14 ways to use a tablet for maximum productivity, specifically for the writers’ workflow.

The tablet revolution may have begun in 3200 BC, with the Mesopotamians using reed styluses on clay tablets to write their morning pages. It’s only fitting that it returns in full force and glory in the 21st century. 

I haven’t used a laptop in over five years, as a writing device or for other work. I have to get colleagues and family to send files to my tablet so I can open their files in my apps and assimilate the material from a tablet workview, whether it is work material, kid’s rapidly-digitalising homework and textbooks, or to look over husband’s presentations for fine tuning.

I researched tablet use for productivity for all those years, slowly amassing tips and tricks, from both study and practice, to turn a tablet into my primary (and only) device, rather than an auxiliary or entertainment piece. As I did this, I also wanted to use only the tablet for writing as well. There’s unending tutorials for the iPad for students and professionals on the go and the many different ways they can use their devices, but very little on the use of a tablet for the writing workflow, particularly from the point of view of a writer focusing on creative writing in short and long form, and associated tasks. 

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Turns out, not only is it possible, but also better, smoother and more satisfying than other devices at times!

Writing workflow with tablets

Years ago, we all went into work, where we had our desktops on our actual desk tops, and work lived on that desktop. Work did not travel with you. There was no work-from-home. Even at home, you had a static setup, especially students, and work had to be consciously, mindfully, transferred to whichever device you were to access at that time and location, much like figuring out which schoolbooks to leave in your locker and which to carry home. 

And while a day job can live on the desktop, for writers, ideas do not want to be confined to time and space. My work was the creative kind, and I still felt chained about when ideas would strike me, reduced to the constraint of where I could work. The rudimentary way was to write them down and go back and process them in my desktop.

Even the cloud wasn’t a big help – it was between two stationary devices and areas, and much was lost in translation in this setup. Though experts swear by having a dedicated space for work to induce creativity and to improve productivity, I never found it fully applicable to me as a creative professional, or me as writer, needing to write on the go because of day job, family, chores, or because I was getting ideas in the middle of the alpha state (in the middle of sleep and wake), or on a treadmill, or right when I would walk away from my laptop and had no easy and foolproof way to capture these ideas – in a way I could further process them. I couldn’t reconcile with compartmentalising my creative brain like this. I needed a device to move with me wherever I was going. 

“We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don’t.”
~ Julia Cameron

Even though it has earned it comprehensively, the tablet has yet not fully won the device wars as the device of choice for ‘working on the go’. Even though portability is a ‘big’ issue with other devices – other devices are heavy, chargers are heavy, you need a power source and a bunch of space to set up your device and begin work – turns out it is not as swift and seamless as it promises. The time and effort to start up a bulkier device is enough to forget what you wanted to write about in the first place – sometimes inspiration is that fleeting. For a writer, it is critical to be able to boot a device as fast as you can open a notebook, else suffer literal loss of data.

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After my son was born, was when I truly started appreciating the idea of using the tablet for creative writing, of being able to open a device very quickly, jot down everything on my mind, and stay inspired while doing other very mind-numbing and repetitive chores. I  was constantly tied down to a non-work space, but my brain was not off. I craved ease, convenience, portability, while not having to compromise on power, performance and the joy of putting down one word after another.

“Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite – getting something down.”
~ Julia Cameron

Hardware and accessories for writing on tablets

• A tablet
• A compatible stylus
• A wireless keyboard 
• A smartphone (ideally in the same ecosystem)

How to use your tablet for writing : 14 tips and tricks to optimise writers’ workflow and productivity

1. Tablet portability for writers on the move

It’s the first and the most obvious reason to be using this setup. You could be a full-timer or a side-hustler, in either and all cases, there is a clear need to access your device on an anywhere, anytime basis, where you can just lift a lid and begin. You could be at college, at work, at home, at the quintessential coffee shop, at the airport, in a bus, in a different room or city, by the beach, at a writing retreat – and you could access the exact interface which puts you in the mood, comfort zone, familiarity and frame of mind to begin creating right off the bat. 

