I’ve Got It. Now What Do I Do with It?

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If you’ve been reading this blog for the past few weeks, you should have a boat load of information ready to go. No? How about a good idea for getting your hands on the information you need? For the purposes of this blog, let’s say you do. Now what? All this information is useful, but a bit cumbersome. Time to build your master plan.

Here’s a simple technique to get organized:

Picture each piece of information as a wooden block (or Legos if that works better for you)
Make categories to store the boxes. I’ll use writing a book as an example.

Yellow would be all the research I did for the book
Green would be creating the outline and all the other steps I must take to write the rough draft of the book
Red would be editing and the tasks associated with this phase of my book development


Make columns in your favorite word processing or spreadsheet tool. Color code the columns to match your categories
Think about how you’ll go about completing each category. Sometimes the categories may overlap (example: I may have to do additional research while I’m writing the rough draft)
List all the information or tasks in the order you need them to be accomplished

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There you go. You’ve just created your draft plan! Pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Then let this sit for a while. You’ll probably find holes in your plan as you review it more carefully.

Final step to the plan: Add Dates! Hold yourself to a schedule, but be realistic about time frames too. You want to see your goal become reality, but being too aggressive gets discouraging.

BEFORE YOU GO! Join me next week on DTJ for a sneak peek of my upcoming book release: The Obsidian Gates – Book Two of the Heart of the Warrior series!