Writing Time

icon by Peg Ihinger

Every time I talk to a new group of would-be writers, one of the inevitable questions is “How do you find time to write?”

There is no good answer to this question, because there is never enough time to do everything—the things one must do (eat, sleep, pay bills, feed cats, write book…), the things that aren’t quite so urgent, but that need to be done in a timely manner (cooking the shrimp before it goes bad, more work on the book, incidental business tasks), the things that should get done or should have been done long before now (regular exercise, sorting those last two boxes of executor paperwork, clearing out the junk in the garage), and even, sometimes, the things one simply wants to do (have high tea with my sister, read at least a few of the books in my to-be-read pile…er, shelf…er, bookcase….).

Ultimately, if one wants to write, one must make doing so a priority. Really make it a priority, right up there with fixing the water softener, rather than saying it’s a must-do but behaving as if it’s a should-do or want-to-do. More than just making writing a priority, though, one has to decide what things one is not going to do, so that writing can happen. This is a piece that is left out of almost every list of time-management advice I have ever seen.

There are twenty-four hours in a day, seven days a week…and all of them are already full of something. School, eating, home maintenance, playing video games, reading, work, hanging out with friends, checking social media, sleeping…the list is endless, even if you take out the want-tos and should-dos. To add something (or increase the amount of time spent on it), something else has to give. There is no way to stretch twenty-four hours into twenty-four-hours-and-fifteen-minutes. You aren’t going to find five extra minutes in the couch cushions. You can’t even “save” that useless hour spent waiting at the bus stop so that you can use it for something later. Nobody gets any more time than anybody else. They only make different choices about what to do now.

There is an old time-management example that I am very fond of, chiefly because of the way it has changed over the years. The earliest version I found went something like this: Time is like a crate, which one can fill with a certain number of cannon balls. The crate is full, yet between the cannonballs there is room for a quantity of small shot. Now the crate is most certainly full; yet an amount of sand can still be interpolated in the crevices between the shot. (I don’t have the source, so it’s not the exact quote, but I distinctly recall the cannonballs, small shot, and sand.) The mechanics of the example have remained the same, though these days it’s usually a jar full of large rocks, smaller rocks, sand, and water. The interpretation, though, has changed.

The first versions I saw emphasized how one could fit small tasks into short amounts of time, the way the small rocks fit in the spaces between large rocks, the sand in the remaining spaces, and the water in the last remaining cracks. A few years later, I heard the second version, which emphasized that if one didn’t put the largest rocks in first, there would be no room for them in the jar/crate. Meaning, of course, that the things that will take a long time have to be scheduled first, or there won’t be a large enough block of “free” time to get them done in.

The third version went through the whole rocks, small rocks, sand, and water routine, and then pointed out that there were still objects of each size that didn’t fit in the container. Which is actually the point I was getting at earlier. There isn’t time to do everything. Not even if you use a hammer to break some of the bigger rocks into smaller bits.

But the one that has stuck with me the longest is the most recent version—the time management guru who pointed out that once you stuffed all those rocks, sand, and water into that one big jar, the jar was too heavy to lift. And there will still be leftover rocks, sand, and water. There will still be tasks left undone, no matter how full one crams one’s schedule.

The first version of the rocks-in-a-jar says that if you pay attention, you can get more done than you thought. Carrying a notebook means one can write in all sorts of places, in scraps of time that would otherwise be waiting in line. The second one says that if it’s going to take four concentrated hours to finish Chapter Ten, you’d better clear four hours of time specifically for that, because the likelihood of four “free” hours just showing up without you planning for them is negligible. The third points out that if one doesn’t plan one’s writing time—and stick to the plan—it’s likely to be one of the things that gets left out. Writing time doesn’t just show up, any more than free time does. And the fourth one reminds us that getting up an hour earlier to write is a recipe for burnout, unless one replaces that hour of sleep at the other end of the day.

Making those choices isn’t easy, especially if the writing isn’t going well. But not making them is also a choice—to let the world and all that leftover stuff take precedence over writing (or whatever other thing you wish you were making time for, but aren’t). Once in a while, the world is right—if you trip on the linoleum and break a leg, getting to urgent care is far more important than finishing the last hour of writing time you’d planned. Most of the time, though, skipping out of writing time is like cutting classes or skipping work: maybe fun in the short run, but a recipe for flunking or getting fired in the long run.