Organize Your Editorial Calendar With Scrivener

One of the biggest challenges for writers who pump out lots of content is keeping all of that content organized. It’d be nice to have a system that can not only help you produce and write content in a quick, streamlined manner, but can also help plan, organize and ultimately execute your editorial calendar.

Many software options are available, of course, but one that serious writers should consider is Scrivener. Produced by Literature & Latte, Scrivener was created with long-form writing such as novels in mind, but is also gaining popularity in the blogging community for its organizational abilities.

Here are a few ways Scrivener can help you keep your editorial calendar productive and streamlined.

Organize Chronologically

Scrivener can organize your content in a variety of ways, but many writers use its tools to do so chronologically.

One way to do this is to create each project as a year, with every folder in that project listed as a month. Then, within each month folder, each post you write can be saved as an individual document.

For many writers this is a helpful way to remember and, if necessary, track down older content. Looking for a post you wrote about Father’s Day two years ago? Simply look in the June folder of your 2014 project.

Take Organization Even Deeper

The software offers other ways to organize content, either as standalone tools or as layers on top of your chronological setup. As “Scrivener for Dummies” author Gwen Hernandez details, writers can also organize by subject, target site or market, or status.

Organizing by status can be particularly helpful, giving you an easy glimpse at whether a project is in progress, complete, submitted or posted.

Individual posts can be color coded as well to help you distinguish them from each other, whether its posts covering certain topics, posts for particular publications, or professional versus personal writing.

Make Use of Corkboard View

Scrivener has three basic options for viewing your content: document view, outline view and corkboard view.

Many writers find corkboard view particularly useful, because it works just like a real bulletin board, only much quicker.

Corkboard view looks just like it sounds, complete with a corkboard-like background. On top of the corkboard are individual cards representing documents within a given folder, or even separate sections of a given post or document.

This allows you to quickly rearrange and organize content, such as individual posts for an upcoming week or month, or separate sections of one individual post or article. The options are plentiful, but they’re designed with one idea in mind — to keep you thinking more about your writing and less about the more tedious aspects of organization.

Potential Drawbacks

Overall, Scrivener is an excellent way to organize and execute all sorts of written content, but some writers have had their gripes.

One is that a mobile version is not yet available, which can be problematic if you’re on the go without access to your PC or laptop. However, Literature & Latte says it is working on a version for iOS for use on iPhones and iPads.

Some have also nitpicked about the software’s word processing capabilities, particularly those used to more traditional software such as Microsoft Word. Specifically, some have complained of formatting issues when importing large documents.

Still, these and other potential problems are minimal. In its current iteration, Scrivener is already a powerful writing and organization tool for content creators, and one that only stands to improve in the future.