Time Management Tuesday: Time Management For Writers With No Time--You Don't Have To Do What Someone Else Is Doing

The second in an arc inspired by Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris and Jeff Warren with Carlyle Adler.

Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics includes a chapter called I Can't Do This that deals to a great extent with what author Dan Harris and his colleagues say is the misunderstanding that meditation requires clearing the mind instead of beginning again. "You really can't hear this enough: Meditation does not require you to stop thinking," they say.

Many writers think they can't write because they can't do certain things, also. Specifically,

• Write every day
• Keep their butts in chairs

Write every day and butt-in-chair are writing cliches that have generated masses of text. They appear in articles, blog posts, books, and workshops. There may be TED Talks about them. In spite of that, I'm not sure what butt-in-chair means. Is it a "just do it" time management technique? Do people who feel they are butt-in-chair writers use some kind of time management techniques to make it possible for them to keep their butts in their chairs or do they have some kind of inner fortitude the rest of us don't that enables them to do what others can't? I'm mystified.

What I do feel write every day and butt-in-chair are, though, is exclusionary. Do this, not that. This is what you have to be able to do in order to do what I do.

You really can't hear this enough: Writing does not require you to do what other writers are doing.