On Time Management
This week’s DTT will revolve around time management, something that I’ve had a lot of ups and downs with over the years. It applies to writing just as much as anything else. Let’s dive right in:
My struggles with time management are nothing new. It’s something I never had to learn how to do effectively until I started college, where not having the ability to manage time was a huge setback. Suddenly, I had to balance more than I ever had to before, with a more fluid schedule than I’d had previously. This was very difficult for me. I got used to the heavier schedule though, and managed to still find the time to write.
As balancing my schedule got easier I thought that I’d learned so much about managing my time. I was wrong. The only thing I’d really learned is how important it is to not waste time, which is somewhat ironic considering that I still wasted plenty of time. especially in writing.
When I would write, I thought that I needed a huge chunk of time, like four or more hours, to get comfortable in my favorite spot in the library and put some words down. The reason that I thought this is because I’d probably do only forty-five minutes worth of actual writing in that time, while the rest was being spent on “research.”
Just about every writer knows the complicated relationship between research and the writer. Yes, it is an important aspect of world building because accurate facts and details are nice to have, but all too often research degrades into aimless wandering around the internet, reading about the Great Emu War, or the names of really large numbers.
Anyway, these large, uninterrupted periods of time stopped becoming available, so I stopped writing altogether. That’s how Laz died. Sure, I wrote a poem or a short story from time to time, but it was hardly enough to call myself a writer. Writers have to write after all.
This period of non-writingness went on for a little over a year before I realized that I actually hadn’t learned how to manage my time at all. I knew then that I needed to make some changes. So I started with my school assignments, trying to space the work for each one out over the entire period that was given. This wasn’t so easy at first, and required that I adhere to a strict daily schedule. I began writing down a very specific set of tasks that needed to get done by the end of each day, which helped keep me on track and kept my mind a little more organized. Once I started benefiting from my scheduling improvements, keeping to them became easier.
Then I realized I could add writing back in if I used my smaller bits of what I call “in-between” time effectively. And that’s how Laz was resurrected. I started using periods even as short as twenty minutes to write, which may sound normal to some, but is something I wouldn’t have done before. While it’s still nice to have long writing sessions, I find that I stay focused on the scene I’m writing when I know that I have a shorter window of time to write in. This way, my “writing time” is always spent writing, not “researching.”
I hesitate to give advice on how to best manage time, because my path to better time management involved many different strategies that seemed to fail, until I found one that worked. The most that I can really say is that everyone should make an effort to manage their time well. Time is the one resource that everyone is granted in the same quantity, and the one that cannot be gained back once spent. Proper use of it can be a major factor in determining one’s success in life.
I’ll let this one end with a little wisdom from Gandalf:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Until next time,
-Sal
