Windows version of Scrivener app much impressive. In fact, I don’t like opening it on my Windows PC.
But I love Scrivener on my MacBook Air, there are so many options in it that I can do my entire writing inside the app in a very organised manner.
Having said that, If I do that, I miss the opportunity to use my mobile time to make edits or add something to my writings done in Scrivener. OneNote makes it possible.
OneNote is definitely not as feature rich as Scrivener but if you are looking for writing articles or eBooks where you have to do research and work on multiple devices, OneNote is a better choice.
It’s been more than two weeks I am using OneNote and I’m am loving the fact that all my work is organised inside one application that can be accessed from any device.
Whenever I have an idea about a post or a project, I just grab my phone and put it in the OneNote app, so that when I am on my PC, I can start writing.
There have also been times when I am working on something else on my PC and an idea strikes my mind, I immediately open OneNote, write a few lines, close it and continue my work.
As it is available on all my devices, I can start writing from anywhere using any of my devices. Even this post has been written using my iPad, Android Phone, and Desktop.
So, if you are looking for a solution to manage all your assignments related to writing at one place and the ability to work on them from anywhere, give OneNote a chance you might not want to go back to any other application.
If you are looking to learn more about how to use scrivener for writing your novel, there are tonnes of resources you can chase to master the software, here is a nice book called Scrivener for Dummies that will help.
