Writing Productively (1): Tracking Story Ideas with Insightly Projects

This is the first in a series on productivity tools for writers. I use technology to minimize the tasks that I find tedious, or to help me avoid errors, and maximize the time I have to be creative.

[03/31/2014 Edited to update screenshots reflecting latest version of Insightly.]

Several months back a writer friend of mine idly asked his Facebook friends what he should write about next. This started a brief discussion about how we keep track of story ideas. He had literally hundreds of story ideas jotted down in documents on his computer's hard drive. I realized that a lot of my story ideas from over the years were even less organized: in a big notebook, or on loose sheets of paper in a file cabinet.

Well, it wasn't all that bad. I'd recently converted a number of writing projects to Scrivener, which I started using last year. They were still not viewable as a list, but the stories I cared most about were at least in one place. I had also been trying to adapt an app called Sonar to scheduling when I was going to submit stories to some upcoming contests, but that wasn't going well.

As an IT professional, I've used a few project management and tracking applications that allow me to queue up and schedule work. So I decided to put my Business Analyst / Project Manager expertise to use in my writing career. What I'll present here is the process I've come up with. After describing my process, then I'll describe how you can set it up for yourself.

Insightly (Insight.ly) is a web-based CRM app which is free at the basic level, and can be upgraded to premium account with additional features. A CRM (Customer Resource Management) system is essentially a tool for keeping track of your customers and managing the workflow of selling your goods or services to them. I tried out several of these before settling on Insightly because it allowed me to add a handful of custom fields and adapt it to the purposes of a writer. The free features meet all my current needs, and the premium features will come in handy when my first novel is published.

Granted, Insightly is not specifically built for my purposes. If it were, Projects would be the first tab, because that's where a writer like me usually starts, with the writing project. Currently, tab order is not customizable, and Projects is the second-from-last tab:

As you can see, there's color coding for the different type of project (Short Story, Novel, Flash Fiction, Blog). You can control what those types are and what color they are. However, the status (In Progress, Not Started, Deferred) is not customizable. You're stuck with those words and those colors. I use Deferred to mean that I have set it aside (trunked it). I don't like to change it to Completed, because then it just turns grey. (Tip: if you change a project to Completed and you want to change it back to In Progress, you have to first change it back to Not Started).

There is an Add New Project button in the upper right corner of the screenshot above, but we'll see that page (I call it the project detail page) in a moment. First let's click on an existing project and look at what I call the project summary:

From this project summary view you can change the Current Status. You actually can't change the status from the project detail page (when you're creating a project). There are a variety of tabs along the bottom. There's a tab for notes, and if you want easy access to notes, you'll want to enter them here instead of the project detail page. You can see I have a couple tasks associated with this project, and it's convenient to create tasks from here (more on that later).

Notice the Project Links at the bottom. I only link Opportunities to projects, which I'll discuss later still. In a nutshell, I use Opportunities to track submissions to contests and markets.

You could use the Milestones tab for various phases of the writing project. However, I have opted just to use Tasks.

If you click on the Actions drop-down and choose Edit This Project (or just click the pencil button), you'll get the same form that's used to create the project, and it shows the project details:

Description is the field where I usually jot down my ideas for a story. I often paste in URL's to articles that inspired the story. The Details field will be visible on the summary page if there's anything in the field. URL's will be click-able links as well.

As I mentioned before, the Category values are customizable. However, it is a standard field. Word Count, Genre, and Sub-Genre, however are totally custom fields. Genre is a drop-down field, which makes it easy to enter and not have to worry about spelling (or misspelling). You may want to customize these fields in a different way. You might even prefer to use Tags (click Add Tags at the top) to indicate Genre. You can have multiple tags to represent genre blending, etc. There's no setup for Tags, you just enter them directly into that area. I don't use tags on Projects.

When you click the Save Project Details button, it takes you to the project summary page. If you want to get back to the project list, just click the Projects tab header again.

I also use the Insightly app on my smartphone, so I can jot down a new story idea and create a new project anytime. When I'm asking myself, "Ok, what do I work on next?" I can peruse my list of projects and see what jumps out at me.

The next article on this topic will show how I set up the custom fields, categories, and color coding for Projects. No programming is required.

