The Start of Cleansing

Photo by brokenarts in stock.xchng

So last week I shared how I was skipping the whole goal setting thing that I normally do every New Year. I went right to what I am referring to as a cleansing.

The junk drawer of my mind was just too cluttered and disorganized. I needed to get my bearings right if I ever hoped to actually accomplish something this year.

So what I had to do was pull from all the places that have to do with writing. I needed to bring it all together and figure out what I was going to keep and what was going to go.

Your areas might look different than mine. But perhaps by sharing my experience, it will help you to think of places that you need to draw from.

I started with the post-it notes all over my computer. These are the virtual ones pinned to my screen.

They consisted of writing websites to check out, paid freelance work to look into and potential submissions. My goal was to delete every single virtual post-it note so that I could actually see the background picture I had chosen for my laptop.

This meant making decisions on the spot. Is this really the type of freelance work I would be interested in? If not, the note was deleted. If it was something I wanted to keep, that information was transferred into a running list on a Word document.

Some of the websites I looked at provided valuable information that I could use later on, such as the article I found on formatting a manuscript for Kindle/Nook. Those were immediately printed.

Another area that I went through was the websites I had bookmarked. Most of them got deleted because they really didn’t have any value, but those that had some worth were included in my list.

I also had a variety of notes in “Evernote.” You might have handwritten notes, information in your smartphone or another electronic device. The idea is to pull from all of these different places so you can get that junk drawer in your mind organized.

In the end, my Word document had a list broken down into the following categories:

EBook Information
Submissions
Freelance Work
Writing Helps

I saved the document on my computer but I also printed it off and placed it into a page protector. It was then filed in my “Writing Projects” binder.

The reason for doing this is so I can open up my binder and the first thing I see is that list of information and where to find it. Already the junk drawer in my mind began to make more sense. I knew things would be easier to locate.

Beyond that, my binder is also filled with some of the articles that I printed off. I made sure to organize those into categories as well.

So this was the start of my cleansing. And to be honest, it was the easiest part. Next week I will share the time-consuming task of going through all of the writing projects I had actually started.

Let me know if you decide to start cleansing the junk drawer of your mind and what you discover along the way.

© 2012, Stephanie Romero

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