So you’ve found Pacemaker Planner– a free online writing tool designed to help writers, translators and editors organize their goals through personalized writing plans!
Create an account/Log in
To get started, head over to pacemaker.press and log in. If you don’t have an account, create one- it’s free to sign up and explore the basics!
Once you log in/sign up, the next page you’ll see will be your Dashboard- a central hub where you can see general details about your plans at a glance, and take additional actions.
Creating a Pacemaker Plan
Getting to your writing goal is a journey, and every journey needs a map! A Pacemaker Plan is exactly that- a map that shows you how to get to where you want to go- your writing goal- from where you are now. Through our tool’s various modifiers, you get to define the parameters for the route you’ll take.
To create a plan, simply click ‘Create a Plan’ from your dashboard. This option is also available in the left sidebar.
The Create a Plan page may look intimidating at first, but we’ll break it down. This page is the core Pacemaker Planning tool that contains all the modifiers you’ll use to define the parameters of your Pacemaker plan. If you think of it like a GPS- this would be the place where you select your destination, your current location and if you wanted to avoid toll roads, take the quickest route there or schedule your start time for a particular day of the week or time of day.
There are 7 Modifier categories that we use to help you create your route. These categories will appear collapsible on your screen so you can expand or collapse them if you wish. These categories may have an option preselected when you create a new plan but don’t worry, it’s all editable!
Plan Info
In this section, replace any automatically populated text with the name of your plan. Then select the particular activity you’ll be doing, and the content you’ll be producing.
Plan Description
This is a Premium feature which allows users to enter a description for their plan and gives them the option to make their plans private.
Public Plans: As a free user, all of your plans are open to anyone who has a direct link to your plan or anyone who knows your username. Public plans are also discoverable through community pages of the site. Community pages of the site show recently updated plans and recently completed plans to give users inspiration. Public plans can be used in challenges (since these are public events) and you can also configure them to be embedded on your personal website or blog.
Private Plans: Premium users are able to choose whether some or all of their plans are private so that they are not discoverable on any part of the site. Private plans cannot be used in challenges or be embedded on a personal blog.
Goals
It’s time to quantify your goals! Using the modifiers in the Goals category you can enter any existing work that was completed before the creation of your plan, or start from scratch. This means you can start from 0 if you’re just now beginning your project, or you can choose some other amount if you’re not quite starting from scratch.
After you set your starting point and target, choose the unit you’d like your goal and progress to be measured in. Using the dropdown menu, you’ll see that there are many options to choose from. For our example here, we’ll choose words.
Here you’ll also have the opportunity to select whether your goal is an overall goal or a daily target. When using daily targets, you work to achieve a particular fixed amount of work every day, e.g. 500 words per day. You can skip certain days but on days that you do work, your goal will be the same each day. Your plan will stay the same as you record progress so you will always be able to see how you’re doing in relation to your daily target. For an overall goal, you have a particular figure which represents your final word count, e.g. 80,000 words.
Once that’s done, choose your start date, and if you have a hard deadline, choose an end date. If you have some flexibility in your scheduling, you can remove the end date by clicking ‘No’ in the ‘Fixed deadline?’ field.
You’ll notice as you adjust these fields, the plan display will begin to change as it reflects your selections! (We cheated and skipped ahead to the Display modifier and selected a graph display to move forward.)
Strategy
OK, so you know where you are now, and where you want to go, but how are you going to get there? That’s what the Strategy modifier is all about!
The Pacemaker tool has 7 Strategy modifiers from which to choose: Steadily, Rising to the Challenge, Biting the Bullet, Mountain Hike, Valley, Oscillating and Random. You’ll find these, along with descriptions on how they affect your plan, right there in the Strategy box. Each of these will inform the pace/landscape of your schedule. We’ll look at other ways to further customize these options below.
Here’s an example of the plan we’re creating with all 7 modifiers. See how the work per day increases or decreases based on the modifier chosen?
Customizations
On a road trip from Point A to Point B, after you’ve planned your route, you may decide to do a bit of sightseeing. You may opt to linger a bit longer here or there, or decide to bypass some places altogether.
The Customizations panel in Pacemaker allows you to do something similar. Here you can choose to write more or less on some days, or skip some days altogether (say write more every Tuesday and skip Thursdays or skip whole weeks at a time). You can also reserve a few days at the end of your project for editing, revision etc. you know, just in case.
For our example, let’s do more on weekends and do less on Mondays. I’ll be at a conference for work during the week of 21st September, so let’s go ahead and skip that period because let’s face it, I simply won’t have the bandwidth to work on my goal that week!
Display
Choose how you’d like to see your plan displayed: Calendar, Graph or Table for those with free accounts, and Bar graphs as an additional option for Premium users. For the commitment-phobes, don’t worry, you can change the display as often as you’d like, you won’t be ‘locked in’ to one display indefinitely.
You can also select Sunday or Monday as your first day of the week (more relevant for the Calendar display), and also choose whether you want to see daily, weekly, monthly or yearly views of your schedule (particularly relevant for those with plans that span larger periods of time).
Progress
Here you’ll have the opportunity to select how you want to input your progress. You can choose to either record how far you’ve reached each day (your updated total word count), or you could record the exact quantity you completed each day. I suppose it just depends on how much math you feel like doing :).
For our plan, we’ll select the latter option for now.
Save your Plan!
Once you’ve adjusted all your modifiers, and are happy with the final product, don’t forget to save your plan by clicking the ‘Save’ button. And there you have it!
Plan duration for Free accounts
Free accounts on Pacemaker offer 2 plans of no more than 60 days each. If you do create a plan which exceeds this time parameter, you’ll see an error message like this one pop up. Simply reduce the duration of your progress to make it valid. You always have the option to upgrade to a premium account to remove this restriction and gain access to many more features!
We’ve tried to make plan creation as easy and intuitive as possible, but we’re always looking for opportunities to make it even more so. If you think of a way we can streamline the plan creation process further, we’d love to hear about it!
As always, thanks for using Pacemaker!