3 Planning Strategies Writers Should Explore
By: Cynthia Giles
Tags: Planning, Writing Life, Productivity, Writing, Writing Tips

3 Planning Strategies Writers Should Explore

Photo by Paico Oficial on Unsplash

I’ve been in pursuit of the “perfect planner” for as long as I can remember. And I suspect a lot of other writers are similarly obsessed/perplexed.

Writing life just isn’t a good fit for standardized, calendar-focused planners — at least not usually. If you happen to have the sort of writing job that involves lots of deadlines and editorial meetings, you probably need an hour-by-hour daily view.

But.

If you are writing on your own — whether part or all of the time — you need a strategy that can combine big goals, small tasks, lots of notes, ideas to investigate or organize, and more. The key is finding a format that balances structure with freedom.

Ideally, a structure that nourishes rather than restricts creativity.

If there’s one thing I’ve figured out in my quest for the perfect planning strategy, it’s that different approaches work for different people, at different times in their writing life. Some writers find a fit with the bullet journal method, or with one of the designed planners that combine a little bit of everything.

At one point in my quest, I was so determined to understand the whole range of approaches that I compiled a database of all the planner products I could find out about. And there are a lot of them.

That was a great exercise, and still has some value I think. But in the end, I never found my soulmate planner. I ended up creating my own approaches — methods and templates that I go back to again and again.

I mix and match them to meet changing needs, and I freshen them up with new tweaks when they no longer seem satisfying.

So here are my three go-to strategies. The first is an inexpensive and not-obvious online tool. The second combines several different paper resources. And the third (my core approach) uses a simple but powerful graphic form to organize everything — from parts of the day to parts of a novel to parts of life.

1. SuperNotecard

I tried many online planning products before eventually deciding that my love of paper is stronger than my desire for a cross-platform strategy. Of all the popular tools I tried, Trello was the only one that clicked, and I used it quite a bit for a while. But I was continually frustrated by the fact that you can only arrange/move cards horizontally. And it’s rather complicated to combine cards with calendars.

As for OneNote and its various cousins — don’t get me started. I’m pretty savvy, but I never figured out the organizational metaphor. So after putting a ton of stuff in, I took it all out.

And then . . .

I stumbled on a tool that’s not particularly meant to be a planner, but works well if you want to use it that way. To be candid — it’s a rather “old” product (started out as a flashcard-maker in 2011), and may seem a bit clunky at first. There are a lot of features, which are reasonably well organized, but the interface isn’t entirely intuitive.

So there’s a small learning curve. Once you catch on to the metaphor, though, SuperNotecard is a lot of fun. To give you a general idea of the approach, here are a few screenshots from projects I experimented with last year.

Top level — card stacks

Next level — stack opened up to show cards

Single card view

You can customize the cards with colors, tags, flags, etc. You can format card text with bullets and tables, embed images, add line numbers and links, apply a variety of styles, search for text.

You can filter views in a variety of ways — and best of all, for my taste, you can move the cards any which way, just as you would move paper notes laid out on a desk or pinned on a corkboard.

Within a project (SuperNotecard’s basic organizational unit), you can stack groups of cards into decks. Double-click on the deck to see all the cards, rearrange them, edit them, etc.

There’s also a reference library feature where you can create cards for any kind of material, then link to the reference from any card in the project. But each library is part of a specific project, so you can’t have a “master” that’s accessible to all projects. (This was a significant limitation for me, but might not bother most people.)

The product is geared toward writers, and provides slightly different toolsets depending on whether a particular project falls into the category of Fiction, Nonfiction, or Script. But the basics (project, deck, cards) are the same for all three categories.

So — how is this a planning strategy?

Simple enough. Just create a “Today” deck, add cards for whatever you like (appointments, goals, tasks, etc.) and arrange them. Add keywords to the cards if you want to be able to view ad hoc groups, and/or color-code them to create a better visualization. You can copy cards from other decks into “Today,” so it’s easy to keep track of ongoing or unfinished tasks.

You can also nest decks within decks — so you can have a “Week” deck containing “Monday,” “Tuesday,” etc. decks. If it suits your personal approach, add a “Goals” deck for the week, and an “Assessment” decks. Or zoom further out with a “Month” or “Quarter” decks.

With SuperNotecard, you can have everything in one place — ideas, text blocks, reference materials, planning tools — which has a lot of potential advantages for writers.

On the plus side, you can tinker up a completely customized personal system. On the negative side, you will have to put some effort into figuring out what works for you, and getting it set up that way.

Their how-to texts are a bit cumbersome, and you won’t find help outside the program, as it’s pretty much a niche product. But it has some of the features in a high-end product like Scrivener, while being more broadly useful and much less complicated.

So! Some of you might already be in love with SuperNotecard, while some already hate it, just from that description. If you’re somewhere in the middle, take it for a free 30-day spin (limited to five projects). And if it clicks for you, the annual subscription is just $19.

