A longhand blog writing workflow on iPad and Mac

I adore writing longhand

I adore writing longhand. I'm not very good at it, and I don't do it often enough, but I adore writing longhand. I crave the feeling of a good weight pen or other writing utensil and the joy of passing that over a smooth page and make an impression. Granted, my handwriting looks like what would be left if a murder of crows dipped their collective feet in a bottle of ink and walked over the page, but still, I adore writing longhand.

Writing longhand liberates my thinking

It really does feel like I have a lot less brakes to my creativity when writing longhand than when faced with a keyboard and an empty document. Writing longhand is such an engrained habit, it is such a low resistance, unobtrusive habit that some of the content just flows. A keyboard often limits my flexibility.

I've tried other approaches. For a while, I was really into mind mapping. I got the applications (iThoughts HD is an excellent app if you are so inclined) but again I was confronted with that keyboard. Even with the excellent fast text entry, the inertia was still too big to get to an effective, always on method of capture.

So I came back to writing. In Moleskines, because you need to write with a certain style. And you really want a notebook with a philosophy and a great website. Thing is, you don't really always carry that around. I have other tools that really are with me all the time. Such as my iPad. But the iPad has a, albeit virtual, keyboard. And most of the writing apps don't really allow me to write in a good way, unless one really large word per line is what writing really should be all about.

Combining Notability with a Bamboo stylus

I had actually purchased Notability a while back, but never really gotten to use it. The interface is far from the stylish, no nonsense interfaces we Apple fanboys are used to. The app actually gives an appearance of utter confusion. Shallow as I am, I never gotten further than that. Until Mac Power Users episode 100, where a number of listeners referred to their workflows. An English gentleman referred to his use of Notability with the Bamboo stylus. As luck would have it, one of my gadget shopping sprees a few month back had yielded, yes, a Bamboo stylus.

I literally put 1 and 1 together and ended up with more than 2. Amazing. The application allows for a focused area in which you can write as tall or as large as you want, and it will still look like normal handwriting on the page, as the focused area also enlarges the actual paper. It is one of the first apps which allows for a worthwhile writing experience in my opinion.

A blogging workflow with longhand first drafts

So I've started writing my first drafts in longhand, on my iPad, in Notability with my Bamboo stylus. And it's been an excellent experience. This is pretty much how the entire process happens.

1. I capture ideas into OmniFocus. During daily review I cull and if the idea remains relevant in my head, I create a short entry into Notability, a document with the blog idea as a title. This one, for example, was called "On writing longhand". That tells me pretty much everything I need to know to start writing. If I don't remember a couple of days later, the idea gets killed anyway.
2. I usually write on the train, in the morning. My morning commute into Brussels takes me about 20 minutes by car, 45 minutes by train and 10 minutes on foot. The train is an excellent place to write longhand on my iPad. I just write. It's almost frictionless sentence capture around the idea the document is destined to capture. I choose to display a lined background in Notability and I write every other line. This makes editing much easier.
3. I usually correct in the evening, on the way back from work. Again I have a 45 minute window in which I can review the text. I use a red pen instead of a black one for first reviews, a blue one for second review.
4. Once I'm happy with the text as it is, I label it ready for "blog draft" and I export it as a PDF to Evernote. This way, the document gets copied on all my devices and whenever I have a couple of minutes free, I write a couple of sentences in my Multimarkdown Composer application on my Mac. I write in markdown and generate text files (.txt) which I then copy and paste into my SquareSpace 6 powered blog.

And that's pretty much it.

More efficiency? No thanks

I'm certain there are more efficient ways of doing this, but this rather "slow" approach works really well for me. It really forces me to take the time and review what I've written, ideally a couple of times. I'm a rather impatient writer and forcing myself through this elaborate process aims at improving both the quality and the relevance of my writing.

Let me know if it works.

Patrick Rhone's beautiful article "The Farmer" >→

Too long it had been waiting on my reading list, but I just rediscovered this pearl by Patrick Rhone, who again shows why he is such a great writer. A quote, among many quotes:

This farmer realizes that the relationship with her work, like any good relationship is, and should be, reciprocal. That the work, the land, would not be as good without her commitment to it. And, in turn, it returns that commitment to her. And, because of her intimacy with it, it returns that much more.