Other posts in this series:

1. Tracking Story Ideas with Insightly Projects
2. Configuring Insightly Projects 
3. Insightly Tasks & Life-Cycle of a Story
4. Configuring Tasks in Insightly
5. The Tasks Tab 
6. Organizations Tab
7. Configuring Custom Fields for Organizations Tab 

Writing Productively

I'm starting a series of blog posts on productivity tools for writers. I don't claim to have mastered writing yet, but I've had a great career as a programmer/analyst and IT project manager. I have in fact been called "The Efficiency Expert."

No, not this kind of Efficiency Expert! (See "Knowing the Place of Technology.")

My particular talent is understanding business processes and needs, and being able to find ways for technology to meet those needs. My approach is a combination of my background in Anthropology and application development, informed by my insight into human behavior.

The creative process is not the same for every writer. Some feel that any attempt to structure their process will kill it, and others may obsess over structuring their time and process. Most of us are between those two extremes. If you believe technology can be a tool to help you be more productive and financially successful as a writer, then please check out my series, Writing Productively, and see if there are some ideas you can use.

I'm starting with tutorials of how I use Insightly, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system designed for small businesses that includes some project management features. Each week I'll discuss one of the five tabs that I use in the Insightly CRM. I will eventually discuss tools like Scrivener and yWriter, and create some videos, but I can't commit to the timeline on those because they're beyond the next handful of weeks.

I chose to use Insightly after trying several similar systems because I found it both simple to use and flexible enough to meet my needs as a writer. Also, when I made some suggestions for system enhancements, I found them extremely open to suggestions, and their customer service was extremely friendly and helpful - above and beyond what I usually experience with software support. The best software providers I have worked with have always been the ones that are responsive to customer suggestions.

I guess my suggestions got their attention, because they soon asked me if I would be willing to be interviewed by their PR folks to publish a case study on me for their web site. Because of my great experience with them so far, I happily agreed.

Other posts in this series:

1. Tracking Story Ideas with Insightly Projects
2. Configuring Insightly Projects 
3. Insightly Tasks & Life-Cycle of a Story
4. Configuring Tasks in Insightly
5. The Tasks Tab 
6. Organizations Tab

Toxic Bosses

This is a compelling look at "toxic bosses," and the US Army's effort to combat this internal threat.

I've had my own traumatic experiences with toxic bosses over the years, and several friends and family have shared their own experiences with toxic bosses. I'm impressed with this enlightened approach to leadership that the Army is taking. It's particularly interesting to note that this came out of research into suicide cases, and a result of the Army's decision to employ anthropologists.

There are also toxic colleagues. Having a good boss helps to mitigate that, but the strategy I've usually employed with toxic bosses is to leave. It's risky to try and resolve the toxic boss problem otherwise, unless the institution provides a safe means to do so.

I was in a department once where all the staff got together and went over the head of the manager to complain. Our boss's boss sat the department and the manager down in a room and told us all to voice our issues directly to the manager, and gave the manager the chance to respond and address the issues. Things were a little better after that. However, that manager was given another department later on, and continued to create problems for as long as he or she was with the organization.

A 360-degree review process as the Army is proposing is definitely a step in the right direction. However, I have not always felt I could count on my boss's boss for support. Sometimes it's a case of the abuse rolling down hill. Although, I'd also like to note that being abused by your own boss is no excuse to abuse your own subordinates - I've been in the middle of that before, too, and had to shelter my team and stand up for them.

If you have an abusive boss, it's important to remember that you can leave. When the economy is bad, when you have a family to provide for, bills to pay, it's easy to feel trapped in a job. Emotional abuse takes a toll on you, and it's difficult to make time to look for a new job. However, staying in a toxic environment can lead to a host of personal problems outside of work. It can lead to depression and anxiety, so I can understand how it could eventually lead to suicide.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu describes the tactic of pushing deep into enemy territory right away. The reason for this is to prevent desertion. For a conscripted medieval army, desertion was a huge problem. He goes on to advise generals to put their forces in a position of no escape because they will fight harder if winning is the only way to survive. Always give your enemy a way to escape so that the enemy force will be tempted to desert.

That approach may have been a necessary evil with a conscripted medieval army, but it's out of place in a modern volunteer army. However, military personnel often find themselves far from home and their support network, especially if they are deployed overseas. Once they become active duty, they are legally bound to fulfill their contract of service, like it or not. Civilians like me can walk away from a job much more easily.