2. Distraction-free

Tablets are notoriously infamous, misunderstood and dismissed as devices of entertainment and fluff consumption only. This could not be further from the truth. Your tablet comes with a no-distractions or focus mode (and other highly customisable modes), where you can avoid notifications, distracting apps can be disabled (these apps should anyway be limited to your phone and not make their sneaky way into your writing tablet). All you need to do after this is disable your Wi-Fi and enable silent mode. My tablet is always on silent, generally off Wi-Fi (preserving battery) – I turn it on only to save work on the cloud, to sync between devices and for research. There are numerous apps to clean up your homescreen, many that give you the most minimal white screen / blank page, removing even distractions like choosing a font or background or any kind of formatting or layout, doing away with even the bad spelling and grammar squiggles – anything that leads to decision fatigue, forces you to simultaneously edit, and drains your writing time and battery – and you can focus on writing and on writing only. They are pure productivity beasts especially in the creative space.

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3. Stunning, smooth interfaces

Let’s face it, Windows is over. The ease of use and sheer beauty of the interfaces on either Apple or Android ecosystems are unmatched and getting better everyday. The degree of personalisation can turn your digital workspace into writer eye candy, so calming on the writer’s nerves that it feels like a play device rather than a device associated with a cubicle, and instantly the writer is relaxed and in the mood to create. Somehow, a tablet’s interface is more conducive to creativity. You may miss out on the joys of feature-rich, full version Microsoft Office (many features are pared down in app counterparts), but think of what percentage of your powerful, licensed word-processing application you actually use. It will make zero practical difference to a writer’s life. 

4. Writing apps for tablets 

There are plenty of these – basic or beast, free or charged, one-time purchase or subscriptions, but you don’t need a lot to write exclusively with a tablet. Some basic hardware, and some basic apps – a word-processing app, a browser, a reader, a PDF markup system will do. Everything over and above is bells and whistles, completely customizable, and may involve a learning curve. I love a bare minimum look on my tablet and have very few apps, which are specific to writing and writing-adjacent activities. But a tablet also leaves ample room to go fancy and maximalist and eke out every bit of the beast from your device. I don’t even use Scrivener, Notion or any trending app, just the old, minimal, millennial ones which don’t need detailed tutorials, yet do the job and then some. 

If you have the mindspace, you SHOULD be experimenting with writing, reading, note-taking, planning and productivity apps and discover what works best.

Writing, though, only needs a few basic components, none of which have a massive impact on the processing speed. Our tool is essentially words. Words take up very little space in device memory –  they are small, they are light, they demand very little of your device, leaving you the flexibility to go basic, and hence inexpensive, with your hardware as well. 

5. Planning and tablet productivity tools

One of the first apps I click on when I lift my tablet case – taking a moment here to appreciate the fact that there is no real boot-up sequence thus no waste of precious moments and your tablet will open as fast as your mind can – is my planner and calendar. I don’t carry different physical items; and having these on my tablet allows me to go completely paperless and minimal while not having to compromise on a detailed interface. I use a mix of Google Calendar and a note-taking app with a basic planner PDF. This PDF markup app/note-taking app  transforms the tablet into a real paper diary, with the help of the star hardware – the stylus/digital pen/pencil. This one feature elevates the writing experience on tablets hundredfold and changes the game on using a tablet as a writer, also one of my chief reasons to switch to a tablet over a laptop for writing. Note-taking apps also act as my entire reservoir of references, research,  screenshots, scanned pages of books or magazines, any and all stray pieces of information that I want to record and refer to later. 

6. Tablet stylus for writers and handwriting recognition

Sometimes journaling is the first thing I do on the tablet after waking up – reach for a blank page and just start writing something, anything. Any writer worth her salt knows about the Artist’s Way (Julia Cameron) and morning pages. I like to do this even though mostly what I’m doing is ranting into my diary of a 13-year-old girl, and I love to handwrite, as Julia herself recommends. Somedays I prefer to do it on the keyboard depending on how my inner 13yo is feeling, and I believe there’s no restriction on how you input, as long as there’s output. For the sake of output, which is words on the page, you are allowed to break any rule. 

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
~ Pablo Picasso

There’s a reason why handwriting is recommended – it  slows you down, sorts out your thoughts, forces you to stay with the same idea to be able to explore it in depth. I do it with a stylus which basically mimics actual handwriting. One could argue that you can just use a paper and a pen – but wait!

