Writing is a business, and increased productivity is as imperative to a writer as it is to any other professional. Aside from writing faster, there are other ways you can pump up your output, and keep more free time to yourself (or just take on additional projects).

1. Mobile Writing Tools

Depending on your lifestyle, you might get some good use out of writing tools you can take on the road with you. This can be simple, such as a (paper) notebook, BlackBerry, or a ‘hipster PDA keychain‘ (pictured above).

The benefits of a tool like a BlackBerry is the fact that you can check your Google Reader on it and use it to keep on top of the latest news and articles. Of course that’s aside from the benefit of being able to write down notes and even edit articles on the road.

2. Increase focus, improve your writing

I came across a neat little program called JDarkRoom. It helps for people who are easily distracted and do better when they just type without having to deal with any pop-ups or email notifications. JDarkRoom makes your screen completely black, and allows you to focus just on your writing without the temptation of checking your email obsessively.

3. Simple Accounting Tools

I recently signed up for BillingBoss, which is a fantastic tool if you routinely send out invoices. You can keep track of your income, outstanding invoices and paid invoices.

You also need to keep track of your spending. Writing related courses, office supplies, or even literature are tax deductible. Instead of dealing with an avalanche of receipts at the end of the year, just open up a separate bank account, and get a separate credit card, for your business expenses. Have financial institutions actually do some work for you by doing your bookkeeping for free. As long as you separate your finances completely, you’ll have painless tax filing, and you will know how much you are actually making.

Seems easy enough right? Well, I had not actually fully mastered this skill yet. It is my new year’s resolution though, so today I went out and opened a new account. For six years I successfully managed my business without strictly separate accounts, but tax time was never a happy time when it comes to making sense of my deductions (I did always obsessively keep track of earnings, so that’s never a problem).

4. Stay posted on Writing Markets

There are tens of thousands of writing markets you can sell your work to around the world. Knowing where to submit your articles, or other writing, if a first step to your next paycheck. Although the Writer’s Market is a fantastic resource (and the online version takes up no real shelf space), there are great free resources that supplement a Writer’s Market subscription as well. One of these is Funds for Writers

What is your favorite writing tool? There are endless things that can be put to good use by writers, and this overview is just a bare-bones beginning to the tools any writer cannot do without, but which has really fueled your productivity?

Sometimes keeping things simple is the easiest way to ensure you don’t miss your appointments or lose all your data to a technical screw-up. The most basic way to keep a calendar would still be the good-old-fashioned pen and paper approach. This comes at a price though: not just the minor cost of purchasing a new calendar each year, but mostly the cost to your back from carrying it around every day.

A more back-friendly option is a digital calendar, and virtually any computer, phone or PDA you buy comes with such a device built in. The problem is that you need to either decide which of these devices to use as your calendar, or find ways to sync the same calendar onto different gadgets.

Keeping an online calendar

If you keep a copy of your calendar online, the obvious benefit is that you can access it from any computer, anywhere in the world. For those who commute to different offices or locations for work, or have off-site meetings and are generally not always carrying their laptops with them, this is a nice back-up option.

Similarly, if you sometimes find yourself without your laptop but need to add a quick appointment to your calendar, online storage is an easy solution. One simple but versatile system is Google Calendar. However, when keeping track of your daily appointments through different calendars, how do we get them to sync up with each other so you are not referencing three different sources all the time?

Syncing Google Calendar with iCal

It’s extremely easy to sync your google calendar with iCal (for Mac users), but it is only a one-way sync from google calendar, to iCal (not the other way around).

The only way this is useful is if you want to use Google Calendar to simply add appointments to your iCal, and not actually use it to reference all your calendar data. If you would like a mirror of your iCal information to be available in Google Calendar, then you need a two-way sync.

Two-Way Sync with GCalDaemon

If you are the experimental type, then the command line, cross-platform, beta-release application called GCalDaemon will get your blood flowing. Like any good open source application, the secret to setting it up lies in being comfortable editing the text configuration file. Lifehacker has a great description of this trick here.

Keep in mind GCalDaemon is compatible with both Mac and Windows, and can sync your calendars across multiple applications such as: Lightning, iCal or Rainlendar

Two-Way sync with Spanning Sync

Easier for the non-programmer than GCalDaemon is Spanning Sync. Spanning Sync does charge a subscription (or one time purchase) fee, but if you refer a friend you receive $5, and your friend receives a $5 discount. This can add up to a free subscription, or even some spare cash. There is a free 15 day trial version of the program, and you can subscribe for $25 per year, or pay $65 once for lifetime use.

Two-way sync with BusySync

Cheaper than Spanning Sync, BusySync offers two-way synchronization between Google Calendars and your iCal, as well as calendar sharing through a LAN connection (think: sharing your calendar with your assistant/secretary or between family or coworkers). It comes with a $25 price tag, and has a free 30 day trial.

Syncing your calendar to a mobile device

If you want to sync your Google Calendar to your mobile phone or PDA, then GooSync is your program. The supported devices are nicely listed, and pictured, here. Not surprisingly, the iPhone is among the supported cell phones for GooSync. There is a free version of the program, as well as a paid version to get more features, like the ability to sync your task/to-do lists.

To choose which option suits your needs best, consider whether you are using a Mac or a PC, and whether this means you are already automatically syncing your calendars with some device or another: some phone software allows you to sync information kept in outlook, while iCal can sync with any iPod you may already carry with you anyways. When it comes to inputting extra information, the iPod sync is not very useful, it only serves as a reference of what is already added to your iCal.

Ultimately, you would likely benefit from a Google Calendar to computer sync, as well as a sync between your computer and mobile device (cell phone or PDA). If you use your computer as a ‘master file’ of all your appointments and day to day activities, and sync these to both Google Calendar and your mobile gadget, then you can be sure you will always carry the most recent copy of your calendar with you, no matter where you are!