4. Use templates (empty documents with preformatted margins, colors, font faces and sizes) to increase your efficiency and productivity.

5. Use selective emphasis: Headings, subheads, italics, pull quotes, and different font sizes are all good ways to organize sections, break up text and emphasize important points. Be sure not to overdo it, however, or your document will be *more* difficult to read.

6. Keep paragraphs short - they should only contain one main idea. If you are starting a new idea, begin a new paragraph.

7. Use numbered, lettered, or bulleted lists to help your reader follow your thinking.

8. Use spaces between paragraphs, rather than indenting. It simply looks neater. Use single spacing for your text and double spacing between paragraphs.

9. Number your pages. Even in early drafts, this will keep you and your co-authors organized. When document is finalized, your readers will appreciate being able to turn to a certain page number to find what they are looking for.

What shows up once this is done looks like a simplified version of Microsoft Word. No clutter and no unnecessary features, though, only basics such as different fonts/boldface/italics and so on. A feature not found in Word is calendar. On left side of display you see days of month, with today marked in bold. As you type, built-in spellchecker checks your spelling.

The genius of TJ shows up when you start it next day. You start on a new, blank page - you can still access what you wrote yesterday, but it is in read-only mode (you can edit if you wish).

To me, this allows for a much more natural writing process - it flows, since I only glance through yesterday's entry before I start writing. In addition to journal-feature, you have a notebook which stays static. I use this for noting down things I must research, ideas on situations and such.

To give you an impression of how different people use TJ, I have taken liberty of copying some testimonials from its webpage:

"I'm an independent programmer, and I've used The Journal for almost three years now to keep up with my projects on a day-by-day basis. My clients are consistently amazed when I can quickly tell them exact date we made a particular decision or software change, and all factors we were considering at time. The Journal has greatly increased my professional effectiveness and is second-to-none!" --Bill D. Pirkle

"I am a note-taker by profession (University teacher and literary critic) as well as compulsion, and routinely use several free-form databases in order to keep track of references, quotations, and (when they come) ideas. These programs are very useful for their purpose, but do not encourage one to enter random thoughts or log personal and domestic events on a daily basis. The Journal enables one to do just that, and you are to be congratulated for having made program so straightforward, transparent, and at same time elegant in its operation. It is kind of program that nobody knows they need until they've tried it, whereupon it becomes indispensable." --David Lucking

As you can see, TJ can be used in various ways. The fact that programmer, David Michael, has added easy to use backup-features, a thesaurus and extensive printing-options makes this a true winner.

You can download a 45 days trial of Journal at http://www.davidrm.com hejournal/ . I am certain that you will become just as addicted to it as I am, and that you will be happy to fork over $40 once trial is over.