A Guest Post by Kenneth Waldman
Today’s writers have their work cut out for them. Whether they are novelists, journalists, content writers, or bloggers, they have to keep up with multiple aspects of their profession. It is no longer sufficient to just write whenever you feel inspired. In order to make a living, you have to write as much as you can, plus, you have to have great organizational and time management skills. Also, knowing a few things about marketing also helps.
So, today’s writer needs to be a jack of all of trades, and that poses a bit of problem. Why? Because, even after you master all those skills, you have to put them into practice, and that’s going to take up an awful lot of time, since you have to wear multiple hats. This goes double if you do all of your writing, marketing, and publishing yourself. There are only so many hours in a day, so what can you do to save time? Luckily, there are many useful tools which are there to help you write, organize, and keep track of all your work and ideas.
We choose 7 incredible time-saving tools all writers should check out.
Evernote
You would be hard-pressed to find a blogger who doesn’t use Evernote religiously. Whether you happen to stumble upon an idea while you’re taking a walk, or while doing extensive research on a particular subject, Evernote is there to keep track of all your notes, ideas and research, and it does so across multiple platforms. That means, if you write down an idea on your smartphone, you can access it later from any other platform, such as your PC.
Evernote allows you to categorize your research by employing tags, comments and notes. This way, you will be able to find exactly what you are looking for, no matter how much material piles up during the research process. It is fair to assume that writers will read a lot before they do some actual writing, which means a tool like Evernote will save them a lot of time when sifting through all that research.
Grammarly
Chances are you’ve probably heard of Grammarly, but we recommend you actually start using it. Proofreading and spellchecking your work is a tedious process, and Grammarly will help you save time and prevent you from running out of patience. It is able to find grammatical, compositional and structural errors inside your work. In fact, Grammarly is about 10 times more efficient at finding those errors than whatever text editor you are using right now.
All you have to do is paste your work into Grammarly, and let it do its magic. Another helpful aspect of Grammarly is that you can use it to check for plagiarism. You can use it to locate your original source, make sure you’ve paraphrased a paragraph thoroughly, or to avoid unintentional quotes. This doesn’t mean you should get rid of an actual human editor, but it does come in handy nevertheless.
WordPress
WordPress is the most relied-on blogging platform in the world, and it will save you a ton of time, and money, if you put in the effort to master it. It is fairly expansive and complex, but then again, it is immensely powerful, and there is pretty much nothing it can’t do. Most of the blogs you visit are made using WordPress.
Lynda.com
Lynda.com has video tutorials on literally anything you can think of. We’ve already mentioned that it takes a while to master WordPress, so we recommend relying on Lynda’s tutorials to get a hang of it. Also, if there is anything you want to know about self-publishing, marketing, web design, or any other tools or skills that might come in handy, you can easily turn to Lynda, instead of spending hours looking in the wrong place.
All of their videos are concise and quite easy to follow, and you will be able to implement what you’ve learned in a matter of days, or sometimes, even hours.
Essaymama
Essaymama.com is one of those tools that is a helping hand for those writers who are precious about their work, and won’t easily let anyone in on their projects. But, they will feel much more comfortable sharing the load with experienced and skilled essay writers who actually know what they are doing.
Needless to say, you will not only benefit from their writing, but you will also be able to rely on them when it comes to editing and proofreading, while you develop your ideas and do more writing yourself.
Dragon Dictation
Dragon Dictation is a tool that comes in handy when you are not in a situation to write down your ideas, or if it takes too much time at that particular moment. It does this by translating human voice into text, and according to developers, the software boasts an accuracy level of 99 percent. This tool will also help you out if you are a slow typist, so you will save some additional time there until you develop your typing skills.
Write or Die
Writers get easily distracted, especially if they need to be online for research purposes. Write or Die is a tool that will save you time by keeping you focused on your writing, and nothing else. It’s probably the only tool that punishes you if you are not writing, and we do mean that literally. It has three different modes: Gentle, Normal and Kamikaze.
In Gentle mode, you will be reminded to focus and write with a simple pop-up box. Normal mode is a bit stricter, as you will suffer an unpleasant sound, unless you resume writing. Kamikaze mode is the most extreme, because the program will start deleting your work if you stop writing for a period of time.
Last but not least, the amount of effort you put into your writing is key, and no tools can help you with that. But, they can help in some other aspects, so we invite you to give them a try.
Author: Kenneth Waldman, writer and content creator. You can get in touch with him on Linkedin.