If you're in an abusive work environment, I think it's extremely important to talk to someone. Many people don't want to burden their spouse or partner, so there are many other options. Most employers offer some sort of EAP (Employee Assistance Program). Someone in HR may be available to talk about a "hypothetical" situation (if you don't keep it hypothetical, they may be obligated to report the incident - and this may be true of all managers). A trusted colleague, or former colleague, can be great support.

Blabbing to everyone about your problems could cause you a lot of trouble, but being able to talk with someone who understands the situation did wonders to ease my burden. That can be enough to help you get through until you land another job or manage a transfer to another department.

If you're thinking about fighting to keep your job, keep in mind another lesson I took from The Art of War: Never fight a battle unless the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor.

Knowing the Place of Technology

2013 was a bad year for technology and Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are just one more example. Not only was there a backlash among faculty (which I heard echoed on the UCR campus), but there were big failures like San Jose State. They don't seem to be working out well, except for students who are already highly self-motivated. They also don't seem to be more cost-effective.

Part of the problem may be that we're still figuring out how to do a good job of educating people. This is hard to do. It's even harder today because society and technology are changing so fast. We're educating a greater portion of the population, which is good, but this is also revealing the ways that education falls short and fails to serve segments of our society.

Another part of the problem is that we're still figuring out how to make technology that's easy to use. When an application developer or an engineer designs a machine or program to automate a job, a good machine or program is intuitive to use for a person who already has a conceptual understanding of the job that they are doing.

However, learning is far more free-form than other tasks we can automate. Also, overcoming the barriers to learning usually involve activities that machines don't do well - i.e., empathy and creative problem solving. We can find ways to use technology well in education, but technologists need to understand the big picture.

Programmers and engineers sometimes overstate the scope of what technology is capable, partly because they tend not to look beyond that scope. It's important to understand what machines are good at (repetitive tasks, following logical sequences reliably) and how that fits with what people are good at (empathy and creativity).

A good example of this is UserVoice CEO Richard White's recent statements about the BART worker's strike this week, and his interview on Marketplace. He said first the BART employees should be given what they want, and then their jobs should all be automated.

However, as you can hear in the interview, there are aspects of these jobs that White is overlooking. Also, the idea that the BART worker in the interview would be freed to follow her dream career after she gets laid off is pie-in-the-sky idealism. The alternative jobs she lists don't have benefits, and provide unstable income.

White might think that these are the kinds of problems that technologists can't solve on their own. However, these are exactly the kind of problems technologists should be tackling. We should be looking at how technology can be used by the worker to alleviate tedious tasks that machines do well and that people do poorly.

How can technology be used to make the worker more satisfied by their work? By making the worker happier, the technologist makes the worker more productive.

Google+ Stalker App

I'm conflicted by Google. I've been a fan for a long time. I use a lot of Google services (e.g., this is a Google Blogger site). However, there are privacy concerns because they track your search and browsing habits, and scan the content of messages in Gmail.

The benefits of Google's services are considerable. The only other company that offers a comparable level of integration between apps and business-friendly (enterprise-friendly) services is Microsoft.

And it's growing increasingly clear that Google+ is the cornerstone of how we will access all their services. YouTube comments are now done through Google+, and Google+ comments show up in search results. However, this strategy will fail unless they can prove themselves worthy of our trust.

There's an efficiency to making Google+ the central user profile for all Google services. I see it like using Active Directory on an enterprise network to manage all users in the organization. When you log into your computer at work, you may not realize this Microsoft product is being used to manage your user rights on the corporate network, but it's a powerful tool for managing access to computers, network drives, etc. Your Active Directory account may be used to manage your access to areas of your corporate Intranet, especially if the Intranet was created with Microsoft SharePoint. And it's also tied into your corporate email and calendar, Microsoft's Exchange server, which you access using Outlook.

When you're at work, you have a persona, a way of behaving, a role that you play as an employee. At work, you probably shouldn't go on a political rant, disparaging anyone who opposes your political views as stupid. That kind of behavior can be disruptive to a productive workplace, so you should save that behavior for outside of work.

Likewise, anything you don't want your employer to know, you should not send through corporate email. Some IT departments track the websites you visit, often even blocking access to sites they believe are inappropriate for employees to access. I've had coworker who got fired for watching porn at work. Well, that, and racking up a huge 900-number bill on his company cell phone.