2. Spiral notebooks, 3-ring binders, sticky notes, and “real” index cards

If that looks like a list of school supplies — true enough! And you can add in some ordinary office supplies for good measure. The creative part derives from how you combine basic items into a personally perfect planning system.

Full disclosure: I love anything that falls into this category, and will amuse myself if time permits by building a new “kit” for a new project. Candidly, I don’t end up using most of them — their usefulness comes from the process itself. From thinking through a project by deciding what sorts of working structures I might want to create, what color seems to fit, and so on.

Which might seem ridiculous. If so, jump ahead to strategy 3! But if the general idea has some appeal, I’ll share a short list of things in this category that have made me happy.

I like to get a really big picture sometimes. And as I don’t have room for a giant whiteboard at home (sadly!), I’ve taken to buying several desk-sized calendars as soon as they get marked down (often by the end of February). I rarely use the dated sides — I just turn the pages over and use the blank side for notes I want to see in mind-map relationships, or all in one place.

Ordinary 3x5 index cards are insanely cheap — often less than a dollar per hundred. And they can be used for almost anything. Sometimes I just put a single word, phrase, task, or goal on each card and lay them out Kanban-style. There’s something about the physical act of making them and moving them around that has a clarifying or focusing effect.

For a couple of extra dollars, you can get index cards in a riot of colors! And you can get bigger ones (4 x 6) and biggest ones (5 x 8).

Jumbo, color-coded index cards can be a lot of fun.

If you are fond of index cards, Post-Its makes sticky ones that can be used in various ways. And there are spiral-bound sets (the cards are perforated for detachment), and sheets of cards that can go in a 3-ring binder (ditto).

Speaking of 3-ring binders — they have three great advantages. First (and obviously), you can easily rearrange the pages, and separate them into groups by using dividers. Second, you can equip them with various accessories, such as pocket tabs, sheet protectors, zippered cases, and so on. Third — and this is most important for me — you can have three different kinds of pages: blank, rules, and grid. (There’s more in Strategy 3 about why that might matter.)

I put this notebook together (mostly with $1 items) for a bit of portable color.

Since there are calendars and planner pages designed to fit them, binders offer an easy way to combine structured and freeform approaches. Etsy is awash with page templates if you don’t want to make your own.

Over the years, I’ve collected a lot of “art cards.” Galleries used to send them out to announce new shows, though of course that’s mostly not happening now. But if you happen to have a stack of them — or something equivalent — tuck them into pockets of notebooks, or cut them up and hide them in your index cards. Just a nice visual refreshment!

If these old-school approaches appeal to you, a couple of famous writers offer inspiration. Check out Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook” (in the 1968 collection Slouching Toward Bethlem) and Anne Lamott’s “Index Cards,” found in Part Three of her wonderful book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Didion and Lamott both focus more on writing than on planning. But there’s a lot of overlap between the two processes, I think.

3. Quadrants, circles, and triangles

Until fairly recently, I always used ruled pages when I wrote in a notebook. Then I started to feel very restricted by the lines. I’d already experimented with some planner styles that offer open parts of the page for freeform notes, as well as the use of a blank journal for bullet-style pages.

Neither worked for me — mainly because there was no consistent approach to the structural part of planning. I didn’t want to be faced with a completely new set of organizational decisions every day . . . .

So I adopted a strategy from my experience in corporate communications: the quadrant chart. Truly the Swiss Army Knife of information organization! Once you put any kind of content into a quadrant format — it might be grossly over-simplified, but it will communicate very effectively with most audiences.

Basically, I create a quadrant chart every time I start to plan anything. Some examples . . .

From a calendar perspective:

Plan the day (4 time blocks, e.g., 7–10 AM, 10 AM-2 PM, 2–5 PM, 5–8 PM)

Plan the month (4 weeks)

Plan the year (4 quarters).

From a project perspective:

Big picture (e.g., preparation, design, development, deployment)

Project elements (e.g., plot, characters, scenes, themes)

Project requirements (e.g., people, budget, infrastructure, materials)

The beauty of dividing everything into fours is that it usually makes you think harder. So if you can’t immediately come up with four equal categories, keep trying — because there is almost always something else that needs attention.

For example, when I was sketching out this story on planning for writers, I knew right away that three quadrants would contain strategies, because the story is part of an informal series organized in three's. But I needed to fill four slots, so realized the fourth square should be “Introduction/Conclusion.”

Now all I had to do was drop in notes for each part, and I had a roadmap. Plus a head start on writing the story efficiently.

Very often I just raggedly draw a quadrant on a sheet of graph paper or a blank page, and go from there. But I’ve also created a PowerPoint deck with ready-made quadrants in different sizes, and some with pre-defined labels.

It’s actually a bit of a pain to draw an exact quadrant in PPT, but you can grab this image, drop it on a blank slide, and stretch/shrink it to the desired size.