On Twitter, @londonsquared asked for an update on my writing setup, which I’d last written about in 2016.
Honestly, very little has changed in the past three years. I still have the same computer, desk, mouse, keyboards and headphones. I print so little that today was the first time in years that we needed to buy a new toner cartridge.
My only real piece of new hardware is the iPad Pro. While I don’t love the squared edges — it feels thicker than the old ones — I find myself using the redesigned pencil all the time. On the whole, I like it a lot.
I’m hand-writing much less than I used to. Most of that is because I’ve been writing the Arlo Finch books, and it’s so many words that I just can’t keep up with paper and pen. But I also do #writesprints a lot, using Highland 2’s built-in Sprint feature.
I write absolutely everything in Highland 2. I’m the main beta tester.1
For other software, I’ve started using Apple Notes in place of Evernote, and switched back to OmniFocus and Mail.
Back in 2016, I wrote:
My mail setup is a mess. The right combination of rules would probably allow me to sort out the wheat from the chaff, but I haven’t invested the energy. Plus, getting it to work properly in iOS would be a big challenge. Increasingly, the iPhone is where I’m doing email triage.
If anything, it’s worse now. I set up a rule to shunt anything with the keyword “unsubscribe” to a special folder, but that’s just hiding the problem rather than addressing it.
On the whole, I’m honestly surprised I haven’t changed more things over the past three years. I’m generally an early adopter and experimenter. But until we start using goggles instead of screens, I suspect this is going to remain my basic setup.
- Version 2.5, coming soon, has some pretty amazing new features in it. ↩
