A"Seeking Time" Series on Medium

No, you haven't seen much about Seeking Time here recently. When I cut back on writing for the blog earlier this year, I cut back on publishing Seeking Time essays here. But I didn't cut back on writing them. I spent close to a couple of months writing five Seeking Time essays, which I published the week before last on the Medium platform. One a day. Last week I published two more. I'll try to do that for the next few weeks.

Essays are an objective for my short-form writing for adults' goal, by the way. I wasn't just going off on a tangent here. The whole Seeking Time thing is a new objective for that goal.

I think of them as meditations on time.

Why, Gail? Why?

• I've written here before about repurposing blog material to be published in other ways. I'm very interested in doing that, and this is one more attempt.
• I've thought for a long time that if I ever did something different with my time management content, I would do so in some kind of memoir/personal essay-type way rather than setting myself up as a time management specialist, which anyone can see I am not. Publishing this series of essays at Medium gives me an opportunity to do that.
• I'm also trying to grow my Medium readership, if that is even possible. Something happened on Medium a couple of years ago, no one seems to know what, and readership and income tanked for many writers. While some people have said they didn't lose readership, their income just started evaporating, others of us saw both go down. One publication editor I've dealt with has discussed that the work he submits for the boost program (which provides extra promotion) is not being selected anymore, so his writers aren't getting as much readership as he'd like. Some publications have closed down, for whatever reasons. The readership thing wasn't always the issue for them. Nonetheless, stuff happens there.
• I was never a big noise on Medium. But instead of at least maintaining where I was, I have gone backwards. I have already cut back on my humor writing there, in part because I've been spending so much time on the Reading History Project and researching markets and submitting elsewhere. But with readership at Medium so low, there's not a lot of reason to make submitting there first a priority. 

What's the Plan, Gail? You Gotta Plan?

My impression from reading articles about Medium published on Medium is that:

• Readers there like self-help and technology. The Seeking Time essays can be promoted as self-help.
• Writers who publish frequently are able to build more of a following than writers who publish less. One writer whose work I liked used to publish in excess of 20 pieces a month. This is why I published 5 essays the first week and will try to do 2 a week for a while. That's going to be tough. I'm set for this week, but have to dig down for the next essays. I'm very aware that while I'm writing these essays for this publishing experiment, I'm not writing other things I could be submitting elsewhere. But that's writing for you!

Conventional Medium wisdom states that if you can have work accepted by Medium publications, your chances of readership improve because it will be seen by all the publications' followers as well as yours. However, I have been published there by publications with big followings and just didn't see readers coming from them. I've done better with a couple of the smaller sites.

As a result, I'm publishing Seeking Time directly myself, because that means I can control the timing. That's why I was able to get work out every day the first week and twice last week. I didn't have to wait for acceptance and publication on someone else's schedule.

Seeking Time Essays to Date

Reading and Writing About Time Made Me Feel Optimistic

"I Came Up with a Work Schedule So Good I'll Be Able to Use it the Rest of My Life!"

The Life Changing Magic of Goals and Objectives

The Unit System

I Can Always Begin Again

Transitioning Between Work and Life

Seeking Time Around the House

And How's It Going, Gail?

I follow a few writers on Medium who both publish directly themselves and with publications. They write and publish regularly and seem to have decent followings. What I see with them leads me to believe theirs is a workable model.

Not so far for me, though. I assume that if this attempt is successful, it will take some time. I'm just not sure how much to give it, when there are so many other things I could be writing and places I could be submitting to. I should try to keep this up until mid-August, anyway, or maybe until the end of summer.

More to come! 

 

Seeking Time: A Sort of Hiatus for Original Content

I'll be cutting back on blogging for probably the next six weeks while I help out a couple of family members. I have two blog posts in progress that I want to finish up and publish, because they are somewhat timely, and this cut back may lead to a Seeking Time post this summer, because what doesn't lead to a Seeking Time post? 

For the immediate future, though, I want to use what work time I have for nonblogging activity.

Looking forward to beginning here again.

Seeking Time: The Unit System

Very early in my seeking time journey someone told me about an article in Poets & Writers by author Ellen Sussman in which she described something she called the unit system. 

She said she worked for 45 minutes of an hour, then spent 15minutes doing something that wasn't work-related. Then she'd go back to work for another 45 minutes. And repeat. The benefits, she said, were: 

1. During the 45 minutes that she worked, it was easier to stay on task when she knew she'd have a break in another X minutes
2. During those 15 minutes that she wasn't working, her "unconscious thought" could often continue working on a writing problem, which was helpful when she went back to work.

She had some science to support this work, research related to graduate students managing time for writing. 

Again, all you did was work for 45 minutes, break for 15 and then begin writing again for another 45 minutes. Later I would realize I am a minimalist. I love how minimal this work method is.

Like the Unit System

Over the years, I kept stumbling upon articles supporting working in what might be described as sprints or short units of time, like Sussman's plan.

• A study suggested recognizing "that you have a finite attentional window––and structure your workflow to be congruent with that capacity. This speaks to how we’ve talked about how work is a series of sprints––and to be our most productive and most creative, we need to unplug throughout our workdays." 
• Tony Scwartz recommends working in 90-minute blocks because at the end of ninety minutes, "we reach the limits of our capacity to work at the highest level." Then we need to renew. At his blog, Schwartz referred to the work pattern he suggests--90 minutes of work, followed by a break--as "mental intervals." Like the unit system but different.
• The fairly well-known Pomodoro Technique recommends working in 25-minute units of time, taking a 5-minute break, then going back to work for 25 minutes. Like 45-minutes but different.