My creepy Big Brother moment with Google came this week. My wife showed me an email she got from Google+. It included a montage of videos and photos that have been automatically uploading to her Google+ account from her Android phone. It's like a scene from a crime show when the detective stumbles on the stalker/murderer's secret wall-collage showing photos of the victim. Please rate the Google+ Stalker App in the Play Store. Yay!


So, Google+ is primarily for information you want to share with the world. Sure, you can set who you want to share your comments with, but it's not hard to accidently share with the wrong circles or with everyone. It's just as easy to make this mistake in Facebook. A friend of mine recently set FB to share posts only with himself for a week. I've made that mistake before, too.

To avoid accidently posting to the wrong audience, I use FB for content I want to share with friends and family, so I don't have to change the settings, which might cause accidental over-sharing. Google+, which is designed for plugging into other services that I want to use

Google may find it's subject to the Microsoft curse. By excelling at serving its business clients, Microsoft has lost a lot of consumer market share, where Apple and Google have become more dominant. Microsoft's Xbox is probably the most notable exception, but it does not integrate with Microsoft's enterprise products.

To avoid the curse, Google has to figure out how to do what most people do every day, intuitively change rolls based on context. They also need to become a bastion of personal privacy, and they've taken some serious hits on this. Their latest Google+ email campaign is not helping.

Duck Dynasty Supporters, Put your money where your Meme is!

It's time for supporters of Phil Robertson to stop hiding behind Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech memes, and use the power of Capitalism to keep Duck Dynasty alive. You don't need A&E.

If you really agree with Robertson's opinions about homosexuality and segregation, or you just don't see any problem with what he said (and I hope you've actually read what he said, or at least his most controversial remarks, before taking a stance on this issue), you might worry about your ideals being marginalized. I can understand the desire to win back the ethos of the country, to try and spin this in the opposite direction. However, I don't think you'll be able to reverse this trend. Instead, I propose another alternative: a Kickstarter to produce a web series.

The problem with all the posts I have seen that support Phil Robertson is that claiming his freedom of speech or freedom of religion are at stake is just untrue. Those who complain to A&E about Robertson's views are exercising their free speech rights, and so is A&E. Furthermore, A&E is exercising their right to make a business decision and remain a profitable company.

Based on his statements in the GQ interview, Robertson clearly understood that his controversial views might hurt the TV show because A&E always edited them out. Perhaps he misguidedly thought public opinion would force A&E to support him. That was a bad gamble on his part, but he's no victim. He states in the interview that he suspects this show is coming to an end soon, and his reason for doing the show is to use the it as a platform, to speak his beliefs. He was very successful in using the show as a platform (got him this high profile interview with GQ), and he was not censored.

So, you're losing the culture war. Should you fight harder? How about fighting smarter? Just because you are losing dominance, doesn't mean you will be wiped out. That's a false dichotomy or a slippery slope. There's a place for you in society, so develop that niche. You, as an American, deserve a seat at the table, no matter how much I or anyone else might disagree with you. However, a reality TV Show on A&E about your family is not an inalienable right.

As of the time I write this, there is no Kickstarter project to develop Duck Dynasty as an independent web series. You should be thankful that we live in this modern age where such things are possible. This is why I have hope for society. Not just because the democratization of information has given hope to historically marginalized peoples, but because it also gives hope to future marginalized peoples, even if they were once the dominant oppressors.

Liberals - my advice is to stop the vitriol of exclusion. By all means, let your voice be heard about what you object to. But name-calling is a contradiction to the ideal of diversity. Let's strive for consistency and intelligence on both sides, please. The oppression of Germany after WW I was one of the factors that contributed to Hitler's rise. As long as your political opponents refrain from violence (and the Robertson family tries to make it clear in the interview that they are opposed to violence), they should feel welcomed to the table.

When I started writing this post a couple days ago, I tried crafting a hypothetical scenario of a religious organization firing someone for speaking publicly about how their beliefs differed from that organization. Lo and behold! As if on queue, the United Methodist Church defrocks a minister for officiating a same-sex marriage.

