There are a whole host of thoughts and processes on what you need to do to get things done. Indeed there is a great book called Getting Things Done, by David Allen. If you aren’t too busy getting things done, perhaps you may have time to read it. Along there same lines is the brilliant blog of Merlin Mann’s www.43folders.com. (For a distraction, check out his Inbox Zero talk.)

For this little blog I want to draw attention to getting things done with respect to writing. Surprising as it may seem, the key to writing is to get meaningful words on a page, whether it is electronic or paper. All to often I see too many people faffing around worrying about fonts, styles etc to make their words look pretty. The effort needs to be put into the content.

Just recently I have been very dissatisfied with a word processor for the Mac (not MS Office), as too many distractions prevent me from just getting words down on the page. In the end I’ve started using TextEdit, which is the Mac equivalent of WordPad in the Windows world. I know a few friends of mine are always surprised I’m not using vi (I do for some stuff), but even I appreciate the occasional benefit of seeing bold and italics.

The great thing is, using such simple tools makes you really focus on the words. You can format it all later, and it’ll take you a fraction of the time. So next time you sit down to write something, either be very disciplined and fire up Word or Open Office, and just bash out the words, and ignore all the formatting stuff, or use something much simpler and focus on content, followed by content, content and then worry about formatting.

[For Mac users, I’ve discovered a great little writing tool called Scrivener, which I am using to put down all my thoughts for the functional specification for one of our new products.]

Miles