Time Management Revisited
A close friend recently asked me how I manage to be a writer. This is a very vague question, but when I asked her to elaborate, I found it was really a question about time management. I’ll paraphrase it as, “How do you have time to attempt to launch a writing career, given everything that’s involved?”
The short answer is that I don’t always do. Here I am coming off of a 7 month dry-spell from writing this blog. (I haven’t been totally idle, but I wish I’d been more active on the blog.) I’ve mentioned before that I’ve recently started my other career in the engineering field with a well-known, and often demanding company. This greatly restricts the time I have to develop myself as a writer. Thus, the question.
For somebody who is just starting out as a writer, and trying to develop the necessary skills to write novels that are good enough to be published and read by many, there are two enormously time-consuming tasks that must be done. They are:
- Writing a lot.
- Reading a lot.
There is no way around this. If you don’t practice, you can’t get better.
So how do I make time? I guess it’s necessary to understand something before I answer that. Reading and writing are two of my favorite things to do. My non-writer friends have trouble understanding that, but it’s a lot easier to prioritize something that you enjoy a whole lot, and therefore it feels less like making time than finding the time.
With that understood, I can say that the first step in finding time is to be honest with yourself about how much time you waste in your day. For me, finding a balance is an everyday struggle that I sometimes win and sometimes lose, but honesty with oneself is never really easy. Do I need to re-watch every Marvel movie when they pop up on the TV guide? Do I need to read every article about every move the Patriots are making on the offseason? Probably not, and by being disciplined in recognizing what’s actually going to benefit me in the long run, I’m able to find a lot more usable time for myself, and feel better about how I use my time too.
However, when you want to be a writer and you work a full time job that has little (nothing) to do with the craft, you’ll always want more time to work, and recently I’ve discovered a tool that has actually given me more time. No, not through magic or some new breakthrough in flux-capacitance, but by enabling me to read while driving. Before anyone gets too concerned, that tool is Audible, and I’ve developed a new love for audiobooks. I’m going to talk about Audible more next week, so for now I’ll just say that being able to listen to books during my absurdly long commute (California traffic) is a huge blessing, because I can get a lot of reading done during time that was otherwise unusable to me, which frees up time I would normally spend reading, so that I can spend it writing. That’s huge, but again, I’ll talk more about Audible and what I think of audiobooks in general next week.
Other than that, I haven’t found any other shortcuts that are genuinely helpful. The rest is persistence, and straining to maintain a Rome-wasn’t-built-in-a-day mentality.
That’s all for now. Talk soon.
-Sal
