Scriviner: My Write or Die Software

Welcome back to another episode of Halftime Talks. My name is Rahim Rasul, and you’re listening to the podcast that recognizes that in the middle of your game of life, whether you’re by 10 or down by 20, we all need halftime talks to uplift us, inspire us and challenge us to bring that level of performance it’s gonna take to win the game back in the day when I was young and not a kid anymore for some days, I said, I wish I was a kid again, back in the day when I was young and not a kid anymore for some days. So welcome back to another episode of Halftime Talks. My name is Rahim, and if you know how we start these things off, it’s by centering with some appreciation.

Today, I want to appreciate freedom, simply put, freedom, the freedom to the freedom to pursue our interests, the freedom to discover our voice, the freedom to exercise our agency in the world. Freedom is this relative thing. As we look backwards to the past, we understand how much of a gift it is to truly express ourself, have our agency and direct the will and direction of our lives at one point in time, it was not a given at one point in time, it was not as rampant as it is today. So I appreciate it, and I appreciate the people who laid down their lives, who set the foundation for the freedom that I fully joyfully Express today.

Welcome back to another episode of halftime talks. If you know me, you know how we do this podcast. You know some episodes are a little bit different, and today’s episode is one of those different episodes. It’s almost an entire episode, dedicated to something that I fully, fully appreciate. And one of these things, this thing that can aid you, especially if you’re a writer, is Scrivener, and it’s not a review, it’s not a paid endorsement. It is me really just grandstanding. I’m just kidding. It’s not grandstanding, but it is going to things that actually accelerate and amplify my productivity as it comes to writing and organizing my thoughts.

So strapping your seat belts, prepare to take some notes. And hey, who knows, I think you might learn something you like. So here we go. You music. This episode is an ode to a piece of software that costs under $50 that has had an immeasurable effect on my life. Now this is not a sponsored podcast. This is just a sense of appreciation of something that can contribute so much to your process. If you’re listening to this, the likelihood of you wanting to make a substantive impact on your family, your friends, your community, the world, your region, or just people who think like you. We want to create.

We want to create either be a product, be it code, be it a software, be it writing a podcast video, how do we organize ourself within it? I first heard of Scrivener, and that’s s, c, r, I V, I N, E R, by virtue of Tim Ferriss when he was marketing and promoting his book, The Four Hour Chef. And in The Four Hour Chef, some of those videos, he was talking about a piece of software that allowed him to have a very macro, comprehensive view of the work he was working on without necessarily having 50, 6070, documents he had to keep track of at the same time.

It’s kind of hard to describe with words visually what it allows, but it’s like writing a book with a Finder window in each folder, each document, is all correlated on the side, so you can work for one chapter at a time. You can insert research, you can insert audio, you can insert images. And it allows you to keep track of what you. Worked on. It’s an amazing piece, especially if you have a big project, like if you’re writing a book, you can create a document within this project that has each chapter. This has been a lifesaver. I’ve shared this software with other people. Have recommended to a lot of other people who’ve bought it, utilize it.

The interesting part is, one of these individuals finished their book before I did. It’s a good piece, but my favorite, my favorite new, recent development that I’ve discovered with Scrivener is something that I’m tempted to possibly not share with you. Okay, you’ve convinced me one of the things that has accelerated my ability to craft, sculpt and mold the ideas in a more timely fashion has been Scriveners ability to fully capture an audio dictation somehow my MacBook Air, whatever software update it currently has, has the capacity with machine learning, speech recognition, whatever you have, to dictate audible content, and so I can plug in my earbuds from my iPhone and talk directly to the computer as I speak the sentence since John walked down the street, period, Chris saw John.

Period, new line, new paragraph. Once you can do things like that and you know how to speak to the computer from a dictation perspective, you can write in excess of 2000 to 4000 words a day, understand that that’s just a sketch, and you can have to go back in and see if the computer missed anything, but the accuracy is at least at 95% or higher. Why are we putting barriers up to create why are we letting the ideas that we have in our mind sit only there? Why are we safeguarding the questions? Why are we safeguarding the conversations only to exist within the domain of our mind?

Last year, one of the authors that I read had a book called Getting Things Done. Part of the challenge is that we keep so much stuff in our brain, we become overwhelmed. We jump between Evernote, notes, Microsoft Word. But where can we centralize it? Where can we have access to it? Because it’s not what you know, it’s what you do with what you know. And how do you give yourself a chance to do more with what you know? You have to put it in front of you. Have to document your experience. And I love Scrivener for its ability to allow me to document my experience.

Love it, and I just wanted to share that with y’all. While this may be a shorter episode, I think even if you Google it, even if you watch YouTube videos, if you’re a writer, if you just have long form content you’re working on, if you’re producing videos and you want to organize your thoughts and work on the arc, if you are a screenwriter and you’re doing all this stuff, give Scrivener a look. It’s one of those things that are within my list of affordable things underneath $100 and this is underneath 50, that can have an immeasurable effect on your life. So until next time, I’m definitely going to continue this series of affordable things that have massive impact, things that we take for granted, things that we look over, things that we don’t really realize could really make our lives better.

It’s giving life to the things that we thought were once important, but now that are abandoned. And as we bring that life into it, as we bring that focus into it, we’re here to extract the ultimate amount of value from the world so that we can individually flourish and flower. So therefore we can touch we can bring the spotlight of our illuminated self to the world. So until next time, my name is Rahim Rasul peace, our entire library is available on our website, halftimetalks.net as well as the iTunes podcast, live. Brewery. While you’re on there, do us a favor, SUBSCRIBE and leave a review. Not only would we love it, but it would also make our podcast more findable, discoverable for other people, like you, who can gain benefit from the podcast. So until next time, go out there in the second half of the game and play to win you.