Go read the whole post here now. Really.

Via Patrick Rhone

Everything I want ...

Yet another great article by James Shelley. I’m just discovering his blog, and the depth of the writing is wonderful. Especially in light of the recent events that hit Belgium hard, this is a text worth reading, as it really highlights what is truly important.

Developing good audit recommendations

In short

Recommendations should never be developed in an ivory tower. Rather, bringing in the auditees during the recommendations phase and challenging them to develop SMART recommendations will enhance the quality of your recommendations. Proper process should counter any issues with objectivity that may arise.

Relevant recommendations are hard

This is a no-brainer for most auditors. Concisely describing your findings in a manner that all relevant readers can understand is an often underestimated task. Developing SMART recommendations related to these findings can be even more challenging, especially in a subject area which is technical.

Nevertheless, auditors often insist on their independence and objectivity as an argument to only involve the auditees in the report finalization phase. The auditees are confronted with a set of well-intended recommendations with proposed deadlines, and often only have a limited time to react. And that's a problem.

Recommendations are not after-thoughts

Rather, they are core to the relevance of internal audit as a profession. Hence, ensuring relevance and feasibility of recommendations should never be the last item to check off the checklist before issuing the report. Rather, it should be core to a separate audit phase, the recommendation phase, where auditees and auditors come together to analyze how to best approach the findings.

But what about independence and objectivity?

We can't involve the auditees in the recommendation development phase because involving them will impede our independence. Will it really? I'm not too sure about that.

Independence is a means to objectivity. Objectivity allows to judge adequate due diligence and report on that. That's at the level of findings.

However, adapting processes, systems or behaviour to improve due diligence in an organization is, at the end, a management decision. As auditors we have the right to independently point out the direction we believe to be most optimal to address the issues raised. We cannot take the place of management and force them in a certain direction.

Hence, rather than believing that involving auditees in the recommendation process will impede our objectivity, I am convinced that not involving them in the recommendation development and only allowing their input as an after-thought will empede our future independence. Why? Well, imagine they will chose a route different from the one we as auditors proposed. Imagine that we invested a lot in developing this recommendation. Pride is a human characteristic. I sincerely believe the risk of not being able to objectively assess auditees' response is a bigger issue than involving them in the process to begin with.

Mind first, words later

There's another element to take in account. Most of the obvious solutions we as auditors with a limited working knowledge of practical, technical situations can come up with have been tried, tested and often dismissed as not feasible or ineffective in the past by those auditees.

"Most complex problems have simple solutions, which are most often wrong."

I don't remember the source of the above quote, and I'm not quoting it verbatim either, but there is quite a lot of thruth in it. To not only patch but really solve certain issues, we need to look at creative solutions for them. The best possible way for me is to combine the critical attitude of the auditor with the in-depth knowledge of the auditee to examine new, creative ways of issue resolution.

But what if you don't agree?

Auditors are independent. Imagine an auditee supports a certain solution which you are convinced will never really address the issue. The audit report should clearly state this and describe both the proposed solution by the auditee and the solution or ideas of the auditor, as well as the motivation why the auditee response is inadequate. This way, the audit committee and the board have all relevant information to decide on a recommended course of action.

My blogging workflow (or, do I need another writing app?)

Workflows are about optimizing your personal process

Developing workflows have the advantage of allowing you to optimize your work process. This will allow you to become more efficient in the future. The disadvantage then is that you need to invest the time now. And workflows take some time to develop. While personal workflows are inherently personal, there are lessons to be learned from other people’s workflows. That’s why I like podcasts like Mac Power Users which take the time to take you through workflows of uber-nerds.

The origins of my writing workflow

I write quite a lot. Professionally, I write quite a lot of reports and audit work papers. I wrote a lot of proposals as well, in the past when I was working as a consultant. My professional writing has to be concise and to the point. It needs to be as efficient as possible in conveying a message as my target audience, the audit committee, has a limited time to listen to me and read our work. Personally, I’m a blogger. As a blogger, I want to be as efficient and effective in communicating the messages I want to bring as well, out of respect for my audience.

Why do I describe my workflow?

