Time Management Tuesday: Did We Carry Through With That Decision We Made?

Well, the decision I made, anyway. The one about staying home to work instead of going to last weekend's New England Society of Children's Writers and Illustrators regional conference. Did I actually do anything with the time I created for myself?

I won't keep you in suspense. The answer is yes.

Friday Night

First off, many of my NESCBWI colleagues who did go to Springfield posted pictures on Facebook of the fun time they had going out to eat with friends. As luck would have it, I went out with friends Friday night. We had fun. 

Saturday

 

I worked three-plus hours mid-day Saturday and some more late in the day. I outlined/blue printed/underpainted three different chapters. For one of them, this involved a major fix. I also did some research for this project. In terms of time, this was the equivalent of attending three workshops.

Then I went outside to do some yard work.

I'm not mentioning this because I'm one of those bloggers who thinks everyone is interested in every minor moment of her life, in spite of that restaurant picture above. No, I'm mentioning this because of what happened while I spent an hour raking this bank. What happened is that I realized I needed another chapter for the book I'd worked on that morning.

• I was rushing the ending
• There were lots of chapters in the first half of the book, making the second half seem skimpy.
• This new chapter would be about yard work. Seriously, it should work. 

That new chapter came about because while cleaning up the day lilies and the fern bank, I had a breakout experience, something I haven't written about here for a while. In short, what happens with a breakout experience is  you spend some time working with a problem, then do something mindless, like raking. While your brain relaxes because nothing is required of it, it continues working on some level on what it was working on before. And...BOOM...a breakout experience.

Sunday

We had plans to attend an organized walk Sunday afternoon. Walking, I thought. That's like raking while covering a lot more ground. So I made a point of working Sunday morning, underpainting that new chapter I'd come up with Saturday afternoon, for one thing. Work in the morning, I'd have a breakout experience in the afternoon, right?

Well, no. Not a thing. Not a single thought came Sunday afternoon. Except for the one about doing a blog post on why this happened. Stay tuned.

Sometime over this weekend I also knocked off a 800-word satirical essay about my experience without the Internet last week. It's unlikely I'll be able to publish it, but it was a good experience getting something done that fast.

So I made good on my plan and had a successful "conference" weekend.

Time Management Tuesday: My 2015 Time Management Disaster

I made a decision in May that knocked me off the time management wagon the rest of the year.

I decided to give up the unit system to work "in bits and pieces" because that work strategy was triggering breakout experiences that were extremely helpful while working on the first draft of The Mummy Hunters. Now, some people would say that the unit system is working in bits and pieces, anyway, because you work for 45-minutes (or another segment of time) and do something else for 15. But I'm talking smaller bits and pieces. Bits and pieces that stopped leading to breakout experiences. Bits that eventually led to pieces spent on-line.

My impulse control is shot.

I did finish a first draft of The Mummy Hunters, though the last portion of that draft was pretty weak. And I've nearly finished a second draft.  But I'm not at all satisfied with how much I've done on other projects these past seven months. Plus the last portion of that second mummy draft is like doing a first draft again, because, as I said, the original first draft was pretty weak. First drafts...Yeah.

In The Throes Of The End Of One Unit Of Time And Eagerly Looking Forward To A New One

I'm hoping to have this second draft done by New Year's Eve. Even with that deadline, I'm struggling to stay on task. Why? My theory is that it's because this deadline involves the end of a year, a significant unit of time. It's an ending. At the end of a unit of time, we're kind of worn out. If nothing else, our willpower, which is finite, is wearing thin. Plus, if you're unhappy with what you've been doing during that unit of time that is almost over, as I am, it's hard to stay psyched. Or is that just me?

That new year that's coming up is an entirely different thing. It's like starting the day over, rested and with impulse control intact. There will be new goals for next year. Hey, everything is going to be different.

It's kind of a Zenny thing, isn't it? We put the old year, the old unit of time, behind us and try to live in the new one.

It's going to be a lot easier for me to do that, if I finish that draft.

Time Management Tuesday: Not Recommending Guilt And Emotional Blackmail, But...

To be honest, I fell off the time management wagon this summer. I'm trotting along beside it, at least. I wasn't left in a heap in the road. But I am not working like a well oiled machine.

Summer is a situational time management problem for many writers who are also primary caregivers for school-age children. The issue was discussed last night at writers' group. I am having a situational issue, but it's not around my personal life. I am pushing through on the rough draft of a new work.

Different Types Of Writing

Generating new work is dramatically different from revising. I find it much more difficult, for example.

I'm an organic writer, so it's hard for me to isolate a plot from the entire story and get that lined up before I start working. Or even while I'm working. I have to work on the story as an entire organism.  As a result, I find myself doing lots of revising as I go along. If I'm stuck because I don't know how to move forward, I'll go back and revise. That actually does help, but what it has meant is that over these past four or five months I've spent a lot of time revising this particular work. So when I got to the point of new work, I, shall we say, was not accustomed to it?

Situational Writing? 

 

What I've been doing a lot of this summer while drafting new work is looking for breakout experiences, those moments when things just come to you. I described my method at the beginning of June:

I started running with the bits and pieces plan.

The last few weeks instead of getting my usual life activities out of the way and then getting into my four or five hours of work time, I took a look at my manuscript first thing in the morning and then did something else. I went back to the manuscript, then went back to something else. Over and over again while I was at the "something else," I worked out problems with the manuscript or came up with new idea.

