She’ll get organised. Some day.

A READER from Ipoh wrote to me the other day and asked if I could give her some advice on being a freelance writer. “It must take a lot of self-discipline and willpower to write a column every week,” she said, “especially since you don’t have anyone breathing down your neck to get the job done.”

I may not have anyone literally breathing down my neck, but a few hundred kilometres away from my home in Penang, there sits a sub-editor in a cubicle at The Star, a charming woman who is capable of breathing flames down the tele-phone when I’m the teensiest bit late with my column.

The logical me says that I should write my column at least a few days in advance, but I keep finding excuses for putting it off. I’d much rather read someone else’s writing, or pull weeds, or rearrange my kitchen cupboards than think about what I’m going to write, simply because I’m a deadline junkie.

Every week, I wait for the thrill of knowing that my deadline is only a few hours away before I start writing. As the clock ticks away, the adrenalin begins to pump a little, the synapses begin snapping, the creative juices start flowing, my fingers begin moving a little faster across the keyboard ... and I’m on a roll.

Of course, there are some weeks when the synapses don’t quite do what they were supposed to do, and the juices simply refuse to flow. When that happens, I begin opening and closing the filing cabinets in my brain, frantically pulling out random pieces of information in the hope that something will inspire me. Then I tell myself that I should be more organised in future.

Unless you’re one of those anal retentive types who indexes all your holiday snaps and arranges your underwear alphabetically, being organised requires self-discipline and willpower, attributes that I don’t have in abundance.

For example, take the other morning, when I threw my willpower out the window and had a bar of chocolate for breakfast. I had other much healthier things to eat in the house, but as soon as I saw that chocolate, I just had to have it. And I didn’t feel guilty after I’d eaten it; not one bit. I just blamed it on my hormones. It’s the same thing when someone places a bowl of nuts in front of me. Unbidden, my hand will reach out and dip into that bowl, again and again, until even the little runty nuts that settle at the bottom are gone. But that’s not hormones moving my hand. That’s an invisible force that can only be overcome by a nut allergy.

My self-discipline isn’t much better. For example, the first item on my To Do list reads: Look at your To Do list! I think I must have been on some mind-altering drugs when I wrote that one.

If I had more willpower, I would be able to resist the rush of deadline adrenalin that I love so much. And if I had more discipline, I would write my column well in advance – even have several pieces in stock, ready for those days when I’m feeling under the weather, or my computer crashes, or my Internet connection gives up on me, which, come to think of it, describes an average day for me.

But perhaps all is not lost, or so thinks a friend who recently recommended a new self-help book called Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength. The result of three decades of academic research on self-control and willpower, it claims to be “the key to success and a happy life”.

According to the author, your willpower is like a muscle that can be trained: “Even small, day-to-day acts of willpower such as maintaining good posture, speaking in complete sentences or using a computer mouse with the other hand, can pay off by reinforcing longer-term self-control in completely unrelated activities.”

As a writer, I seldom speak to anyone during my working day, and when I do, I’m sure I speak in complete sentences. Otherwise no one would want to hire me. And who the heck wants to use the computer mouse with the other hand? That would be just so extremely irritating, and it would probably take me twice as long to get anything done.

At the same time, I owe it to myself to give the book a try. Perhaps, I’ll stick it on my To-Do list.

■ Check out Mary Schneider on Facebook at facebook.com/mary.schneider.writer. Reader response can be directed to star2@thestar.com.my.

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