It took a while to finetune my writing workflow. I’ve been testing a lot of applications on different devices and I’ve managed to find a couple of solutions to the challenges of writing as focused as possible. Additionally, it forces me to formally close the testing phase which saw me making a lot of tool changes and spend a lot of time and money getting and testing apps. By describing my current set-up I aim to answer the question “Do I need another tool or have a reached a maturity in my set-up.” The answer actually surprised me.

Steps in my workflow

My workflow consists of five discrete steps which each have a reason and a set of tools to support the execution. I don’t always follow these steps, but I noted that the quality of my writing and the level of synthesis without losing content is more optimal if I apply each of the steps.

Stap 1 - Idea capture I often get glimpses of ideas. When creativity strikes, I try to capture it. I always carry around a small notebook and a pen. I just write down what I think about and add as much or as little detail as I think I need. It allows me to put ideas out of my head, where they are likely to get lost.

Step 2 - Mindmapping the article When I have the time to write, on the train, during the weekend, at night, I set down with one of my tools, select an idea and start brainstorming the content of the article the idea for which I captured in my notebook. I don’t always do this, but I find that article writing takes more time if I don’t, because mindmapping my content generation around an idea gives me the freedom to go really broad in my ideas, without the linear requirements imposed by word processors or outlining tools. I export the mindmap in OPML where possible, which allows me to transfer the structure to my outlining tool.

Step 3 - Outlining the article Once I’ve developed the ideas and the basic structure in the mindmap, I export through OPML to my outlining tool. The outlining tool brings the unstructured idea generation to a structured environment and allows me to assess the narrative in the structure. Am I making all the points I want to make … and does the story make sense? Using an outlining tool to review these aspects really makes sense for me. Knowing this tool and this process is available also allows me to go all out in the mindmapping. I don’t need to hold back as I know I will be outlining anyway. Outlining is pruning of the content. And I find myself often noting down items I came up with during the mindmapping as possible future ideas for articles. However, if they don’t make sense during the outlining phase, they get pruned, relentlessly. At the end, I export the outline as a txt file to my writing tool of choice.

Step 4 - Writing the article Given the preparatory work that I’ve already done, this step should be easy. But it isn’t. Even with the bones of the article skeleton in place and optimized, and all the ideas as cute little ducks in a row, this is still a lot of hard work. When narrative structure is in place, you still need to tell the story. Hans and Grethel would be a very short story if only the outline mattered. Fleshing out the bones is a lot of hard work, and still the most work of all the steps. Once the text is done, I go back and format it using Markdown. It’s not a complex language and it allows me to edit on multiple platforms.

Step 5 - Article quality control After having written and formatted the article, I go back one more time before I post it on the blog. However, I usually wait a while, ideally a day, but often more likely an hour or two, before I go back and reread it for essential issues, such as spelling and use of the correct words and turns of phrases. I read it from two perspectives. First, I need to know the article makes sense. Second, I look for optimization and correct links.

Step 6 - Posting the article to the blog For this, I use the tools SquareSpace gives me. I post in Markdown which is then by Squarespace transferred to clean html for the blog. Basically, I just copy-paste the markdown in the squarespace editor, although on occasion I will use SquareSpace’s tools available on iPad and iPhone.

Tools, apps and file formats

For each of the steps described above, I use a specific set of tools which depend on the device I’m on. I intermittently use a Mac (home and portable), and iPad or an iPhone (IOS device, also when travelling) or Windows PC (work). The available tools allow me to do most of my work on each of these platforms, with limited to no hand-off issues if I switch devices. Pulling it all together are two folders on my dropbox, one containing my mindmaps, the other containing Markdown saved as txt.

My blogging devices, apps and file formats

Answering the question

I honestly dare not go back into my app store archive and check which I have or haven’t purchased. What I know is that when I ‘discover’ yet another app which I want to look at, more often than not it’s the “INSTALL” dialog box that appears instead of the price button. A good indication I purchased a predecessor of the current incarnation of that tool somewhere in the past.

The thing is, I probably don’t need them. Most of the most relevant tools I have and use are nvAlt (free, but pay Brett Terpstra some money, because this is a txt editing powerhouse) and Plaintext (free, but you can pay €1.59 to have the banners removed). Notesy is an alternative, and you need iThoughts as a mindmapping tool on your IOS device, but I really don’t need another writing tool.