Writing a book - with Gneo and Evernote
In the coming weeks, Gneo customers will be sharing their stories of Gneo in action. These unique individuals harness the power of this productivity tool differently, but achieve similar success. We love showing how the various aspects of Gneo can be utilized, and illustrating with stories how to accomplish a variety of goals. Networking guru Stefan Thomas kicks off this series, sharing how he enlisted the help of Evernote and Gneo to turn a book concept into a book reality.
Writing a book - with Gneo and Evernote
So, in May 2013 I was asked to write a book - Business Networking for Dummies. Truth is, I had been sort of planning to write a book for several years, but had never quite got the momentum going. This time, I had a publisher and a contract and a lot of people waiting expectantly for me to write it.
So I had to work out a system.
In fact, I needed more than one system. I had about four months to write the book in order to stick to my deadlines and needed to come up with around 100,000 original words in that time. This was the biggest challenge I had ever undertaken.
My first system involved research and organising my content into some sort of order. Evernote was simply perfect for this. I absorbed everything I possibly could about networking. If I saw a blog online that I liked the tone of, I would clip it to Evernote. If I was at a business networking event and picked up a tip or got a new perspective on something I could instantly make a note. Sometimes it was something written on a flip chart or presentation and I would just snap a photo and upload it to Evernote.
As often as I could, I would organise my stuff and notes into some sort of order. We had started the book by writing and refining the table of contents so I simply made a notebook stack for the book, with each chapter having it’s own notebook within the stack. Most notes could be immediately filed into the relevant chapter’s notebook, then tagged so that I could reference them in future. As well as the chapters I had notebooks for ideas and inspirations which didn’t fit anywhere else.
Even if I had never written the book, I had built myself the most comprehensive library about networking content ANYWHERE!
Then came writing each chapter and this is where Gneo really came into it’s own.
My deadline was four months hence. I know how my mind works. I know how I work. Had I simply relied on the four month deadline I would have done nothing until at least three months and two weeks in. Then I would have panicked.
So we set a deadline for each chapter and put each chapter into Gneo as a task. Along with a due date and reminder. The interface on Gneo allowed me to see exactly where I was up to with the book and the link with my calendar meant that I could make sure I specified time for writing.
The ability to drag chapters up the list and edit the dates when other tasks got in the way was a massive help.
Most of all though, a clear plan from the outset, with staged deadlines towards the main deadline was invaluable in getting the book written.
And I did. 100,000 words in 106 days. Those 106 days also included being the very busy Network Director of Business Networking organisation 4Networking.biz, with over 5000 events per year to help manage, and having an operation on my ankle when I broke it just after finishing the table of contents.
Everything went into Gneo. Every promised follow up call, every single task towards any of the many goals I need to achieve every week.
The discipline of putting everything in was tiresome at first, and I had to force myself to do it, now I couldn’t work any other way.
This post was contributed by Stefan Thomas who is the author of Business Networking for Dummies
Find Stefan on Twitter @NoRedBraces and follow his blog at www.NoRedBraces.co.uk