Useful and Quirky Tools
In this post I share some of my favourite tools, most of which are open source, that help with motivation, stopping distraction, or staying organised.
For Writing
Battle your fear of the empty page!
Written Kitten all the way! In this snazzy little Browser App you get a photo of a cat for every 100 words you have written. Mind you the developers state they are not professional developers so you might want to copy and past your writing in a text document every now and then.
Organise your writing
I like Scrivener particularly for organising bigger writing projects. To provide an honest review I am not keen on the formatting of things and that it is a bit unwieldy to use. However, it does work if you are not someone who write linearly but works on different aspects of a piece of writing at a time. You save yourself from the scroll of death, and can easily navigate within a piece of work. This is not freeware, but you can get discount if you are a student or educator.
https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview
No time to write!
Change in increments or micro-writing will still move you forward and is better than no writing at all. Do you have a note taking app on your phone? Why not write some ideas, thoughts? Reading an article, take the notes there and then, build up your word-count. Editing is easier than starting from zero.
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newSTR_97.htm
Easily Distracted?
Go Cold Turkey!
Organise your Thoughts
I created that Pinterest board a while back, collecting ideas for bullet journaling, but also covers topics like the ‘back of the napkin’ technique and kaizen.
MindMapping is for Sanity
Whilst I loathe Gantt charts with a passion and cannot imagine a project where I ever would voluntarily use one, MindMaps are my tool of choice. There are a variety of free tools such as:
Or tools you can try for free
One of my other favourites which only exists as an app for Android or Mac is Mindly. I adore Mindly because it has such a different approach to organise a mindmap and the aesthetics of it are appealing. The only niggling bit with it is that there is no browser version of it. So you can really only use it as an app.
Please comment and share your favourite tools!
Adventures in Academic Development 