Organized Writer, Tools for the business of writing.

DAY TWO: YOUR MASTER LIST

Sample chapter from
"The Organized Writer:
30 Days to More Time, More Money and Less Frustration"

Subcategories
Your subcategories should be short and should be nouns. Make sure they subdivide your Main Category into logical areas. Spend some time with this. The more accurate you can be now, the more time you'll save going forward.

You need enough subcategories to address all your ideas and topics, but not so many you fill an entire page. In our Parenting example, "Infant" is a short and sweet subcategory, but it may not be detailed enough. If you've written fifty articles on parenting infants, you may need "Infant" to be a main category.

Include a subcategory called "Guidelines" for market information you accumulate.

Ideas and Topics
The subcategory for an idea or topic should be obvious. If not, rethink your subcategories. Make them clean and simple. Scratch out, rethink, and pull out your thesaurus. You want the shortest words you can find since they will be on your file folder labels and in your computer directories.

More than Seven Categories
If you have more than seven Main Categories, you may be a packrat of ideas (see the description of a packrat on Day One). Try to focus more. Play a game with yourself to see how few words give you the same meaning. Or instead of using three columns, group your thoughts inside circles like a Venn diagram.

Start with your seven favorite categories to keep your tasks manageable during the next 30 days. Then, once you are an expert, expand your Cheat Sheet.

Ten or Less Ideas and Topics
If you have more than ten ideas or topics under a Subcategory, try to create a new subcategory.

Save it
Once you’ve completed your Master List, use the cheat sheet on the next page to make a nice copy or print it on your computer. To keep the Master List from becoming too cluttered, only the Main Categories and Subcategories are listed. However, if it will work better for you, create your own three column list with Ideas and Topics. Put it onto brightly colored sheets of paper and insert them into page protectors. Then place a copy everywhere you work. Until you memorize the list, you want to keep it handy.

Two days down...and only 28 to go. Stay with me. Tomorrow we will learn the one secret tool every writer needs to stay organized.

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