Do it Now Principle

I’ve got a spot in my house, on top of my dryer, to be exact, where I drop items that need to go out into the garage. Toys for donation, canned goods, boxes of cereal, school items, reusable grocery bags that need to go back into the car….etc. My plan is, that whenever the pile gets big enough, or whenever I am already going out, I will take these items with me and put them in their proper homes.

Can you guess what happens?

The pile grows and seldom gets distributed when “I am already going out.” The dryer becomes the new “home” for miscellaneous items. I don’t finish what I start and end up creating a new home for these random items that isn’t really a home at all.

Enter the Do it Now Principle that I learned from Flylady. Whenever I am tempted to put something on top of the dryer, I think, Do it Now! It’ll take me 30 seconds to open the door and toss the grocery bags back in the car. How hard is that? I spend more time thinking about it than actually doing it.

If you are like me, and I suspect you are, you have writing projects that have been stacking up. Their new “home” has become your computer files, when their true home should be in a magazine, or a book. Trouble is, each project needs a little bit more focus to get it back on track and publishable. For various reasons, you decided it was easier to walk away than tackle it.

Well, this month is the month. Anti-Procrastination month. Consider this challenge the NaNoWriMo of loose ends. We’re making a concentrated effort to do more work than we would normally do in a month. Kitty and Stephanie have already listed their projects. Looks like they will be working hard. Off you go, girls!

For me, instead of going wide, I’m going deep. In addition to my currently scheduled project, I’m going after the novel I’ve put off for the longest. The book that my son has been bugging me to work on. I left it at the first-draft-horrible stage. But I’m a better writer now, so I’m ready to give it another go. To kick start this WIP, I’ll be working through Margie Lawson’s Deep EDITS lectures. The classes normally take two weeks and I’m giving myself the month of May.

How about you? May 1st is our start date. Feel free to add your progress to our comments in the coming weeks. Let’s encourage one another to work a little harder this month and knock out those projects we keep putting off.