This is a first draft. I have trouble with first drafts. Generating new material is not my favorite thing to do. I'm wondering if maybe when I'm in a first draft situation this is how I should be managing my time. Maybe this should be first draft process for me.

As I said then, I thought of this as being one of those situational things. Perhaps when I am working in this type of situation, in first draft mode, this is how I need to work. And I believe I have only a couple of chapters to go on this first draft. So it could be said to be working.

But I am functioning in a totally random way. I'm not working in units. I'm not using transition time. I'm not staying on task. I'm not shifting between projects the way I feel I should. And I have to wonder...if I had forced myself to just look at this #!!@ monitor for 45 minutes at a time instead of cooking up breakout experiences the way I've been doing, just because it feels easier and less stressful, would this thing be done by now?

Which brings me to Can Anything "Make" You Write? by Gina Barreca. Her time management technique appears to involve guilt and emotional blackmail. "So what if it’s not healthy? You want to be emotionally balanced, swim with the dolphins. You want to write? Learn to deal with the sharks." I definitely refuse to use guilt as a motivator, because according to Kelly McGonigal (who I kind of worship), it's supposed to undermine willpower, and God knows, it's not as if I have so much of that that I can afford to risk undermining any of it. But I am leaning on emotional blackmail right now.

Right after Labor Day, I'm leaving on a lengthy vacation. I am leaving whether I have finished this draft or not. How much I enjoy it, however, will be determined by whether or not I finish.

I'm going back to work, damn it.

Time Management Tuesday: A Change In Process During May Days

Another May has come and gone, and so has  May Days, what I call a set-aside time, meaning it's a unit of time I commit to working on one project. I did better with working every day then I think I've ever done before. 

In order to do that, though, I had to work around a lot of family stuff on weekends and sometimes on week days. (There is family stuff here all the time.) I was working in bits and pieces, I had to work in a motel room a couple of days, and I was frequently working at the kitchen counter while something was cooking. What I found was that I was having breakout experiences all over the place. So I started running with the bits and pieces plan.

The last few weeks instead of getting my usual life activities out of the way and then getting into my four or five hours of work time, I took a look at my manuscript first thing in the morning and then did something else. I went back to the manuscript, then went back to something else. Over and over again while I was at the "something else," I worked out problems with the manuscript or came up with new idea.

This is a first draft. I have trouble with first drafts. Generating new material is not my favorite thing to do. I'm wondering if maybe when I'm in a first draft situation this is how I should be managing my time. Maybe this should be first draft process for me.

I'm sticking with this method for the time being, hoping to get an entire rough draft done in the next couple of months.

And, yes, I know there are lots of people these days who do a rough draft in six weeks, who do an entire book in a few months. Zen tells me that desiring what others have or are able to do will only lead to unhappiness.

Time Management Tuesday: Keeping Your Head In The Game

I am using my May Days to put a lot of time into one project, something I've done the last two May Days. The same project, I'm sorry to say. But, once again during this May Days I am experiencing the value of trying to write every day on the same project. It's incredibly helpful for organic writers like myself. We have trouble isolating plot and planning out what we're going to do for an entire story. We deal with stories as a whole organism. If we have to stay away from that organism too long, it takes us a while to come back up to speed, because while we have a feel for our whole story, we aren't good on the details that are coming up. It's hard for us to pick up where we left off.

The May Days project forces us to write every day. For me, this meant spending some time at my laptop in a motel room between biking excursions this past weekend. Writing every day increases chances of having a breakout experience (at least it increases my chances), and I had one on a bike the next day. This led to taking notes on it while having lunch in a sandwich shop (my work for the day) and that led to a much easier transition back to work on Monday.


Whenever I find myself in a situation where I'm writing every day, even a tiny amount, I think, I've got to keep this up! Not because I accomplish so much (I did mention that I've been working on the same May Days project three years in a row, right?) but because it keeps my head in the game.

That is a huge plus for time management.

The Cupcake Project: The Value Of Writing Every Day

My long-suffering Facebook Friends heard me go on at length yesterday about the 120 plus or minus cupcakes I had to ice and box up. During a roughly 6-hour period I also made an additional two-dozen cupcakes that didn't need icing as well as some mini-meatloaves and asparagus for dinner.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Gail. But did you do any writing?

I did some yesterday morning. And that led to something happening yesterday during my cupcake binge.

While I was revising a chapter yesterday morning, I realized that a lot of what I was reading was similar to what I'd read in the chapter before. I felt that the new chapter was necessary because it dealt with the protagonist's parents' response to what he was doing. But this is a mystery, and the details being discussed had all appeared in the chapter before. If I couldn't come up with a new significant step in the story, I might need to eliminate a section. If I eliminated a section, I might be left with a hole in the plot that would need to be filled.

While I was working on cupcakes, the significant step I needed came to me. I had a breakout experience. With breakout experiences it's easy to focus on the breakout, because that idea/thought is so important. But the breakout can't come without some input first. You take in information, work to a point at which nothing more is happening for you, then let your brain relax with a totally different activity. Like icing and fancying up cupcakes.

So the work/input is important, maybe the most important part of the process.The more you work, the more opportunities you have for breakout experiences. Conversely, the less you work, the fewer opportunities you'll have for those breakouts. Writing every day won't insure a daily breakout experience, but it increases your opportunities for having them at some point.

In fact, writing every day helps make it possible for you to keep working when you're not, technically, working because you're relaxed brain is doing something with the material you provided it with earlier in the day.