One Year to a {More} Organized Life, Week Three

An author does not just sit down and type the first word of a book and keep going until she types the last. There is a lot of thought, a lot of planning, a lot of brainstorming, and a lot of crumpled papers thrown over the shoulder before a story even begins to take a recognizable form.

We all have dreams and desires for what sort of story we want our lives to be. It is not up to us whether we want to write our story. We write it every day of our lives. But if we're going at in a haphazard, thoughtless way, the story of our life will be neither inspiring to others or glorifying to God.

Taming the chaos and devising a plan for our lives is like an author carefully mapping out a story. It's going to take a lot of planning, a lot of brainstorming, and a lot of revising.

Our Purpose is the title of our story. It should sum up our life. When we come to the end of our life, someone should be able to read the purpose statement(s) we came up with and say, "It describes her to a T."

We are currently in the brainstorming and planning phases of the plot... the storyline... what happens and in what order. The Bare Minimum gives us a bit of a basic grid in which everything else fits in or around or on.

By now you should have mapped out your bare minimum. Keep following it on a daily basis. If you haven't, go ahead and do it. Do not skip it. This is what you will come back to on those days when survival is all you can handle. If you found, this past week, that you had a hard time getting even the bare minimum done, evaluate your list. Try taking one thing off the list. If everything on your list is truly vital to the operation of the day, then do not be discouraged. Take another go at it this week.

Brainstorming for the Rough Draft

Ok, for this week's assignment... It's pretty easy actually. Print this worksheet (or scribble one out yourself real quick) and hang it on your fridge or bulletin board. (Yes, I hate having things on my fridge too. But I promise this paper will not stay there long.) The worksheet has five columns on it: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly. As you go throughout your week, be thinking of things you should routinely do and write it in the proper column, according to how often it should be done.

Include anything that comes to mind... chores, hygiene, family hygiene, hobbies, relationship maintenance, wardrobe/style upkeep, finances, fun things, boring things, ANYTHING. Do not worry about importance or priority. We will weed through our lists later.

So that's it... Do your brainstorming and write everything that comes to mind in the proper column. Oh, and keep up the daily bare minimum. Just blog a little something about your progress and/or observations and link up.

Happy brainstorming!!