One of the hardest things most writers have to do is defend their writing time.
There are always chores to be done, emergencies to be dealt with, other people who want large pieces of your time for something, and really cool things that writers would love to be doing in addition to or instead of writing. And you are the only one who can stop yourself from getting up from the computer to feed the cat and do the laundry, to call the plumber about the sudden explosion in the bathroom pipes, to answer the door or the phone or the ten-year-old, or to go off to the beach or the mall or the theater.
(You are also the only one who can make yourself sit down at the computer to start writing instead of doing one or more of the above, but that’s really just another aspect of the same problem.)
You can slice up the interruptions and distractions in several ways. There are everyday chores that must get done (dishes, laundry), and there are true emergencies (the tree that fell on your house or your best friend’s house, the wildfires or oncoming hurricane, the heart attack or stroke that hits someone in the family). There are things that you need (food, shelter, sleep) or want (clean dishes/laundry, a day at the beach), and things that other people want you to do (their dishes/laundry, chairing a committee at the Art Center, attending an all-day party for your least favorite relative).
The thing that is hardest to admit is this: True emergencies are the only things that absolutely cannot be ignored or put off. (OK, theoretically, you could say “I am going to ignore these sudden chest pains I am having, for now; I’ll call an ambulance when I’m done with the chapter,” but that would be a really, really bad idea. Nevertheless, I have known writers who made choices that were close to being this bad.)
When one stops to think about it, the difference between a true emergency and everything else on the “I could be doing that instead” list is that in a true emergency, no one – not you, not your editor, not your agent, not your most rabid fan-reader, not your friends or family – no one will say that you made the wrong choice by making “deal with this emergency” your top priority over absolutely everything else you could have done instead. If it’s not an emergency, somebody will disagree with you when you tell them that writing was more important.
When it comes to those non-emergency alternatives, though, one is always juggling priorities and consequences. I can put off laundry today because I still have a set of clean clothes in my closet, but if I leave the dishes until tomorrow morning they’ll be getting slimy and unpleasant. I could possibly ignore the cat for another fifteen minutes, but if I do, she’ll keep yowling louder and eventually she will come sit in front of the computer screen. Since I’m going to have to get up and feed her eventu…excuse me.
(The trick to dealing with short distractions is to keep them short – that is, I fed the cat and came back to the computer immediately. I did not take the opportunity to do dishes or start a load of laundry or take the almost-full bag of recycling out to the garage “as long as I’m already up” or check my email “as long as I’ve already stopped.”)
Where was I? Oh, yes, setting priorities.
The real problem is that, in the absence of a signed contract with a hard deadline, writing falls solidly into the category of “Things that are important, but not urgent.” Important-but-not-urgent things are universally the easiest to put off. Things that are urgent-and-important-both are easy to prioritize ahead of important-but-not-urgent, and (usually) rightfully so.
The catch is that there are also a lot of things that are urgent-but-NOT-important, and the feeling of urgency tempts most people to work on them ahead of the non-urgent, but much more important, things. We’re conditioned to respond first to urgency, rather than to importance, especially if the urgency involves other people. Most of the writers I know have trouble saying “No” to other people when what the writer is being asked for is time. They have less trouble saying “No” when it’s a matter of contributing money, which if you think about it is just time and effort that’s been turned into rectangular green paper.
Also, even with a contract and a deadline, most writers don’t feel “urgent” about writing until a few weeks before they have to turn in the manuscript. Their non-writer family members and friends, who have even less of an idea how much time it takes to produce a manuscript, will cheerfully say things like “You can come to dinner tomorrow. You can’t write all day, and you said the book isn’t due for another two months!” (That is, unless they are experienced and well-trained writer-friends, in which case they will say more helpful things like “How is the book coming? You only have eight months left to finish it, you know.”)
What it comes down to, in the end, is that “making time” for one’s writing is a matter of choosing to make writing a priority … and then taking that choice seriously enough to defend it from whatever subsequent choices you might want to make. No one will defend your writing time except you, and the first person you have to defend it from is yourself.
The thing that most people don’t grok intuitively is that not-important/not-urgent things are on your chart for a reason. If you didn’t have to do them, they wouldn’t be there.
If you ignore them long enough, they will become important-and-urgent, at which point you can finally justify doing them! and declare yourself a hero for having managed the impossible just in time. (Can you tell I’m procrastinating right now?)
