Mostly About Time

Everybody gets 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. That’s 168 hours, total. Nobody gets any more; nobody gets any less.

Yet somehow one of the first things that gets asked when I talk to a bunch of would-be writers is “How do you make time for your writing?”

(I always want to say something like “If I could make time, I’d be using the new time for a lot more things than just writing!” but I’m always worried that the comment will be misunderstood.)

Basically, nobody can “make time,” “find time,” “save time,” or “manage time,” not in the ways those phrases are understood for other types of things. Time comes blooping along, one minute after another, regardless of what we do or don’t do. Nobody I know can grab thirty seconds here and fifteen seconds there, and store it all in a box for later until they’ve collected enough bits and pieces of time to string together into a half-hour trip to the ice cream store. (Everybody I know wants to be able to do that, but nobody can.) Nobody walks down the street and runs across five minutes that somebody else dropped at the edge of the sidewalk.

What we’re actually talking about when we speak of making, saving, or managing time is adapting the activities that we do, so that we get them done in less time than they’re currently taking, thus “freeing up” a few minutes here and there, which can supposedly then be used for other, more important or more desirable, things.

This works great, in theory; the trouble is that we can’t move those “extra” free minutes around at will to create nice large “new” chunks of unoccupied time. Oh, if I save half a minute on dressing in the morning, and then “save” two more minutes by carefully planning my tea-and-toast making so that it’s going on while I’m dishing up the cat food, I can get out of the house three minutes early…but it just means I spend three extra minutes waiting for the bus, or waiting for the dentist or the vet or the hairdresser. Sooner or later, the external world puts the brakes on that painfully accumulated string of “extra, saved” time.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately, because my writing productivity has been all over the map lately, and a lot of it has been due to external events. For instance:

I caught a horrible cold at Minicon (as did many others; this year’s Convention Crud was apparently extra-virulent), and spent four solid days in bed. Productivity of any sort fell to zero; you should see the laundry mountain…wait, no, you shouldn’t.

I was faced with the horrible annual job of doing my and the family taxes. I put it off for a week, during which my writing productivity soared.

The horrible annual tax job turned out to be even more horrible than expected, necessitating dropping many other activities and elevating my stress levels. Writing productivity dropped almost to the same level as with the cold.

My Dad asked me to plan a week-and-a-half road trip, encompassing some family stuff and a visit with my editor. Writing productivity wobbled up and down all that week.

I had an unexpectedly long string of socializing: events to attend, dinners and lunches with friends, etc. Writing productivity initially went up, but dropped farther and farther as the social engagements multiplied.

This tells me a couple of things about myself and the way I work: First off, not being healthy is the rock-bottom state. Based on past experience, it is well worth four days of zero productivity if that allows me to get back to 50% after a week, rather than spending four days at 10% productivity and then six weeks slowly climbing back to 50%.

Second, writing is a great avoidance activity. All I really need to do is find something (like the family taxes) that I want to do even less than I want to work on that next horrible, sticky scene. Third, fun, enjoyable stuff has a small window where doing it improves my productivity, but after that, it starts interfering. Fourth, high stress axes productivity almost as effectively as being sick.

The biggest thing, though, isn’t obvious from the macro descriptions above. It’s this: there are things one has to do, like laundry and taxes; there are things one wants to do, like read the most recent Seanan McGuire novel; and there are things one thinks one should do, like clean the bugs out of the light fixture or check all one’s spam email to make sure nobody real has gotten caught in the filter. In each category, there are jobs that will expand to fill whatever time is available, like a sponge-rubber dinosaur dropped into water.

It’s not enough to “balance” the have-tos with the want-tos and ought-tos; the important thing turns out to be keeping an eye on those infinitely-expandable tasks, no matter what category they’re in. There will always be more excellent books to read, more email to answer, and more chores to do than you have time for, even if you spend all 16 of your waking hours every day doing them.

The only way to “find” or “make” time to write is to stop doing something you’re currently doing, and spend that time writing instead. If you want to keep it up on a regular basis, you need to find something you are currently doing that you are willing to swap out permanently. (Hint: doing laundry and doing your taxes are both really bad choices to pick for this kind of long-term commitment.) The most likely place to start is with the infinitely-expandable stuff, because it’s usually already expanded way more than it needs to have and may well benefit from being cut back a bit.