Since the United Methodist Church is a religious organization, their beliefs are the very basis of the organization, and they have a right to ordain or defrock, employ or fire, based on religious beliefs (i.e., religious organizations have exceptions allowing certain leeway to discriminate on basis of religion). Sexual orientation is not listed as an exception to freedom of religion, but beliefs about race are explicitly listed as an exception to the freedom of religion. There may be those who want to change the church's stance on gay marriage from within the organization, or change the law - but I won't get into that.

Personally, I support both "firings." Each organization has every right to do so. I'm saddened by the defrocking of Rev. Frank Schaefer. But I am profoundly bothered by the discourse surrounding Robertson. The reason is because it is prejudice hiding behind religion, which I have experienced first hand.

When my wife and I were dating, there was a period where I moved back to Kentucky from California, so I could live with my dad and save up Money to come back to California on my own. I worked in the cafeteria of Berea College, mostly as a caterer, but occasionally in other departments. For one whole month, I worked in the bakery.

There was a father and son, who was a little older than me, that worked there, too. They heard about my long-distance girlfriend, and that she is from the Philippines. One day the father asked to chat privately with me in the men's locker room (not the athletic locker room, but the one for employees to change into their uniforms). He sat me down and told me how the bible said I should only marry within my race. He and his son are White, as am I. He went on to tell me how his son had dated a Latina for a while, but that had been problematic due to their difference in race, and it hadn't ended well, also because of the difference in race.

He spoke to me out of sincere concern. He wasn't angry or forceful. He didn't say Asians are inferior, just that the races should be separate. I was very uncomfortable. He probably saw that. I went back up to the bakery without saying much.

The older ladies I worked with in the bakery were very motherly, and they asked me what he'd wanted to talk to me about. I told them, and they were very supportive, saying, essentially "You never mind him and his silly ideas."

For context, perhaps I should also mention that Berea College was founded by an abolitionist preacher and an abolitionist statesman. It is a non-denominational Christian college. The motto of the college is "God hath made of one blood all nations of men." I want to mention this because it's important not to stereotype Conservative White Southern Christians, just as it's important not to stereotype Blacks, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, etc.

He's got a right to be a racist, and to have those beliefs, even to speak about it. He should not do it in the workplace, but I'll grant that he asked to have a private conversation with me, and he never brought it up again. I think he was embarrassed by the incident, too. So, I never complained about it, either.

But he was basically telling me I should not marry the person I love. He acted to influence his son not to pursue future potential love interests. So, this is very personal for me. It's easy to forget that Loving vs. Virginia, the landmark case that struck down state restrictions on interracial marriage, was just five years before I was born (still less than 50 years ago).

One of the things that bothers me about this man's message is that he was cloaking his racist beliefs in his religion. "It's okay to be a racist if it's part of my religion." Well, the law does not extend that to racism, although that kind of racism is what I encountered and is echoed by Robertson.

The field of Anthropology has struggled with this concept. It's called Cultural Relativism: you cannot judge a culture based on values that are external to that culture (e.g., the values of your own culture). When I was doing my BA in Anthropology in the 90's, there was a dialogue about Cultural Relativism being invoked to defend human rights violations. Most of those violations were violence against women, such as female circumcision, stoning, honor killing, etc.. When human rights, or civil rights, are being violated, you cannot use Cultural Relativism as an excuse.

In Star Trek, the principle of Cultural Relativism is embodied by the Prime Directive. This rule is frequently violated by Kirk, especially when lives or human rights are at stake. Cultural Relativism sounds like a great principal, but it's an Ivory Tower concept that proves problematic in the real world.

Ultimately, the culture war cannot be won, either by Liberals or Conservatives. For one to get rid of the other is Tyranny, and that's not a stable form of government. The vehemence of some conservatives is an understandable reaction to their increasing marginalization. But both sides would be well advised to remember that they cannot win this war, and only by civility in the democratic process and the social sphere can either side find long-term success.

Performance Writers

Scalzi's new Audible interview discusses history of publishing SF.

John Scalzi weighs in on what it takes to be a successful writer in today's electronic marketplace, and discusses his own unusual path. He talks about what he calls "Performance Skills." While these skills are not new, he says writers have leveraged them in the past, these skills they are more important for success in today's environment.

Scalzi also gives an interesting discussion of how distribution models (i.e., racks in the grocery stores and the rise of specialty book stores) coincided with Science Fiction's New Wave movement, to create the genre that we have today.




Related:

Charles Stross io9 Q & A:

Robert J. Sawyer interview: