Since childhood, I have always found it difficult to pen my thoughts down because as a creative, I spiralled a lot and would get strangled into the web of my thoughts every time I went on a creative spree. And soon, I'd give up out of frustration and stress. I am sure a lot of you out there would relate to this. 

 Whether I was in School writing an essay or I was at home trying to paint a landscape, I wished I had a magic wand that could organise all the thoughts in my head with one swing and out comes the perfect essay or a breath-taking painting.

However, I often struggled with this problem of leaving an unorganised mess of creative ideas while creating something new. 

One day my English teacher saw me struggling to write a story. That day she gave me a tool that has always helped me overcome this challenge. Although, I tweaked it to fit various scenarios in my life, the crux remains intact and I have created a framework out of it. 

 It is called the 'DO' or the 'Dump and Organise' framework. Let's get a little deep into this framework to understand what it is about and how can you apply this to your life.

Dump

The 'Dump' step involves, well, dumping everything that you have in your mind about a particular topic on to a paper (or a Word document, Miro board, Figma art-board, etc.). How and where you dump your thoughts depends on your work type and your comfort level. Since I am a designer, I usually sketch out my ideas on paper.

How should you 'Dump'?

Let me explain you with an example. Suppose you want to create a presentation about a campaign that you want to run for your company. So in order to create the presentation, you should first write all the topics you want to talk about in front of your audience. Don't worry about the order of those topics or if they even make sense or not. Just keep dumping.

Organise

The 'Organise' step involves editing, re-arranging, or removing things from the dumped content to make sense out of it. Organising is driven by what the dumped content intends to communicate. How I organise stuff depends on what I have dumped and what I intend to use it for.

How should you 'Organise'?

So after you've written all the topics for your presentation, you should edit or rearrange them to create a continuous story. The arrangement of topics depend on the story you want to drive home. It can be used to show how impactful can the campaign be or how successful it was.

Dump - Organise - Dump - Organise...

This seems pretty simple, right? Not so fast. Your job at hand might require you to 'Dump & Organise' multiple time and at multiple levels. 

For example, after organising the presentation topics into a story, each topic might require you to 'Dump' a number of sub-headings to explain that topic. After which you'd 'Organise' those sub-headings to create a micro-story inside that topic. You then go ahead and 'Dump' your creative content in the sub-headings to finish it. This exercise would then be replicated in all the topics you had finalised for your presentation.

So, whenever you're creating a story, an essay or a presentation, you will need to think how many times to apply this framework.

Also, if you're a planner by nature, you might find 'Organise & Dump' framework easier than 'Dump & Organise' if you're able to organise your thoughts in your head. Usually, late stage professionals are well versed in organising their thoughts in their head because of years of practice. However, I as a creative usually 'Dump' all my thoughts first to avoid overwhelming myself with them.

Time the 'DO'

An extremely important part of this framework is timing it. Setting a deadline for your work forces you to focus and aim to finish what you started. You can time your 'Dump' and 'Organise' in separate chunks so that it is easier for you to focus on one activity during one chunk.

Conclusion

This framework has helped me time and time again in speeding up the process of writing stories, essays, presentations, and even helped me create paintings. Thus, feel free to try out this framework in your personal life and at work. Modify or add your flavour wherever necessary. I hope this framework will help you create impactful content and speed up your work, helping you achieve deadlines.