Thinking about workflows

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Nov 2, 2009 at 07:15 PM

[Note: This is my at-work-PC response—see my next note for personal-project-at-home-MacBook response]

Relating to my experience, “workflow” is like GrapeNuts—like GrapeNuts, which do not contain grapes or nuts, my workflow does not work nor does it flow! Nevertheless, I’ll try to relate my so-called workflow.

Hugh has wisely assumed that you’re talking about the workflow of a writer, I think, which makes his comments spot on. I am the sales and marketing director for a small, nonprofit publisher, so my job requires many different facets… catalog copy writing, catalog information management, customer service, policies and procedures, media relations, author relations, vendor management, to name some but not all. For the most part, these aspects of my job require workflows that are unique to themselves. I’ve been struggling to develop a workflow that handles as many of these aspects as I can, with mixed results. My initial information catching application is Zoot 5.0. I use Zoot to store records on approved invoice payments, boilerplate for various documents, a catalog of the books we publish (though I’m not entirely satisfied with this, see below), reminders, records of certain types of correspondence, and various miscellaneous information. In some cases, Zoot is all I need. But usually not. I use OneNote to bring project-specific information together in one spot, making use of the notebook and section organization, and the ability to drag and drop PDFs, text and images onto a page. I don’t know that I consider this “workflow,” however, as it is mostly like a cork board I tack information to for use in other applications.

I usually compose text in the plain text editor NoteTab. If I need to plan a written piece before hand, I will likely use Brainstorm. Likewise, I’ll use Brainstorm for brainstorming a project.

I’ve also been toying with ConnectedText for storing the catalog of our books.

Two big holes in my process are a good journal-keeping approach (i.e. keeping day-oriented notes) and contact management.

See my next post for my MacBook workflow.

Steve Z.