Ten days ago, I wrote about Scrivener. I said I thought it might help me get through a book project with a tight deadline. Boy, did I understate things. I think I’m in love.

So that’s (nearly) it. 25 days and some 30,000 words later, the first draft of the book chunk I’ve been working on is done. (Nearly, because I still need to read and no doubt do some rewrites and cuts tomorrow. But I’m fine with that.) It’ll be with the friend and colleague who commissioned it by Monday morning.

And I couldn’t have done that without Scrivener. (And to a lesser extent Notion, the other app I wrote about.)

I wrote about Scrivener 10 days ago, lauding it (although complaining about its iPad app) and hoping it’d help me get this thing done. (And incidentally giving said friend and colleague the fear – which I can understand; after all, I did say, explicitly, that I was indulging in displacement activity by trying it out.)

I was wrong. In that I understated things. Truthfully, I don’t think I’d’ve done this, in this time, without the app.

I recognise that I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. Its manual, a wonderful old-school single PDF (albeit one with full and loving internal linking), is 921 pages long. I’ve probably looked at a dozen of them. I haven’t even begun to experiment with its ability to compile documents into specific formats. Frankly, right now, I don’t have the time.

But simply by encouraging one to split the project up into logical chunks, and then make it staggeringly easy to see, manipulate and write or edit them separately, in groups, on a pinboard, as an outline, or as a cohesive whole, it makes writing anything of any size conceptually straightforward. And it’s blindingly fast. The only downside is it seems only to sync through Dropbox, as far as I can tell, which I barely use. I’d prefer not to have to have it running all the time. But it feels a relatively small price to pay.

I finally understand why another friend, Naomi Cunningham, now pretty much refuses to use anything else.

I’m now actually going to RTFM. Honestly. I want to get under the skin of this thing.

A quick word about Notion, too, the other app I was experimenting with. I haven’t settled into it as an “everything bucket” yet, not least because it doesn’t seem to have a Safari web clipper – so I’m still on Evernote as a “clip web pages and store PDFs” dumping ground. But in other ways, it excels. I’ve pages running for several projects, and for a live case list. Each page is using a different kind of design – a list in one, a kanban board in another (that was for the book – I finally get the point of kanban, although it’s definitely a project thing rather than for general todos), a straightforward wiki in another. Once I’m used to it, I may simply import the Evernote stuff and stick with just the one. Time will tell.

In the meantime, though, Scrivener – wow. Just wow. And thanks.

(UPDATE, following a bit of further reflection. I might have been able to do this without Scrivener. But I probably wouldn’t have been able to do anything else. Whereas instead I’ve managed to keep other work running alongside – admittedly with long hours, but Scrivener has really helped me keep focus even in the wee hours. Now that’s the real miracle…)