An hour–why, there was no way of measuring the length of an empty hour! It stretched away into infinity like the endless road in a nightmare; it gaped before her like the slippery sides of an abyss. Nervously she began to wonder what she could do to fill it.

Edith Wharton

Welcome back, my fellow creatives!

First, thank you again for your kindness and patience as I work myself back to a better place. Bo’s watching over me to make sure I don’t push things too hard, and my little B’s are…well they’re still as chaotic as ever, but that’s to be expected. 😊

There are few old posts on this blog from the past decade where I’ve touched on time management. As my fellow parents here know, though, it only takes a year or two for the time-needs of children to completely change. I may no longer have to keep an eye on my kids 24/7, but I’m now in the car for several hours every school week commuting them hither and thither. That was one of the reasons I ended up going dark on this blog for a year—when to write?

When to connect?

Unlike the Wharton’s character, I ALWAYS have ways to fill hours. Unlike the character, I didn’t know where to find them.

Not a nightmare, but at times, it felt close.

So I’m here with you today to talk about something I learned while researching time management for academic reasons. Perhaps what I learned—and what I’m working on—could help you tend your time like a garden rather than confetti.

Ashley Whillans, author of Time Smart, describes the conundrum many of us face in having the time we need and want; because there never seems to be enough, it feels like we experience time poverty. Part of this problem, Whillans explains, comes from the way we use little scraps of time. What’s five minutes on Facebook, after all, or mucking about on Instagram for a bit? On its own, those scraps of minutes don’t look like much, but when you add them together over a week/month/year, and you realize just how much time went to farting around.

To be serious about writing while also holding a regular job and family and whatnot means time confetti is not an option. It didn’t help that with the commuting for schools, I felt like I had no time except for teaching, let alone my scholarship and service work. I needed to find the time.

To cultivate the time.

Mindfulness gives you time. Time gives you choices…it is easy to fall into false narratives of time poverty, but choosing to change your story from “i’m too busy” to “i have time for what matters to me” can make you see possibilities…

Laura Vanderkam, Off the Clock

In Off the Clock, Laura Vanderkam shares the visual of a time garden. A garden doesn’t just magically look awesome. It requires a LOT of time at the outset to clear the ground, till the soil, and plant the seeds. Lots of weeding and warding off sprout-eaters. Once that garden grows, though, does it need the same level of work as before? No. Oh it’ll still need tending, sure, but the hard work’s been done.

Likewise, with time, it is the same process. A gardener must know his plot. Then it is the daily cultivation that leads to beauty, in a landscape and a life, too.

Laura Vanderkam, Off the Clock

So, I took my calendar, and started breaking down the hours: the hours for commuting and the days I teach classes don’t change much, so it’s easy to block those off. How was I using those remaining hours? I estimated how much I needed to tackle the regular student work, considering more time would be needed certain weeks when projects were due. That still left me with, on average, 2-3 hours.

Eureka! TIME!

And so for a few weeks, I used that time well…or so I thought.

In fact, extensive and meandering research is a very inefficient way to get going on a big project.

Robert Pozen and Alexandra Samuel, Remote, Inc.

Any time I had for “writing,” I kept finding new things to study: language for my Old Guard. What Imperial ships could look like. Harmonica music. I kept finding things to dig into instead of the bloody writing.

And then other academic projects need their time, of course. These hours were, after all, to be shared for creative AND academic stuff…which meant more research, committee meetings.

And the time felt gone again. I had dug up all the proverbial soil, but somehow my planting had gone awry, leading to my sprouts choking each other out.

What was I doing wrong?

While knowing where the time goes is fascinating, it is the envisioning of how you would like to spend your time, and then the day-to-day evaluation and tweaking, that truly matters for spending time better.

Laura Vanderkam, Off the Clock

~*~

Writer’s block is a misnomer and can be compared with turning off a faucet. Like the ability to write, faucets can develop problems when they’re seldom used. You get all this rust in the pipes. When you turn on the faucet, a lot of rust comes out.

Susan Neville

It hit me when I was teaching my students about writing anxiety. “A great way to get rid of the anxiety,” I always say, “is to get rid of that empty page. Fill it! No one writes perfectly the first time, not even the best-selling authors. Even they revise. Let yourself write badly.”

For all that encouragement to my students, I wasn’t giving that grace to myself.

I think the trouble starts when you sit down to write and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent — and when you don’t, panic sets in. The solution is never to sit down and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent. I write a little bit, almost every day, and if it results in two or three or (on a good day) four good paragraphs, I consider myself a lucky man. Never try to be the hare. All hail the tortoise.

Malcolm Gladwell

Last year I reread The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray and Bret Norris, and early on they emphasize “spinning your novel down the page”; that is, using fragments to describe scenes, action, or dialogue so that you can cover a lot of ground quickly. It forces you to think through the story rather than how you tell it, which keeps the inner editor at bay.

Happiness is a great reason to let good enough be good enough, but for our purposes, it is important to note that satisficing saves incredible quantities of time…Satisficers have a set of criteria, and go for the first option that clears the bar.

Laura Vanderkam, Off the Clock

I had to stop pressuring perfection. And let’s face it—for writers, that’s damn hard. But that epiphany allowed me to alter my time garden a bit. I got realistic about just how much I wanted to plant every season. An hour spinning plot (heck, half an hour, even) makes it far easier to know what kinds of research I’d need for worldbuilding later on; plus, spinning plot could be done with speech to text—I could talk through my story on my way to get kids from school!

I write like I talk and I don’t get talker’s block.

Seth Godin

Granted, my garden is still a work in progress. (I imagine most botanical gardeners say that anyway.) But it feels so much better to see a path forward…something I could not see for myself a year ago.

If you’re feeling stuck like this, check out The Weekend Novelist or the time books I’ve shared here. All of them have great tips worth applying to taping together that time confetti or tilling your time garden. You are a creative soul, and that creativity deserves to be nurtured and tended like the other things you love in your life.

Don’t let it rot.

Coming up, I’ve got an interview, another podcast, a writing resource highlight, and more. 🙂

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!