Before I jump into today’s post, I’d like to let you know that my next e-course on breaking into magazines, which has helped students land assignments from magazines ranging from Pizza Today to Woman’s Day, starts on Monday, August 3. That’s just a week away! Also, due to popular demand (no, really!), I’ve added a Gold version that includes not just eight lessons and assignments and eight weeks of unlimited e-mail support — it also includes weekly half-hour phone coaching sessions. To get the details on the three levels of courses available to you — and to sign up — visit writeformagazines.com.

My life coach Kristin Taliaferro gave me the idea for this blog post. She mentioned that if she asks her clients to add something to their lives, they resist. But if she asks them to subtract something that’s getting in their way, they’re energized. Collecting too many things around us, whether they’re physical items or unnecessary habits, can weigh us down.

That’s the idea behind getting rid of your tolerations, which I wrote about in March. But there are other ways we writers can use this concept as well.

For example, one way to get something off your to-do list is to, well, take it off your list. Just don’t do it. Is there anything on your list that won’t make an impact on your bottom line that you can delete? For example, maybe you’ve had “Send letter of introduction to X magazine” on your list for months, and you’ve been resisting doing it — so it just stares out from your to-do list, bugging you every day. Could it be that you don’t really want to write for X magazine, but you somehow feel you should? Ditch that to-do and free up mental energy for something that will really carry your writing life forward.

You can also remove long-term work habits. We all probably have things we do on a regular basis as a part of our writing lives that we don’t actually need to do. As an example, I’m going to admit something terrible: I stopped sending handwritten thank-you notes to my article sources. I felt terrible about it, but once we adopted our son, I kind of had other things taking up my time. I’ve always been a big advocate of the thank-you, but I dropped it. The result? I save time, and it’s had no impact whatsoever on my ability to get good sources for my queries and interviews. Do you have a work habit you can delete from your life?

Then there are the work-related items and services we pay for, some of which are just clogging up our writing lives. For example, I’ve been so happy doing my interviews on Skype ($3 per month for unlimited calls) using a $15 Skype call recorder that I’ve been able to relegate my digital recorder (and all the batteries and wires) to the back of my office shelf. And I’m considering dropping my $40/month landline at home, since I used it mainly for interviews.

Another thing I could consider dropping, though I’m not sure I’m ready to go that far yet, is my el-expensivo business cards. I pay over $200 for them every time I change my phone number or e-mail address, and yet I’ve probably given away fewer than 25 of them in the last year since I do 99.5% of my work online. I do love the design of my business cards, but if I ever get brave enough, that would be a great item to drop from my writing life.

So: Are there items and habits you’ve collected around your writing life that are weighing you down? Have you ever done a major purge, or do you drop things a bit at a time? What have the results been? Please share in the Comments section below! [lf]

If you liked that post, you might also like:

• How to Be an Intolerant Freelancer
• Interview with Allyson Lewis, author of The Seven Minute Difference
• Failing Well
• How to Gain Control Over Your Freelancing Life
• 10 Ways of Thinking That Lead to Writing Procrastination and Rebuttals to Those Thoughts