Time Management Tuesday: Everything You Do Speaks to Everything You Didn't Do

This is one of those flash essays that begins with something that seems totally unrelated to the topic but is in reality a hooky lead-in to what the writer wants to address. You have been warned.

I spent two-and-a-half days of Thanksgiving weekend on a sewing retreat. In my laundry/sewing room. In my basement. By myself, though I found out yesterday that someone I know would have come sewed with me, if I'd thought to ask her. I hadn't done a sewing retreat since 2022. This time I was making shopping bags out of blue jeans and cloth Christmas bags out of remnants of Christmas material from years gone by, as well as some new fabric. I also mended Donkey.

This is what I believe is called unnecessary creation, which I read about in an essay by Todd Henry in a book called Manage Your Day-to-Day. Unnecessary creation involves creative activity engaged in by people who work in some other creative area. An example would be a writer who normally writes regularly who spends some time doing some sewing, a different type of creativity. The theory is that involvement in some other kind of creativity will spur your regular, daily creativity.

I have found this to be the case, particularly while playing with journals and reading during vacations. Or binge cooking. Something else happened with this sewing retreat, though.

But Unnecessary Creation Takes So Much Time!

My sewing retreat was a terrific experience. However, by Sunday I was dwelling on something I once read..."Everything you do speaks to everything you didn't do." There were other things, at least one of them being work-related, that I didn't do that weekend, and by midafternoon Sunday they were beginning to hang over me like death and taxes. I got a couple of them done that evening, but still I was very aware that there had been an opportunity cost for my weekend.

You can read about opportunity cost in an interview with Dan Ariely, also in Manage Your Day-to-Day. (Ariely's work, by the way, is the inspiration for the TV show The Irrational.) When you spend time on Activity 1, you no longer have the opportunity to use it on Activity 2. While I was spending time in my basement creating shopping bags out of old blue jeans, I couldn't spend that time on something else. 

What I Really Want to Write About is My Holiday Hell Projects

What this all is leading to is the Advent/Holiday Hell Projects I've been doing since 2021. You know, the project that involves me starting a different piece of short-form writing every day between December 1 and December 25. The idea being that these were all starts I could pick up and run with the next year.

This year I've been revisiting the starts from earlier years. Anything I like I do some more work on and move to the 2024 file. There have been quite a number of them. I only just started looking at the 2022 starts.

While I did finish, submit, and publish 8 of the 31 pieces from 2021, I did nothing with the other 23. Some of them I think were good and I could have gone somewhere with them. At least 1 I might have tried submitting somewhere as is. Instead, I forgot about them. I did even less with the starts from 2022 and 2023.

Why?

I can tell you why. During those years...years...I was working on an adult novel, 143 Canterbury Road. I was working on it even though I hadn't been able to sell a novel since before 2008, and I've never sold an adult novel. 

I was desperate to finish that book, though, and paid a very high opportunity opportunity cost for it. The time it took me to write that book I couldn't spend on short-form work, even though the last few years short-form work is the only writing I've been able to publish. 

In a lecture last week, author Steve Almond said, "You write about what you can't get rid of by other means." That was certainly the case with 143 Canterbury Road. The setting and some secondary characters were torn from the headlines of my life and writing about them was a sort of therapy. 

But therapy isn't free. My therapy had a hefty opportunity cost, because it kept me from other kinds of writing that I would almost certainly have been more successful with.

I'm out of therapy now, and 2025 is another year.

Creativity DOES Spur Creativity!

You may recall that I spent last week on a home-based, DIY sewing retreat. In my sewing/laundry room. In my cellar. In part it was to get rid of some sewing work that was hanging over my head. In part it was due to the weight of run-of-the-mill chaos on my shoulders. In part it was because I thought spending time on one kind of creativity would benefit my writing, because creativity spurs creativity.

This retreat worked on all counts. 

The Benefit To My Writing

Last week I came up with various ideas for my work in progress. I will admit that early most mornings I spent a little time reading a chapter of that. But the bulk of my days involved sewing. The writing "work" that did came about as a side benefit should help a great deal with moving forward on this manuscript.

What we're talking about here are breakout experiences, which occur when you've absorbed material about some project/work problem and then moved away from it. They can happen while driving, showering, walking, or doing anything that either engages your mind minimally or in a different way from the original project. 

I came away from this retreat not only with new work material but with new energy, as if getting back from a vacation that involved some relaxation. 

I can't claim this retreat was modeled on what I think of as traditional writers' retreats--go into a cabin and write. I've never been to one of those. The few writers' retreats I've attended were called retreats but were actually short conferences with all the time committed to presentations of some sort. 

This was modeled more on retreats my sister has attended for rubber stampers. Those appear to be intensive work times, with people sitting at long tables with materials they've brought with them and working all day, into the evening. The photograph I saw of one of those events had a sweatshop quality to it.  Those people generate work.

I will definitely do something like this again, creating a retreat around some kind of necessary creation, when I'm at a struggling point with a project and/or feeling overwhelmed. 

EDITED To Add:

A Sewing/Writing Parallel

Last week's sewing included binding some pieces from a quilt I'd taken apart last year to make wall hangings and using some of my extensive collection of old denim to make shopping bags. The engineer at my house referred to all that as "creative repurposing."

Repurposing is something I've done with writing, too, reworking older pieces. Earlier this month I did it with You Are the Parents of Sixth Graders. Act Like It, humor for adults that began years ago as a short story for middle grade readers.