All the above involve simple strategies. 

The Value of Small Units of Time 

For years I used the unit system daily. I will admit, the 45-minutes on, 15-minutes off system has failed for me the last few years. I still embrace small work periods, though, even without following a work, break, work, break pattern, for two reasons.

First, the idea that we should work in 90-minute, 45-minute, or even 25-minute units means we have accepted that we can do something in small amounts of time. We don't need to have a summer to write. We don't need a formal retreat, a three-day weekend, a day.  

In The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer at Literary Hub Olivia Campbell quotes author Alison Stine:  

"You can't be precious about writing if you have kids. You can't be fastidious or fussy. You can't always write at the cool coffee shop. I applied for a NEA grant at Burger King: They had free wifi and an indoor children's playground...I wrote my most recent novel draft during my son's remote school Zoom meetings. My first novel, Road Out Of Water, I wrote at the local skatepark, where my son belonged to the skate club."

Stine recognized that she could adapt small units of time to use for writing. It's not unusual to read of mothers who write working like this.

Additionally, psychologist Kelly McGonigal has talked about the what-the-hell-effect, in which people give up on a project because they feel bad about their lack of success with it. As in "It's 2:30, and I haven't written yet. The day is shot. What the hell. I'll try again tomorrow." With the unit system, we don't have to feel bad about ourselves for not starting work yet, because we realize at 2:30 we have two and a half hours before dinner to work. Or we have an hour before the kids get home. Even a half an hour can be helpful.  

I like the psychological impact of the unit system. It isn't just a way of managing time. It's a way of thinking about it. The thinking aspect becomes part of our view of ourselves and how we work.

That's the part that's kept me using it and maybe even kept me writing.

 

Seeking Time: Begin Again

I said recently that back during the fourteen years that I was writing about time regularly, "I was hungry for ways to get things done and sometimes even finding a few." 

One of my favorite fews is begin again.

Yes, Begin Again Comes from Meditation, Not Time Management

Begin Again is a concept from meditation. In Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics authors Dan Harris, Jeff Warren, and Carlyle Adler describe beginning again as the most important step in meditation. "The whole game is to notice when you're distracted, and begin again. And again. And again." Kelly McGonigal says In The Willpower Instinct that having to keep bringing your wandering mind back to your breath (beginning again) while meditating develops the brain. 

In my dabbling in meditation I have never seen begin again used as anything but a positive. 

That's Right. We've Done Nothing Wrong

I consider beginning again on a par with the writing advice to keep your butt-in-chair or write every day. The main difference is that beginning again doesn't involve guilt. Butt-in-chair and write every day carry with them a sense of othering. "Keeping your butt in a chair is what we writers do." "To be a writer, you have to write every day." 

But, remember, most of us are the kinds of writers who can't support ourselves with our writing. We've got a day job to keep us alive. For many of us, there are kids, sick relatives, moves to be made, newly diagnosed illness, depression over our lousy careers, existential dread...Those things are all going to happen and keep us, at least at times, from keeping those butts in chairs and writing every day. Kelly McGonigal has said (again In The Willpower Instinct) that self-criticism undermines motivation and self-control, leading us to give in, to give up. Feeling we are less than because we're being judged for not being able to live like writers are supposed to live is unlikely to be a positive for us.

Beginning again can be. We can get past those life issues or find a way to deal with them and then we can begin again.   

You Can Look Forward to Beginning Again

When we've done the begin again thing a few times, we find ourselves looking forward to it. Maybe it's because beginning again means whatever was standing in the way of our writing is over or we're managing it now. Maybe it's because we like sitting at our laptop in whatever passes as our workspace and know we'll enjoy getting back there again. Maybe it's because we're writers, and writers like nothing better than being able to begin writing again.

To paraphrase Dan Harris and company, "The whole game is to begin again. And again. And again." 

Seeking Time: A 24-Hour Readathon? In My Day, We Did 48.

I learned of Dewey's 24-Hour Readathon, which is happening today, nine minutes before it started. For a hot second I considered being all impulsive, dropping everything, and taking part. Believe me, I have way more than 24-hours of reading to do. But in my search for time, I'm try to stay on-task, and the task this Saturday involves some invasive plants at the back of my yard and a wide array of additional activities both work- and personal-related. Taking a day off to read will have a bad impact on how I use my time next week.

But a community reading binge is very attractive. I know, because I've done them.

The 48-Hour Book Challenge

I believe I have a couple of readers still with me from back in the day when there was a children's lit blogger community. And for ten years that community took part in The 48-Hour Book Challenge. We didn't just read for 48-hours. We blogged about what we were reading. We were fierce.

Karen Yingling of Ms. Yingling Reads ran a #MGReadathon in 2022 that I took part in. I don't read many children's books these days, so I don't know if that's still happening. 

I think there are definite benefits to binge reading, and I've been trying to work what I think of as a targeted weekend reading retreat into my life for months. I'm struggling to find the time to do that.