Organize Your Writing Research in Google Docs
Tame the chaos of your research — right inside your draft.
Any writer knows: it’s hard to keep your research organized.
I’m a content marketer and journalist (plus I have my own writing on Substack and Medium). With almost everything I write, I have a ton of background info: articles I’ve found on the topic, interviews I’ve conducted, YouTube videos, whitepapers, etc.
And all of my drafting is done in Google Docs, because it is the easiest way to share/collaborate with clients.
I used to drop links all over my Google Docs as I’d find them which created… a mess. I could put them in a more structured format like Airtable or Notion, but I wanted everything in my GDoc, rather than linking to an external site.
Finally, I uncovered a way to keep my research nicely organized using Google’s Building Blocks feature. I now have a Building Block as part of the template I use for all writing.
The end result looks like this, which I keep at the bottom of my GDoc. Plus, I format the text with Headers, so I can access my research easily from the Outline menu.
I also format the descriptions using Headers, so I can easily navigate to my research in the Outline of the GDoc (on the left portion…
