Coming Next Week--Time Management Tuesdays

Back in the dark ages, I worked at a state university for a department that offered personnel and management workshops and consulting services for state and municipal employees. I hated that freaking job, but as a result of spending four years of my life doing it, I often find myself thinking about business-related concepts I stumbled upon at work in relation to writing. (I never actually studied any of this stuff.)

One of the business-related concepts I think about is time management.

Organization and self-discipline are not things I learned at my mother's knee. Or at all. I have to make major efforts to manage my time so I can write. Always. It's not a linear process. It's more two steps forward and one step back, if I'm lucky and I haven't fallen over altogether, metaphorically speaking. Then I get started again. I'm always reading about better ways to manage time in all aspects of my life in order to isolate time to work. This has been going on for years. I won't even get into how many years.

So when artist Liza Myers posted a link on her Facebook page to Time Lost and Found by Anne Lamott, I rushed to read it. I did not, however, find it very useful. During my years of time management research, I'd read plenty of advice like Lamott's--you've got the time to write, you've just got to cut back on some other, lesser activity. I'm very sympathetic to those people who wonder, What lesser activity? There are plenty of us out here who have signficant family responsibilities or who really do need to put in many hours on a salary-generating job, because, you know, giving up work to live in a garret and write only works in romantic comedies. I also find such advice very glib because the people giving it rarely address the impact of reorganizing your life to work in a creative field in which you don't get daily or even weekly (monthly? annual?) feedback.

While I was making rambling comments/complaints on Liza's Facebook page regarding Lamott's essay, I thought, This is a nuts and bolts subject that ought to be addressed at writers' conferences and retreats, in books and at listservs, at...Original Content.

My followers know how much I love an obsession. So in 2012 I'm going to obsess on time management for writers and others in creative fields. I'm hoping that readers will jump in and comment, offering their reactions to my thoughts and their experiences with managing time. Maybe by the end of the year some of us will have found a way to structure our lives in such a way that we're cranking out work the way we've always dreamed we would.

Until next Tuesday.