Learning to chip away at the ‘not-important/not-urgent’ things – researching a place that will come up later in the novel, factchecking that thing-I-remembered actually works like that, looking at maps and changing ‘he lives somewhere up north to ‘he lives somewhere north of Rotherham’. Especially this November I’ve come to realise how much my writing speed relies on having scaffolding in terms of worldbuilding and character development, so if I spend the odd 5-10 minutes that I would otherwise have spent looking at cat memes, I can make myself much more productive.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is exactly what I needed to hear today (say I as the washing machine hums and my small child asks me question after question).
“I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.”
―Duke Ellington
“I don’t find time to write… I make time to write. Big difference.”
―Elizabeth Moon
The urgent-vs.-important sorting is the core of the “Seven Habits” system. Like calculus, it’s really important to retain the basic concept, even if you’ve forgotten the details. Just recognizing the difference is illuminating.
Rick
I was just thinking about requesting a time-management post!
Agree with green_knight that not-urgent/not-important things have a way of becoming both if you let them simmer. That facia board was showing wear, but it wasn’t urgent. Now there’s a four-foot-long hole in the garage. And it’s snowing.
My real problem comes in not being able to prioritize more than one thing. I can make time for writing (by stealing it from everything else). But how do I then make time for querying agents, sending out short stories, and all the other business stuff of being a writer? I already stole all the time I could for writing; if I have to make time for querying/submitting, the only place left to steal it *from* is writing. This causes problems….
“You can ask me for anything you like, except time.”
– Napoleon, to one of his aides
That would be a much cooler quote if Napoleon was famous for his literary conquests and winning words…
One thing that I’ve found helps – sometimes, somewhat – is to work on two different projects on alternate days. When it works, it can create that sense of urgency (“I have to work on Project A today, because tomorrow is scheduled for Project B.”)
Of course when it breaks down, it breaks down just as badly as any other system.
I’ve never been any good at switching like that — once I get the correct hat on my head, it tends to glue itself there — but I might try inducing that artificial sense of urgency and see if it helps. Deadlines work for me; it sounds like a very stressful way of getting things done, but it might get some things done.
I find deadlines stressful and they don’t help me that much. In fact, I have to pretend that I don’t have a deadline in order to feel free enough to write fiction. Some of them are unavoidable. I just had one last week: getting the brief for a book cover to the designer by November 15. I got it done and turned in on time, but didn’t like the wear and tear on my psyche.
Of course, everyone is different. I know several people who like the adrenaline rush provoked by deadlines. More power to them, but I’m not like that.
What does help me is envisioning the story complete and told to the best of my ability. That’s a real carrot for me; it draws me and motivates me.
If a deadline is too harsh, it doesn’t help me either. At best I’ll struggle to meet the deadline and then use the wear & tear on my psyche as an excuse to loaf excessively afterwards. At worst, I’ll just want to curl into a ball and quit.
What makes the alternating-day thing work for me is that I don’t have to finish anything on any given day. I just have to make a “reasonable” amount of progress on Project A today, before tomorrow comes with tomorrow’s Project B.
It’s a calibrated daily dose of urgency. If I miss a dose, or if I get an extra dose of urgency from some outside factor, then the system breaks down.
Of course, if you have to pretend that you don’t have a deadline to make progress, then even a little urgency is too big a dose.
Heh. I can write under a deadline, I just don’t like it, and I add many more words to the ms. when drawn onward by my particular carrot than when flogged by the deadline stick.
My solution to the problem of getting myself to work on non-fiction was to assign the book I was writing as the text for a class I was going to teach. I had to finish each chapter by the week my students are supposed to read it. I have done versions of that two or three times now. I think of it as a commitment strategy.
My other approach was to assign myself, some years back, two hours a day on writing projects, seven days a week. My motive wasn’t mainly to get writing done, although that was a useful side effect. I had a lot of free time and had found that if I spent all of it playing, broadly defined (reading sf, arguing with people online, making things) I ended up feeling stale. Two hours a day was not a serious imposition on other things I was doing and was enough to make me feel better about myself.
I allow myself to go as much as two hours into debt or two hours into credit, but that is the limit—with one exception when I got further into credit because I knew I would be doing something that would make getting work done hard. I give myself a two week vacation for Pennsic.
I should probably add that I count research for a book, not just the actual writing.