Drat! Distracted again!

I sat down a couple of days ago to start the research for my next assignment. Within seconds I had wandered off down a rabbit hole happily to myself. A useful rabbit hole, but still not quite the rabbit hole I should have been in.

Firstly I wanted to manage my PDF references in a better way. Much Googling led me to what I thought was referencing nirvana Docear but sadly it seems I am too late to the party and it's no longer updated. After some cursing I settled on Zotero and spent several happy hours watching youTube videos learning how to use it. Also how to use Zotfile to pull annotations from PDF files and Zotero Connector to magic PDFs found in searches in to my Zotero folder. For a few minutes I managed to wander in to the correct rabbit hole and actually search for some relevant papers so I could use my new toy. Success! Papers found, magicked in to database then annotations grabbed by annother form of wizardry. Happiness.

Time to start doing some propper work on the assignment?

Noooooooooo.

Now I've decided I need a better way to organise my writing. I've used mind mapping tools in the past, they are great but I dislike having to faff about to see the whole picture of my assignment. Off to google and youTube to see what's about. Several hours later I found Scrivener designed for authors this lets you pop in sections for each element of your book, make notes, write content, and store research. It also lets me see where I am, where I've been (or not) and where I'm going.

I've popped all the assignment information in and planned out the structure of the piece. Now all I need to do is stay focussed enough to gather the information I need to write each section. The advantage of Scrivener is that I can hop between sections as ideas occur helping me to keep everything a bit more organised.

Hopefully this approach will enable me to turn my scrambled thinking in to a linear assignment that won't make the eyeballs bleed of the poor person who has to mark it.