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My journals are all recorded and backed up, I’ll never lose them. They are an ineradicable record, and it’s like I’m carrying all the old diaries of the last decade together and can pull up something that I wrote in the pandemic haze of 2020 if it suddenly pops to mind. In newer versions of this tech, even handwriting has been made searchable, so now you can search by word or phrase even if you had handwritten it and forgotten to type it up. 

Handwriting-to-text is a nifty tool for later when you may actually want to use those thoughts in a word processor. This beautiful piece of tech can turn handwriting into typed text for further processing, and is available on word-processing apps as an input mechanism as well as a feature on note-taking apps. You can have your handwriting stored either as original handwriting, and save these as PDFs for further perusal, or turn it into typed text for editing.

Writing on a glass screen takes a bit of getting used to, but after having done it for a while, I can’t write on regular paper. My pro tip – zoom in. 

“Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.”
~ Natalie Goldberg

7. Writing efficiency on tablets

It is in this most basic task of putting one word after another, where all the features and utilities of a tablet congregate to make writing a seamless, joyful endeavor. 

For regular laptop-style writing, you can add an external keyboard. For capturing ideas on the go, there are apps like Google Keep, Reminders, Evernote, Apple Notes and the like. For immersive writing, use the stylus. For when your mind is sprinting with ideas or lines or dialogue or you’re in alpha state and cannot physically write or type, there’s speech-to-text, dictation or transcription apps (which somehow are more sensitive on mobile devices than laptops. I’ve tried.) 

“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
~ Ray Bradbury

I use these features daily to write – speech-to-text, handwriting-to-text, and sometimes even prefer swipe-typing on the digital keyboard even though it halves screen real estate – because the word predictions are easier and quicker than actually typing out the full word. 

All this is geared towards one thing – max output in terms of number of words, and minimal self-censorship and pre-editing. It minimizes, even completely removes the drama or rituals associated with starting to write, essentially doing away with any perceived barriers and making it possible to start writing immediately.

8. Editing with digital writing tools

The writer’s bane – as all writing is essentially rewriting and editing, and for good reason. With a tablet, I can change perspective and use multiple input methods to get a 360-degree editing output. 

“It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.”
~ C.J. Cherryh

First, I reread the document in portrait, if I had typed it in landscape, for a fresh perspective. Cutting and pasting entire blocks of text is easier than even actual ctrl x (which you can also do here). Then, I transfer a PDF into a markup app and make scribbles, scratch stuff out, make red marks, or any color actually, handwrite notes to myself, exactly as I would do on paper. Then I go into tablet multitasking for writers, or side-by-side mode with my marked PDF on one side and Word/Docs on the other. and retype the changes, highlight passages, scratch more things out, change reading modes, backgrounds and fonts, and lather rinse repeat till I’m happy. The multitasking feature also saves me the cricks in the neck from looking down at printouts and then looking up to find my place again and again. Simple zoom in zoom out is easier on a touch screen. For yet another perspective on your draft, text-to-speech can read it back to you, saving you the need to read aloud (this is so much better if someone reads it out to you. If I read it aloud myself, there’s still a touch of bias of already knowing the content. A dispassionate AI voice reader catches flaws with even more accuracy than a human voice). Read your draft in print or reading layout, play with line spacing, change fonts, read in two columns, and make it look the closest to an actual print run. All these tweaks, used in unison, really push the editing process to its furthest boundaries. 

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9. Speech-to-text

Another star feature in my book – this involves speaking to a tablet or a phone, as it simultaneously transcribes your speech, almost like an old-timey secretary. Another version is to record your speech into a voice recorder app or a tablet dictation software for writers and have a transcription service / app turn it into text. The newest Galaxy devices have an unbeatable transcription app, extremely sensitive and 99% accurate. I have used it to transcribe nearly 90-minute meetings, with negligible errors. 

“It’s hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.”
~ Carl Sagan, Contact (1985)

I use this a lot when my mind is running faster than a pen or keyboard, or in the middle of an alpha state. I also like to talk into my journal some days, like talking to a friend, because while I should slow my thoughts down, some days I can’t rein it in and will lose thoughts and words if I don’t do fast enough. Most of these special features that need either touch sensitivity or accurate speech are already part of the inbuilt features of a tablet. If not, there are numerous apps that can be installed. 

