Hi Marla and the team,

I had a  strange thing happen today. It’s Wednesday, which is anti-procrastination day, and I decided to make a list of everything I had to do today. I didn’t want to sit at my computer yet, so I grabbed my writing ideas notebook instead and flipped to a blank page.

I’ve built a habit that when I’m using that notebook, I write “wagon wheels”–you might know them as “spider webs,” “word webs,” or some other name. The basic idea is to write a topic in the middle of the page and then branch out into connected thoughts and from those to their points or ideas. School teachers say, “use each spoke as a paragraph topic, and write one spoke’s paragraph at a time.” I love working this way; it’s more messy, but makes more sense when I’m writing because I can connect things easier.

So when I sat down with that notebook I started making a wagon wheel with “Day Plan” in the middle. Before I’d even started to think about it I had a half-dozen topic spokes, with names like “laundry” and “dishes” and “bathroom” and “bills.” When my 15 minutes were up, I had filled the page!

I wondered for a minute about where to start, and looked at all the items around the edge of the page. So much to do! And as I read them, just in the order they went around, I got that SHE in Crisis feeling. Just from reading! And I realized, maybe that’s what’s going on with SHEs that the Born Organized folks don’t see. We go around the wagon wheel instead of finishing one spoke at a time.

So today I’m going to try doing one spoke at a time instead, and see what happens. It won’t work entirely; I can do other things while the laundry is in the dryer, and I won’t be eating all my meals at once either. But I bet if I focus on the dishes spoke, I can get it done before the washer stops, and the bills should only take an hour (because of hold times on phone calls, which is usually about one hotspot long per call 😉 ). Who knows? Maybe it will help.

Liz in WI