Writing, Organizing and the Task at Hand

Write or layout? When I sit down, prepared to write, and nothing comes to me, I start organizing.

I have more material than I thought.  Much more. Certainly enough for a book. Over the past 12 years, I wrote small and medium pieces, combined some into longer documents, and tucked them away into flat homogenous folders on my computer.  

The folders were then backed up, and, because of my organizing disease (for which there is currently no treatment), the files multiplied and nested, again and again.  While I am thrilled to have so much raw material to work with, sorting for duplicates, selecting, copying and pasting is very time consuming.

I hesitated before creating a brand new folder titled "Working Clean." Providing I can sustain some discipline, this folder contains only keepers, or things to be worked on, in the present day now. But I have to be very strict with myself. 

Categorizing snippets and pages once into longer, working documents could be an agonizing problem were it not for Microsoft Word.  The navigation view is a way to see all the document sections in a sidebar. The only extra effort needed is in the creation of simple headlines for each section.  And a redirect back to the task at hand, of course.