Another way to optimize this is if you are a very fast reader and you want to take notes from craft books, but don’t want to spend the time copy-pasting or highlighting or handwriting, you can read out the sentences along with your own thoughts and synthesis of the text, which literally builds you your next blog post or social media post or reference list or list of quotes to use somewhere else – all while you’re reading. 

10. Sharing, publishing, collaborating

Writing collaboration tools for tablets are seamless yet compartmentalized as every medium has its own app, which sometimes have more features than their web counterparts. Some blogging platforms actually encourage the use of their apps, promising you a boost in discoverability. You can toggle between the web view and app view to get the best possible idea of how your uploaded piece will finally look. Collaborating on shared work, version control, tracking changes, online meetings are all as good as a laptop.

11. Transferability, mirroring and cloud

At night when I don’t feel like picking up a heavy device, and am draped over my bed with a mountain of pillows at my side like a spoilt housecat, but I still have something to jot down, something I remembered that can’t wait till I get to a suitable place, I pick up my phone which mirrors the entire writing setup on my tablet, and I can access any material from the point I left off. 

All apps sync over Wi-Fi, and file transfers between the two devices is like talking to your bestie – they just get you (given that you’re operating in the same ecosystem)

12. Rethink, reimagine

A tablet helps writers rethink the entire writing process – using a tablet for writing lets you weave in and out of the ways you want to channel your input and tailor your output. You will find that at different points, different ways to input makes it easier to be more prolific and productive. 

“I think it’s time to admit that our writing is guided by the technology we use as much as it is by our own subjectivity.”
~ Kenneth Goldsmith 

13. Writing on the go with tablets

The best thing for me? All of this is in one place and I don’t have to carry books, notebooks, papers, even pens. There’s nearly nothing else in my bag. All my research, references, articles, craft books, writing magazines, websites, submissions list, calendar, life and content planner, sticky notes, pens and markers and highlighters – are all in one place. And I have the flexibility to consume them as the device being a laptop, or a reading device, or learning device, or entertainment device. It is the headquarters of my writing life, with everything at my fingertips. That’s why using a tablet is just the most liberating experience as a writer – it is so freeing in terms of what your mood or circumstance is and how you can adapt to your environment so writing doesn’t suffer. There’s also unlimited accessibility without much effort or mindspace – I’ll never have lost papers or shelved books with notes on them which I never go back to…

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14. Tablet multitasking for writers

Play music, listen to craft podcasts, attend your writing webinars, do your online courses, listen to TED talks or slam poetry for on-the-go inspiration, audiobooks, morning meditation on meditation apps. Mindmap like Apple Freeform, draw and doodle, paint or mandala color, all on the go. Read craft books and consolidate every note ever. Get it to read your text out loud or even webpages of the many, many, many articles you have bookmarked to read later. The Galaxy tablets can also be used in actual desktop mode to mimic a laptop as closely as possible, and most tablets can be used as a second monitor along with your computer for massive screen real estate.

Verdict

I wrote this piece in multiple input manners – particularly in speech-to-text, because for me technology is too instinctive a topic for slow typing. Before I knew it, it was 3000+ words – resting my case about maxing output, with minimum time, effort and barriers. 

There are a few cons that I do encounter. The first is file management – which is a bit tedious on mobile devices, and needs a tweak on mindset to work with a different OS and file management interface. The desktop mode can make this look as close to Windows as possible, which is very helpful in this transition. 

Sometimes I forget what I was working on last, and this may be because of over-digitisation than tablet domination – when there are no physical elements like books or printouts to serve as tactile reminders, things can get lost in digital shelves. How do I keep a mental list of what files and apps I had open, or even which exact file did I have open in which app, or which book I had to get back to the next day – because apps tend to close or refresh, and I lose track because of the sheer number of tasks I’m carrying out on the tablet. I have homescreen sticky notes and deadline widgets and use Notes and Calendar obsessively to overcome this digital forgetfulness. 

The only other contender in this space is the reMarkable – an uber fancy writing tablet that mirrors the writing-on-paper experience most closely. However, I will not be giving up my tablet experience for the scratchy paper sound effect at that hefty a sum. As of today, this device is very limited and not enough value for the spend. While the pen is the star enhancer of the tablet, it is not the only functionality, not even the most important one. A black-and-white screen is a deal breaker – just using paper and scanning it up to a tablet sounds like a better idea. It simply does not have the width of functionality to oust a full-fledged device for now, which a tablet does.