All right, NaNoWriMo is done– for me, at least! After a slow start– a very slow start– I somehow managed to completed my 50,000 words two days early, just before midnight last night. I’d had a run of astonishing productivity, around 5,000 words a day for several days in a row, and I credit having a schedule with limits for this. I was spending a few days in a row at my girlfriend’s family’s house in Maine for Thanksgiving, and I knew I could disappear for only so long at a time, so I’d designate three different times per day to really jam in as many words I could in a strictly limited period of time, an hour or an hour and a half, say.
Now that that particular simian has leapt from my shoulders– now that I have once again a clear mind (though NaNo can really induce a clarity of purpose), after NaNo and before that the book tour and before that the runup to the book tour, I can devote myself to organization. Productivity. Charging ahead. All of those proud concepts. But what a scatterbrain I am– how can I keep on top on all of these things I’d like to file and accomplish?
The answer for me will be my renewed devotion to Evernote. It’s time for to-do lists again, o happy season, and it’s time for bulging virtual notebooks on various ideas and areas of interest. I have the full-fledged program on my computer, and a bastard corollary on my Palm Pre (held-back child in the smartphone family; I expect the Evernote functionality on my next phone will be much more sophisticated– but I really should hold off on chasing the next sexy thing for a while… right? You’ll wait for me, Epic, won’t you).
Let me know if you have any good ideas for using Evernote efficiently. There seems to be a pretty good body of advice out there in the rolling azure fields of the internet, but hearing thoughts directly from an actual human being is nice as well. I get pulled in a lot of directions by shiny new bits of informations, so I’m trying to designate separate notebooks by category of info. At the same time, I’d like to use it on a daily basis for mundane tasks like keeping on top of bills and other necessaries of responsible citizenry. Might be too ambitious or foolhardy to rely on a single program as a Tool of Everything, much as physicists struggle for a theory of everything, but both seem worthy causes to me.
