Self-help junkie

Keris Stainton continues her self-improvement quest...

I am quite an organised person. No, that's not right. I want and need to be organised, but somehow I never really manage it which means that I spend much of my time feeling overwhelmed and panicky and lurching from one emergency to another. Well not any more - er, mostly - since I discovered The Organized Writer.

Julie Hood, has created the DRAW method, a 20 minute daily practice to help you focus. DRAW stands for Declutter-Read-Assess-Write and works as follows:

Declutter (only 5 minutes)
Read (only 5 minutes)
Assess (30 seconds to 5 minutes)
Write (at least 5 minutes)

So you start by DECLUTTERING for five minutes. "Clear a space to work on your desk," says Julie. "Clean space will help your mind settle. Don't get overwhelmed here! When the buzzer goes off, stop. You will do more tomorrow. After a few days, your desk will be clean, and you can move onto another area (maybe your files or bookshelves)."

You then READ for five minutes. "Stay away from email," Julie says. "It is too easy to go over your five minute allotment." Don't I know it. Email is my biggest problem - more about that later.

Use the next few minutes to ASSESS what your most important project is for that day. Decide what you need to deal with and what can wait.

Finally, WRITE. I use this time to list everything else I need to do for the day.

Once I discovered DRAW I set my timer for five minutes and merrily decluttered my desk. Then I set it for another five and read blogs. My Bloglines aggregator tells me how many unread posts I have outstanding. This morning it said 70. This, of course, immediately causes me to panic because I think I've got loads of stuff to do, I can't be spending all day reading blogs, but quite a few of them are work-related blogs that only have to be scanned and, at the end of my five minutes, the little notifier said 4. Yay!

I then "assessed" that my Most Important Project was my novel so I opened the document (which is surprisingly hard for me to do - emotionally, I mean, not physically) and decided to spend just 5 minutes working on it. As it was, I got involved and actually got quite a lot done. Result.

Once I'd written my daily to do list, I then went to read my new emails. Email totally overwhelms me. I often don't even manage to read most of them for days on end or, if I do read them, I don't reply to them, which only serves to create a little 'reply to those emails!' niggle in the back of my mind and also potentially offend lovely people who are waiting for a reply. I have tried creating an "Action" folder, but found that emails just lingered in there instead of the in-box. I'm now trying to deal with email the way I do with snail mail - one touch. Read, reply, delete. It's difficult, but I think it will work out better in the long run. Of course, now I just have to deal with the backlog. Any ideas?

As for the DRAW method, I generally use it first thing in the morning and then again after lunch (with a different MIP) because otherwise I can easily spend all day floundering about on the internet feeling guilty and getting nothing done.

It's a simple idea, but it's surprisingly effective. Give it a go.

Keris co-edits Shiny Media’s fabulous women’s fiction blog, Trashionista and contributes to TV Scoop and The Bag Lady. If she's not strict with herself, she can lose whole days to Television Without Pity.

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