Are you managing your writing workload?

When you're working on writing projects, you'll find your progress is dependent on others as much as yourself. You need to set up times to talk to knowledge owners, move along the review and feedback process, and achieve final sign-off from all the parties involved. If you're working on several documents at once, remembering who needs to do what when gets even harder.

Putting your work in progress down in writing and keeping it updated makes good management sense - especially if you need to report on your progress at regular intervals.

I find a simple spreadsheet works wonders. Here's an example work in progress spreadsheet that I have written using GoogleDocs. I like GoogleDocs because:

• it's free and everyone can access it
  
• it's simple and easy to use
• it's on the web so you can share your document with anyone, anywhere
• it has features that let you limit who can see and update the document
• you can easily produce reports in .pdf format that can then be printed off and distributed at meetings