The Million Dollar Plan

A tip from the distant past that's worth a million bucks.

I have long bragged I can find something of value in any book I read, no matter how bad the book.

The example I use most often is this one:

I once read a book called The Total Woman by Marabel Morgan. It was published in 1973. I was a miserable young bride in an abusive marriage when I read the book. I was desperate to save, not my marriage really, but my life, and the book promised secrets an unhappy wife could use to “make your marriage come alive!” I was willing to try anything—maybe if I could make him really happy, he’d stop beating me up and threatening to kill me.

It turns out Morgan’s book is based primarily on a single biblical verse—Ephesians 5:22: “Wives, submit to your husbands ….” I’m a spiritual person, but I’m not going to go there except to say that, as so often happens with the Bible and anything else, human beings translate and interpret things to their liking. They pick and choose the things that support their arguments, ignoring those that refute them or put them into better context. In a patriarchal society such as ours, it’s not surprising this verse is well-known. But I don’t believe in a God who wants me to tolerate physical abuse any more than I believe God told my friend Paulla to stop writing.

Still, I was desperate and looking for help anywhere I could find it. So I read Morgan’s book and learned that, if my husband treated me like dirt and my marriage was unhappy, it was all my fault. The answers to turning it around all fell on me too and consisted of things like becoming a “cheerleader” for my marriage by cooking and cleaning, never having or expressing an opinion, being pleasant and fully made up when my husband came home from work each evening, not talking to him until he’d had a chance to unwind, and manipulating him into giving me the things I wanted by offering him sex every night.

“It’s only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him,” Morgan wrote. “A Total Woman caters to her man’s special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex or sports.”

In Fried Green Tomatoes, Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates) attends a class on how to save a marriage, then tries to spice things up by greeting her husband at the door dressed in nothing but Saran Wrap. This scene is said to be based on Morgan’s book.

I’ll be honest—I was oppressed at the time, but it still seemed like a crock. I’ve been a feminist since I was about nine years old, and Morgan’s book didn’t sit right with me. Still—desperation. I tried some of Morgan’s suggestions, and my husband was happier. I mean, what husband wouldn’t be? I’ve seen The Stepford Wives. But no matter how subservient I became, the abuse didn’t stop. Not even a little bit. It turns out what made him happiest of all was beating me up and threatening to kill me.

The Total Woman was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1974. The bestselling nonfiction book of 1974. This was at the height of second wave feminism—the same year the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Women’s Educational Equity Act were passed, prohibiting discrimination against women in matters of finance and education. (But 20 years before Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act, making domestic violence a crime.) I’m not exactly sure what the fact that this was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1974 tells us, but one thing’s for sure—I wasn’t the only unhappy woman out there.

Morgan’s marriage manual didn’t work for me. Still, in the midst of all the misogyny (so much misogyny), I found one tip worth keeping.

Morgan called it “The Million Dollar Plan,” if I recall, because the legend goes that a businessman offered $1 million to the person who could give him a time management tip that would allow him to get the most work done in a day that he could possibly get done. Marabel used the time management tip to complete all her errands and chores, have dinner on the table on time, and greet her husband at the door dressed as a cowgirl.

I’m not big on cooking, and I’m no longer married (surprise, surprise), but I’ve used Morgan’s time management tip to handle my to-do list and my schedule for close to 50 years now. This tip is one of the things that helps me accomplish as much as I do. It also helps me make my own writing a priority and protect my writing time.

I don’t mind repeating The Million Dollar Plan to you here, because Morgan didn’t invent it—she heard about it through the grapevine, so who knows where it came from. I’m paraphrasing, because I tossed that book right into the trash, but here goes:

1. Make a list of everything you need to do today.

2. Reorder the list in order of priority.

3. Start working on item #1 and don’t stop working on it until it’s done.

4. Don’t allow any interruptions—in 1973 that meant telephone calls or salesmen at the front door. Today, it means no email, text messages, or social media.

5. When you finish item #1, cross it off the list and move on to item #2, and so on.

6. Work on the items in order—don’t skip around.

7. At the end of the day, you may not have finished everything on your list, but you will have finished the highest priority items, and assuming you worked diligently and didn’t allow interruptions, you’ll have finished as much as you possibly could have.

8. The next morning, make a new list, moving the items you didn’t complete the day before up to the top of the list and adding anything new.

This idea is so simple in theory, and yet it can be exceedingly difficult to implement in practice. Our attention spans aren’t what they were in 1973, and we have even more distractions and interruptions to contend with. Interruptions and having my attention pulled to something else are always my biggest challenges.

But I make my list every morning, prioritize it, and do my best to stick to it. It works.