.TXT File: The Solopreneur's Digital Swiss Army Knife
As a solopreneur, efficiency and keeping costs down are two of my primary concerns
That’s why I’ve written about topics such as using your email platform as a CRM and making productive strides in your business during ad breaks in the TV shows and movies that you stream.
For solopreneurs, and especially first-time business owners, I’m a big believer in starting with the smallest, simplest tech stack possible, and then adding more complexity (more solutions) only when absolutely necessary.
So, as we approach the new year — a time when companies are rethinking their priorities and processes — I'm excited to talk about a simple yet powerful tool that I use every day.
Let’s celebrate the humble .TXT file 🎉
.TXT files have been my digital companion throughout my entire career. Even before graduating high school in the late 1990s, I was familiar with them as the format for “Read Me” files that accompanied software on floppy disks and CD-ROMs. Starting in the mid-2000s, I used .TXT files to dissect and write HTML code for web pages.
When I founded this company last year, .TXT files were among the first files I created for it. I have a file that serves as my brand style guide, containing my brand colors and associated HEX codes along with my brand font names. I also have a master/all-purpose .TXT file that I’ll talk about below.
Some underrated strengths of .TXT files are:
When you paste text into them, and then copy/paste it to another app, the formatting is removed. One use case where I find this helpful is reusing text from a sent email, when I don’t want the recipient of a new email I’m working on to see that I reused part of it from a prior email. (If you don’t remove formatting and simply copy/paste from a sent email to a new email, your recipient may see a color change between the copied/pasted text portion(s) and any text you wrote that was unique to your new email. This creates an automated look that could make your lead think that you’re less professional than you are.)
Capital letters are the same width as lowercase letters. I use this in practice with a client where a title for their podcast episode needs to be in all caps for the episode thumbnail image; whereas the same title can be in initial caps in other places. When I write the episode title in two lines in my .TXT file — one instance of all caps followed by in initial caps on the next line down — I can see that I’m using the exact same words in both, confirming that the title will be the same (correct) in every place where I paste it from the file.
Even with tons of words/characters added to them, they remain extremely small-size files. For example, my “master” .TXT file, which has 200+ lines on it, is only 13 KB. For a file I’m constantly updating and making longer over time, it’s having virtually zero impact on my computer hard drive space.
Here’s how I use my business master .TXT file — and apps/outside use cases it eliminates
Storing business entity and account login info. This eliminates: dependency on password managers, which I worry might be hacked.
End-of-social media post “follow me” and call-to-action link text. Eliminates: browser bookmarks of past posts to copy/paste from and/or Google Docs or similar files to store these text fragments.
Content for recurring events; in my case, for weekly LinkedIn-based events that I host on Zoom. Eliminates: needing to store this same info in one, or multiple, Google Doc(s) or Word doc(s).
As I’ve made it a priority to shoot and post direct-to-camera marketing tip videos every few weeks, I use a section of my .TXT file for “video post topics” where I list topics “shot and in the editing hopper,” followed by “need to shoot” topics that I list in this place as I think of new topics to cover. I also list reminders here for editing, such as the possibility of needing to reduce background noise by a certain percentage. Eliminates: A Google or Word doc to store the same content or (worse) needing to look up emails I sent myself when I thought of each video topic.
Punch list of topics for each new e-newsletter I create. Eliminates: storing and saving this same content in separate Google or Word docs for each issue.
Notes from virtual networking events as well as one-on-one calls with leads and other contacts. This section, toward the bottom of my master .TXT file, is temporary; I keep my notes here until I have a chance to massage/shorten them (including addressing any action items I can quickly knock out) and then I email them to myself. Once this is done, I delete the per-call (or per-event) text from the .TXT file. Eliminates: the need for a standalone CRM solution (I can simply look up my call notes later in my business Gmail account).
Client action items within a block of time. While on my client work spreadsheet I note the marketing channel and high-level description of work done during a block of time — in other words, things for my invoice — in this section of my .TXT file I’m workshopping (brainstorming, writing, and editing) the content that will go into my final client output. Eliminates: Google or Word docs; in some cases, image files as well, such as from Canva.
Spell checker: incorrectly spelled words are underlined in red. Many other apps also have this function, of course, but when I’m already doing #7 above, I like that my .TXT file is ready to help me with this. Eliminates: checking a word spelling in a new browser tab or inside of a Google or Word doc.
My challenge to you:
Whether you’re a new, first-time business owner or have 20+ years of experience running your own business(es), check the use cases above with what you’re doing — and how many different apps you use to make it all happen. I’m willing to bet that at least some of your content production and other business development needs can be met by incorporating a few .TXT files — or maybe even just one — into your workflow. If this evaluation results in lower costs from cancelling one or more redundant software subscriptions, all the better for your bottom line!
