Author: David

Writing in Ulysses, under macOS, it was easy not only to set a global goal for any project (the number of words or characters one wants to reach).

More importantly to me, it was dead-simple to quickly access a live word count — for the whole book, or for any specfic chapter, section or whatever (for any sheet or any group, in Ulysses’ linguo). That was very useful.

In MS Word, I don’t think one can set a goal or a target. But it’s easy to display a live word count nonetheless, be if for the whole book/file or for a single chapter.

In Word, look at that status bar at the bottom of the window. It should display a lot of useless junk and a live word count.

If you don’t see it, right-click anywhere in the status bar and check the Word count entry in the list.

Btw, while you’re at it, feel free to uncheck everything in this list you don’t need or don’t want to constantly see in your status bar. The ease of customizing Word’s look is one of the its most underestimated and underpromoted feature. I only use the live word count, the language tool, plus the different view modes and the Zoom cursor and even those last two I could probably get rid of.

Word count for a single chapter

For this to work, you need to:

• Use headings Styles for your chapter headings — you know, Heading 1, 2, 3 and so on. See below for a tip to quickly apply those styles without having to waste time and focus using menus and sub-menus.
• Have the Navigation pane open (you’ll find it in the View tab). It displays all your headings, on the left of the screen, like this:

Now, right-click on any heading in the Navigation pane and choose Select heading and Content. That will select all your chapter’s content and instantly updates the status bar’s word count to display the actual word count for the selection, next to the global word count of the entire file.

Neat.

Bonus tip: quickly apply Heading and Normal Styles in MS Word

Using menus, even the contextual menu, to apply Styles is distracting and slow — once you discover there is a better xwy to do it, you realize what a waste of time it is. And what is this better way of doing it? Keyboard shortcuts, of course.

Word comes with a bunch of predefined keyboard shortcuts for some of the more essential Styles; And if you need more, you can always add your own too.

To apply any heading Style, put you cursor on the desired line and press Shift+Maj+right arrow once to apply Heading 1. Press it again to switch to Heading 2, and so on. Shift+Maj+left arrow to cycle in the opposite direction.

To remove any heading Styles, and to get back to the Normal (default) Style, press Shift+Ctrl+N.

And keep in mind you can create your own Styles and/or create your own keyboard shortcuts too.

For years, I frowned at the idea of timing my work—“I write dude, I’m not getting paid by the hour!” I repeated myself. But I was wrong. Sure, I’m not paid by the hour, or it would be a misery if not less than that, but writing takes a lot of time and one’s time is limited. One’d better know how and where one spends it.

Timing my writing, in fact all of my work, was the best change I’ve ever made to my work routine. And it is still is, even if the way I do things, and the time I need to do them, constantly evolves.

It helps me to roughly know where I’ll be at the end of every day, no matter what. It’s also very useful to realize where I waste most of my time during any day, and to fight procrastination.

Every morning, accompanied by a big cup of coffee, I will start working around the same time (very early) for a 45’ or a 2h session, depending on what I want to do. I’ll take a short break after that first session, and have breakfast. Then I’ll start another session often, but not always, followed by another break. Rinse and repeat, until a day’s worth of work is done. After that, I’m free to do whatever I want.

During a session, I’m not allowed to go check my emails, Twitter, and so on. It’s just the work to be done, and me.

Here is another trick I use: to make sure I’m not tempted to waste my time online, I have a separated ‘work’ account on my computer, where I don’t have Twitter or email configured, no games either. Nothing but my word processor, a couple dictionaries and the notes I need in order to write (using OneDrive for storing my files, makes it really easy to share the one I need between my two accounts). During a session, I’m allowed to not write if I feel like it but the thing is that I quickly found out that looking at an empty screen, with nothing else to do but stare at it, is quite motivating to start working 😉

As you can see, beside the use of two separated accounts, there is nothing fancy in my ‘method’, that is merely a stripped-down version of the Pomodoro technique. And there is nothing complicated to it: it doesn’t require any sophisticated app, any timer should do.

To my surprise, I discovered that Windows 10 comes with its own timer. I wasn’t expecting much of it, but I thought I could give it a shot before spending money on yet another app.

You now what? It does the job.

Continue reading Get Things Done with Windows 10 Timer

Depending on how bad is my eyesight at any given moment and/or what mood I’m in, I like to change the font I’m using for reading, as for writing—and I’ll often use different fonts for note taking and for the more creative part of the job.

Continue reading Selecting a Font for Writing and Reading