Although it certainly can be used otherwise, a progress tracking system like the one Paul Silvia suggests in his book How to Write a Lot seems to work best for writing that can be open ended: by following a regular writing schedule, projects can regularly and reliably come to completion. What happens, however, if one is working under a deadline (be it self-imposed or not) and, therefore, needs to develop a writing schedule backwards from this due date?
...Paul Silvia
Paul J. Silvia
teaches psychology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
In
How to Write a Lot: A Practical
Guide to Productive Academic Writing, Silvia chiefly pleads
with his readers to set aside specific, regular blocks of time for
writing and to adhere steadfastly to this schedule ( 16–17). “The secret,” he says, “is the
regularity, not the number of days or the number of hours [allotted for
writing]” ( 13). Silvia argues that
observing such a regular writing schedule will allow an author to
produce better material more efficiently ( 1). “More efficiently” does not, of
course, necessarily indicate that all academics should
publish a large quantity of material; those whose interests lie
elsewhere can still use a regular writing schedule to produce the
quantity of literature that they wish. Thus, Silvia suggests that a more
accurate title for the volume would be How to Write More
Productively During the Normal Work Week with Less Anxiety and
Guilt, but he humorously recognizes that such a title may well have
inhibited book sales ( 130).
Zotero is a bibliographic and research management addin for the Firefox web browser. The latest test release, 2.0b3, succeeds Zotero 1.5b2.1 with some substantial improvements, particularly by increasing Zotero’s flexibility and usefulness for research collaboration among several, different Zotero users.
In addition to the resources on Zotero’s website, Tommy Keene has a good quickstart guide over at Nerdlets.org, and he plans to post a fuller review and guide for Zotero 2.0 fairly soon.
I recently found a thread on the Zotero forum that mentions the PDF XChange Viewer, which is supposed to allow users to markup PDF files.
Especially if you use Zotero, you may want to use PDF XChange as your default PDF browser plugin. After installing PDF XChange, you may still need to do the following:
Also, if you have the Adobe Acrobat plugin installed in Firefox:
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