Ways To Waste Your Writing Time
I don’t know if you’re a blogger, but every once in a while I publish something about writing software or finding your inspiration on my site.
Now, wordpress has this block system in place, but some time ago, before they did, it was quite a hassle to set everything up the right way with your pictures, descriptions and SEO stuff.
But I didn’t know there was another way, I just did it, it took a long time every time I published something, I hated it, but there was no way around it.
I didn’t hate blogging per se, I just didn’t like that it took such a large chunk out of my writing time, just clicking around “stupidly” to get the pictures in there and copy SEO information like titles and descriptions and what not from A to B.
So, after a while I discovered that Scrivener is great with html. So great, in fact, that I found out, I can create a template where I just fill in my text and placeholders with the names of the images and when I compiled that, Scrivener would give me the ready-made html code for my blog.
Everything that was left for me to do was upload the pictures to wordpress and since I had the placeholders with the correct names in place the correct html links were already created and everything worked fine.
This template cut down my time spent on wordpress doing stupid clicking… I don’t know… Maybe to a tenth compared to what it was before.
To be totally honest, it took me a while to set up the Scrivener compiler to do exactly what I wanted, and I also needed to insert a little bit of html code… So, it wasn’t done just like that.
But once it was done, it saved me a lot of time.
The thing is, I didn’t know for a very long time that Scrivener was able to do that. Just because I didn’t know the software well enough.
And that happens often with other writing software as well.
You need to do something tedious, and just because you don’t know that there’s a function for that that saves you all the work (and your writing time), you’re wasting all this creativity of yours to do stupid clicking.
That’s why I’ve created the {!global Membership Site Product Name}: a collection of how-tos and tutorials on writing software and writing processes, so you don’t waste your writing time doing things you can let the software do.
Know your software, and use your time being creative!