I write a lot. Much of my writing stays as a draft. Generally, that’s great.

However, I want my output to become more outward facing, more consistently. Here’s my current approach.

First, the Devices and Software

Oh lord, there are devices. Not easy already.

  1. Pomera DM250
  2. Supernote Nomad
  3. Supernote Manta
  4. iA Writer (on various devices)
  5. Claude Cowork
  6. GitHub, Hugo, Vercel

Now, the Flow

Writing is not sacred for me, but it needs to be intentional. With all the other external and self-imposed demands on my time I can only commit to what is truly valuable. Since I was a kid, drafting is one of those things.

The second I look at a screen that is connected, my brain turns to mush and I multitask myself into oblivion. I’m also a gadget nerd, so for the past 5 years I’ve been exploring single-use devices. This is what is currently working for me.

Pomera DM250us

All the drafting gets done here. I’ve used all the devices for this in the past, from the typical laptop to some real esoteric pieces of work you’ll find on r/writerdeck. The Pomera is what works for me.

It is single use, the keyboard is good enough, and it is a purpose built word processor for the 21st century. Plain text, no distractions. While still not as limited as something like a Freewrite.

Supernote Nomad

Before it was the reMarkable 2, which replaced volumes of the classic Leuchtturm 1917 in my bullet journaling habit. I’m a committed journaler and haven’t looked back from the Nomad since it arrived in late 2023. If it broke tomorrow, it is something I would instantly replace with another. But it is generally user repairable, so, ideally I’d just fix it.

All of my handwritten notes wind up here. Those notes sometimes become words in the Pomera.

Supernote Manta

New to the family! I’m actually selling the reMarkable 2, despite its lovely keyboard folio.

Why? Another e-ink device?

I read and annotate a lot of books. I do most of my reading on the Kindle, but have been moving more and more to epubs and PDFs. The Manta screen size is perfect for marking up books. This has been a great way to engage with reading more actively than just highlighting sections. Additionally, as I get deeper into drafting fiction, it is so great to read and markup manuscripts without having an AI or spellcheck buzzing over my shoulder.

iA Writer

This is connected to Dropbox and syncs across all of my personal devices. That way, I can revise, edit, and write from anywhere. I was a Ulysses user for a long time, but found that the simple markdown-supported structure of iA Writer is a better fit for my workflow.

I’ll still use Grammarly for general spell check, but that’s a trivial round trip step that keeps editing separate from writing.

Publication

In the case of my digital presence, I recently moved this journal off of the bog standard Squarespace blog. Why? The friction to publish was just so dang high, so I wrote… and never went to print. Since I’ve been embracing AI for my work, I decided to bring it over and improve my personal life workflow too. Here’s what I did.

I worked with Claude Cowork to configure a GitHub repository that writes to a Hugo CMS, and publish the site through Vercel, and point it to a subdomain of my main site. I’m still working on a simple backend to access in case I’m away from a computer, but now it is as easy as a Cowork ask to publish a blog. It reads right from the Dropbox folder, loads in all of the relevant front matter to make the post and images render, and then I just do a quick push request via the terminal.

5 clicks and one sentence and the post goes from a working draft to a published post. This, I think, is the publication unlock for me going forward.

Now I can just get to writing.