Writing & ADHD: Part 2/?

Been trying out a lot of new things for my writing toolkit.

I’m not thinking of it as building a writing process, because one single process feels too binding for me and would make me feel trapped. So I’d rather build myself a toolkit with some process templates and trust that I can adapt the process as I need.

• Timing my work [web app - toggl.com]
• Logging my writing sessions [spreadsheet]
  • When I started
  • How long I wrote for
  • What I worked on (project name)
  • How much I wrote (quantitative, word count isn’t always meaningful)
  • How much I wrote (qualitative, free response)
  • WPM (calculated estimate)
  • What worked? (free response, usually specific things I tried or ways that I felt good)
  • What didn’t? (free response, less specific things and usually more environmental distractions or outside events)
• Tracking my progress on particular writing projects - breaking down each project into tasks and subtasks that I can check off helps me get a concrete sense of how much I’ve done vs. how much I have left.
  • [spreadsheet] - more intense, I have formulas and all
  • [text doc bulleted list] - if I’m pressed for time or the project is easy/small
• Mining my notes - recognizing that I do a lot of writing “in the moment” as I jot down my thoughts. So arguably, I was already following the advice in this blog post from Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega, “Writing by memorandum”. If my notes are properly labelled (in my 100+ page Google doc lab notebook) with dates and a short headline of what the entry covers, then I can quickly copy over those thoughts and compile a narrative arc of the process.
• Switching text editors - because sometimes a full word processor is too distracting/has too many formatting features for me to play with, so plain text (possibly also focusing on a single section or paragraph) and then copy it back into the main doc can be helpful. On the other hand, if I need to care about formatting or just whatever because brain, plain text editors can make formatting too manually tedious or impossible, while word processors provide much more automation for styles and section headings.

Obsidian links

[[writing]] [[academia]]

tags:   writing  | academia  |