Get Everything Done

Something that I have remarked on often in my books is that when one puts one’s attention on a subject it begins to change. This phenomenon is actually at the root of the “Current Initiative” idea in Do It Tomorrow, where the idea is to give a particular subject a daily burst of attention. Projects and the like resemble houseplants. Ideally they should be watered every day. If you miss a day or so, it won’t matter too much, but anything more than that and they will begin to wither and die.

So I was interested to see that the second that I decided to get writing on my blog again I got an idea which had never occurred to me before.

What I’ve done in the past is collect ideas for articles in one place. I usually keep a list of possible titles on Evernote. Then when I am ready to write an article, I select an idea and start drafting it in Notepad. (I use Notepad because, unlike Word, it doesn’t produce any formatting problems when uploaded). Once I have finished the drafting and editing, I upload the article to Squarespace.

Now the chief characteristic of this process is that there are innumerable opportunities for the articles to get lost. And that is exactly what has tended to happen.

And then I had a blinding flash of the obvious. All I had to do was every time I got an idea for an article or posting, however unformed or incoherent, was to start a new entry on the blog and leave it unpublished. That means that all the ideas are in one place, I can have a number of articles in draft at any one time, and none of them are going to get lost.

Now, as I say, this is a blinding flash of the obvious and is probably the way every blogger other than myself has worked since the beginning of recorded time - but it’s not the way I’ve been working. In fact it’s an excellent example of the way improving a system can make life much easier - a subject which I deal with at some length in Do It Tomorrow.

Once one has improved a system, the next question to ask is “How can this be applied elsewhere?” As soon as I ask the question the answer is obvious: I can use exactly the same system of unpublished drafts on ConstantContact for my newsletter.

Related article: Expand Your Ideas the Easy Way!

Update on Wednesday, January 9, 2008 at 10:49 by Mark Forster

The above idea is working well, but I found initially that I had so many draft postings that they were becoming difficult to keep track of. I then had another blinding flash of the even more obvious and added a “Draft” category to the category list. This means I can bring up all my draft postings together in one place.

As a visitor to the site, you won’t be able to see this category if you look in the Blog Archive because you can see only published postings. The Blog Archive does not show empty categories.