I’m so glad you found tools that work for you. Offline capability is so important, but over here, at least, fewer and fewer tools have that option.

Yup, so often, simple is better!

I ditched my computer’s calendar. I tried it, but honestly it was more work then help. I went back to my old paper planner which shows me a month at a time and my steno pad To Do List and Grocery List. These three things work for me and have for years. Saves me from signing in and out and waiting for the computer to boot up.

In my computer I have a Manuscript Sample page already set up for short story writing. I just go into it, type in the story title and go. Everything else I need is there: name, address, e-mail, and setup (byline, pages numbers, headers, etc.) to start writing.

I also have a file for stories, articles, etc. I have the title, submission date, where I sent it, and the results. Just four columns in a Word file. Its simple and works.

Why change things if they aren’t broken.

I started with Asana, but it was buggy and glitchy and didn’t do precisely what I wanted it to do, and it was far too big and far too expensive for the benefit I did get out of it.

ClickUp was next. It did everything Asana did for half the price. But it didn’t work offline and their tech leave people complaining for years before anything is done. I cancelled my subscription a couple of months ago, but instead of continuing until the anniversary of my subscription, it went straight away. So I lost 2 months’ worth of what I’d paid for. How to make sure I NEVER go back to your product again, eh?

I tried ToDoist and a couple of others, but they wanted a monthly subscription in order to synchronise over all of my devices.

But then I found TickTick, and that does everything I want it to – EVERYTHING – and all for one reasonable annual fee. I’d love it even more if it came with a lifetime fee too. TickTick saves me a lot of time as that’s where I do my actual day to day planning once I have my deadlines on the calendar (in red). I can play around with it, really quickly, and once it’s doing something I think will work, I leave it and transfer it to the diary. It is available offline, but I still like my diary and it’s quicker to show Ian something on a wall calendar or in my diary than it is to open up an app. But it has a Pomodoro on it too, whereas all the others seem to require to you to pay for a Pomodoro add-on, on top of the sub you’re already paying.

My writing software of choice is Scrivener. But I know now how to format it to suit the mediums I work in and I have templates set up for all of them. I can export it to Word or to OpenOffice, or directly to the printer, or to ebook, or to pdf. And it keeps all of my bible, all of my research materials and websites in one place. And it works offline. Offline is the biggest thing for me.