How to Stay Organized With Your Content Ideas By Using Google Spreadsheets
As a writer, you’re constantly thinking about new projects. So much so, in fact, that there may be a lot of projects you’re dropping accidentally.
How can you stay organized with your content ideas?
Google Spreadsheets, of course! Today, we’re going to take a look at a few methods you can use to stay organized with Google Spreadsheets.
Track Your Word Counts on Individual Projects
How many words have you written? If you’re anything like most writers, you probably have specific word count goals. Stephen King once said that you only need to write 500 words a day — eventually, you’ll have a whole novel.
You can use SUM, SUMIF, or SUMIFS to track the word count of your projects. SUMIF is a particularly useful function — with a Google Sheet SUMIF you can add together only the word count of a specific project, not all of them.
In the above example, we used SUMIFS to add together our submitted words only. But we could also add together our Forbes work specifically — or all the work that we had done in November.
And if we were working on a novel rather than discrete articles, we could continuously update our word counts and track a “word goal” instead.
Prioritize Your Projects With Filters and Tables
By building a new filter view (Data > Add Filter), we’ve created the following:
Now we can easily sort by Due date, by Publication, or by Submitted, so we know exactly what we need to work on next.
Filters are very useful. In the above example, we only have six articles to track. But what if we had hundreds? What if they were all in varying stages of submission? In the above filter view, we can also filter out specific publications, submissions, word counts, or due dates, so we’re only ever focusing on what we need to focus on.
Sort Your Sheet Using the Sort Function
Of course, there’s also a simpler answer if you just want to sort things once. You can just use the Data > Sort function.
Above, we’ve added a priority listing and we’re sorting by the appropriate column. This will do the same thing as a table, but we’ll need to resort each time based on what we’re sorting by (whether it’s the publication, due date, priority, or something else).
Check Items Off Your List
A frequently under-used function of Google Sheets is the “checkbox” function.
In our Google Doc, we can also use the checkbox function to track whether we’ve completed something or not. We can also create a content checklist for more complex items of content — such as content that has to be outlined, written, and then edited.
Use Tags to Sort through Different Types of Content
In WordPress, we frequently use tags. Google Sheets doesn’t have a “tagging” mechanism, but you can create one like so:
Use a cell to include tags for your content and then simply CTRL+F (Find) to find the item you’re looking for. This makes it far easier to find pieces of your writing that fall under specific categories.
There are ways to get around this (with the LOOKUP, HLOOKUP, and VLOOKUP features), but though Google Sheets can be used as a database-lite system, it’s best used as a spreadsheet.
Store an Archive of Your Published Work
What happens when you’ve actually published something? Make sure you’ve archived it for your portfolio.
The HYPERLINK function lets you easily hyperlink to content on the web. Not only could you link to your published content here, but you could also link to things like unfinished WordPress or Medium drafts — things that you’re still working on and want the ability to access quickly.
Create a Sheet for Agent Submissions
In addition to all the above, you might want to create a sheet for submissions. For instance, what if that article doesn’t get into Forbes? Well, it’s time to submit it to Entrepreneur — but you’ll need to track where you’ve submitted an article to and when you’ve submitted it.
Likewise, Google Spreadsheets are a particularly great way to track agent submissions. Track what you submitted, where you submitted it, and when you submitted it. It’ll be an easy way to tell when you should start submitting elsewhere — and, at a glance, you’ll be able to see who you’re still waiting to hear from.
Time to Start Writing…!
There are a lot of ways to stay organized with Google Sheets, from content ideas to project management. Today, we discussed a few major ways you can improve your content spreadsheets.
Using the SUM, SUMIF, and SUMIFS functions to track progress.
Prioritizing and tracking projects with filters.
Sorting your sheet using the sort feature.
Checking items off your list with checkboxes.
That being said, there’s always the potential to over-organize. If you find yourself organizing your Google Sheet because you don’t want to start writing, well. It might just be time to put away the spreadsheet and open up the Google Doc.