As well as having caregiving responsibilities I’m a freelance writer, and today I unexpectedly got a message from an organization interested in the health and well-being of caregivers, asking me to write them an article specifying how employers can make the workplace much more user-friendly for employees with caregiving responsibilities (it’s Carers’ Week here, and everything caregiving-related is suddenly on-trend). I’ve been there, struggled with that and have experience to draw on, but what I’ve never done is actually write about it. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, and not having an easy and effective way of organizing my material had previously tipped the balance between using what I know, and not.
I decided to accept the challenge, and set up a project in Agenda for writing articles. I wrote down in an Agenda Note everything I could think of about my experience of being a carer while also holding down a full-time job, and my ideas on how some simple adjustments in the workplace could make the situation much more tolerable for caregivers in future.
Next step was to set up another Agenda Note as a place to write the article itself. With the prep already done in the first Note, it was quite easy. I copy/pasted it into Pages to check the word count (yes, I’m looking forward to seeing that facility turn up in Agenda in due course), and it was good to go.
I was so delighted at getting the article sent in so fast it took a little while for me to recognize the spin-offs. Instead of my previous haphazard way of producing on-spec articles I now have a file for brainstorming ideas, another for research and notes, a strategy, and an action template that effectively takes care of the organizing and leaves me free to just get on and write. Hopefully this will vastly improve my productivity and the quality of my work, and maybe bring me in some better money.
To anyone who does creative work of any kind and wants a top-quality app that will both organize and inspire them, I wholeheartedly recommend Agenda. A heartfelt “Thank you!” goes to everyone who’s worked on it ️