Does anyone else use Scrivener differently than they thought they would when they first bought it and what does your actual setup look like now
Asking because my current setup looks almost nothing like what I imagined when I was watching tutorial videos before purchasing.
Bought it two years ago expecting to use the corkboard constantly, keep detailed scene cards, use the label and status system to track everything, and generally have a deeply organized binder that made the structure of the novel visible at a glance.
Current reality is that I have a mostly flat binder with one folder per chapter, no scene cards with any real content in them, labels I assigned in month one and have not updated since, and a research folder I stopped adding to about eight months ago because I could never find things in it quickly enough to justify the interruption to a writing session.
What I actually use Scrivener for day to day is the distraction free writing mode and the compile function at the end, been doing the actual drafting sessions in something called Skrib Writing recently where the planning board and the draft live together without any maintenance overhead, and bringing finished scenes back into Scrivener for organization and compile has made both tools feel more useful than either one was when I was trying to do everything in one place.
Everything in between is infrastructure I built and mostly do not maintain.
Not complaining about the tool. It does what it does well. I just find it interesting how differently I use it versus how I expected to use it and I wonder if that is common or if most people actually use the full feature set in a way that stays functional across a long project.
What does your actual Scrivener setup look like after you have been using it for a while and which features turned out to matter versus which ones seemed important before you started.