Create an acronym all your own -- Newsday.com

Remember Dave from earlier in the book? He is a regular GFM--good family man-- busy with his kids' soccer and boy scouts, keeping the environment clean, paying his taxes, writing work memos on the weekend, fixing the van and the lawn mower. But what about Dave the poet? Dave the dreamer, the athlete, the intellectual?

And you haven't met her yet, but what about Karen, Dave's wife? She's just as wrapped up in potlucks, chauffeur duty, and her own job selling real estate. What about Karen the potter? What about Karen the political activist, the genealogist, the sex kitten?

When you run your life like a business, with appointments and prioritized schedules, you run the risk of starving your soul. You may be too efficient to budget time for such tasks as smelling the roses, meditating on the meaning of life, writing a love poem, becoming a vegetarian, doing yoga exercises, contributing to charity, or staying in better touch with your brothers and sisters.

These kinds of ongoing personal practices don't mesh well with the more mundane demands of a busy life. You feel a little stupid putting "meditate" or "be more positive" on your to-do list every day, especially if you continually give these items such low priority that they are almost never accomplished.

One solution is to devise an acronym all your own. Dave's acronym is "CREW," which stands for:

Create
Read
Exercise
Write

In the upper left-hand corner of each day's schedule, Dave writes "CREW." Before he goes to bed each night he underlines the C for "create" if he has done any work on a poem that day. He underlines the R if he has read in a good book and the E if he went jogging or to the gym. If he had a dream the night before that he wrote down in his dream journal, he underlines the W.

When Dave is feeling stale and depressed, he looks back over the last few days and, sure enough, he finds that hardly any of the CREWs are underlined. He knows he hasn't been feeding his soul enough. Sometimes at the end of a busy, frustrating day, he is cheered up by underlining just one letter.

Karen's acronym is "PAGES," which stands for:

Politics
Art
Genealogy
Eat healthy
Sex

In the daily diary she keeps by her bedside, she underlines the P if she has written a letter for Amnesty International or gone to a neighborhood meeting. If she has worked on her pottery or her family tree, she underlines the A for "art" or the G for "genealogy." She underlines the E if she ate a reasonable amount of healthy food that day. She gets an S for "sex" if she went to bed early, showered and put on perfume before bed, wore a lacy nightgown, or did something else to keep her and Dave's sex life lively.

What would your acronym be? Write down all the things you want to do or become, the things that you seldom get around to, and pare the list down to the four or five most cherished items. Brainstorm some synonyms for these items and see what you can come up with in the way of an acronym. It should be short, simple, and easy to remember. Use your acronym as a subtle reminder to feed your soul, expand your horizons, express yourself, and help others.

Reprinted with permission from "The 50 Best Ways to Simplify Your Life," by Patrick Fanning and Heather Garnos Mitchener (New Harbinger Publications, $11.95); www.newharbinger.com