Time Management Tuesday: September Is A Temporal Landmark. A Big One.

Author, artist, and Facebook friend Dana Meachen Rau  has committed to creating a collage a day during the month of September. A back to collage challenge. (Get it? Back to college?) She's posting her projects on her Facebook page. 

Dana's September plan illustrates two time management techniques we've discussed here.

• One is that she is using the month of September as what I call a set-aside time.  It's time we set aside for specific tasks. Time we're going to use in a particular way.
• The other is that she's taking advantage of September being a temporal landmark, a calendar event that creates a fresh start opportunity.

Dana has inspired me to republish, as part of this year's observance of Original Content's twentieth anniversary, a blog post from 2016 on the value of the month of September for managing time. I was on vacation when I wrote that post, which explains the beginning and ending.

When you finish reading this, you may think, oh, I can't do anything with this, because it's already September. I needed to plan ahead. The month of September isn't even half over, people. Run with it.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Time Management Tuesday: Now Is The Time For Change. Hurry!

I know, I know. I said I wasn't going to be blogging until next month. However, I actually read those newspapers hotels provide gratis, and I read something last week that will not keep. It is time sensitive.

First off, I'm sure you all recall that I've written here about the significance of beginnings and endings of units of time.  January, the beginning of a major unit of time, the year, is a big moment here at OC with the creation of goals and objectives.

Well.

Last week The Wall Street Journal carried an article about the end of one unit of time and the beginning of another and how that beginning has become very important. In Now Is the Real New Year, the WSJ reports that September is now "the start of the real new year." It lists masses of ways that September is now outpacing January for people making changes in their lives. And there's a couple of statements that suggest that September works better than January for doing this. "In January, postholiday exhaustion can make New Year's weight-loss resolutions feel even tougher, nutritionists say..." and 69% of respondents in a British survey "believe small improvements in September are easier to achieve than New Year's resolutions."

There's not a lot in this article explaining why this is happening. There's talk of shifting back to routines after the summer and the Jewish New Year coming in the fall. But what is going on that is so big that it blows January, the stereotypical time for changing our behavior and getting started on new projects, out of the water?

My own wild theory is that, at least here in the U.S., we have generations of being enslaved to the school year and its calendar. We're tied to it as students, ourselves, and then those of us who have children are tied to it again when they are students. Teachers are tied to it. Children's writers who do school presentations are tied to it. The school year, which begins in September, has become more meaningful than the calendar year because something truly happens when it begins. January, not so much.

So can we use this sense of a new beginning and a time to get started fresh in our work?

I can't, obviously. I'm on vacation. But maybe you can.

Time Management Tuesday: Essentialism And Set-Aside Times

Here we go with the fourth and final portion of our discussion of how we writers can apply Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown to our lives. Today we’re talking about one of my favorite time management techniques, what I call set aside times. (Sometimes I've hyphenated it, sometimes I haven't. I accept that.) I'm talking a chunk of time--a weekend, a week, a month, or even more-- that we have set aside to do one thing. You can think of it as binging. Binge writing, binge editing, binge submitting.

Binging whatever you think is essential.

Life is chaos, as I've mentioned here a number of times over the last couple of years. Planning to work in blocks of time that we've committed to specific things helps to control that chaos, at least for a little while. To quote myself,  "Looking forward to our future, which we, of course, expect to go on forever, it's hard to get a handle on controlling things, because will power and self-discipline are finite." With shorter periods of time, it is possible to get some control. Additionally, if we try to manage our time around what is essential to us, that's not going to work long-term, either, because, as I said in an earlier post in this arc, that keeps changing. So we can't rely on just defining what is essential to us to help contain chaos for a lifetime.

But we should be able to use it to contain the chaos for a weekend, a week, or a month. Maybe even a semester, if we've decided a class is essential right now.

Planning

In his book, McKeown speaks briefly about extreme preparation. Preparation is going to be a big help in working with set-aside times. In the lead up to any kind of set-aside time, we'll want to plan: 

• To get other small work jobs out of the way before we start so they won't divert us from the essential task 
• To get as much pre-writing work done as possible
• To decide what pre-writing work we want to do, if that's what the set-aside time is for
• To coordinate the set-aside time with our day jobs so that we aren't trying to work intently on something essential to our writing at the same time we know we'll have extra work for the day job
• To get as much personal life work out of the way or under control, meaning we don't plan trips or guests during the set-aside time, and to try to find a way to bring family obligations down to a minimum for that period.  

A Perfect Example

A perfect example of applying essentialism to writers lives in a set-aside time is National Novel Writers' Month. That has helped many writers jump starting new projects or completing first drafts. They had one essential thing they were doing for one month--writing 50,000 words.

You can find a multitude of information on-line about preparing for National Novel Writing Month, much of it involving plotting and working on character development or settings before November 1, NaNoWriMo's starting date. Additional planning could involve keeping your November weekends clear of commitments, finding help with the kids, getting meals made ahead of time. (That may only be important to me.)

The more plans you can get in place before NaNoWriMo or any set-aside time begins, the better your chances of being successful with it. 

 

Round-up Of Original Content's Essentialism Posts

A Summer Reading Arc On Essentialism

Essentialism And Work Clutter

Essentialism And Choice

Situational Essentialism

Time Management Tuesday: I Made A Mistake With This Year's May Days

 Last year I described May Days as "that month of the year when I get together with some Facebook friends to set aside a time, in this case the month of May, to work on something special."  Notice I said some thing.

At the beginning of May this year I sat down with my bullet journal and listed seven things I wanted to do. Seven. While planning is good, that plan was not.

I did three of them, did three things I hadn't planned to do, and barely touched the chapters of a book-long project that I really wanted to work on in May. I did get to them the first few days of June, which sounds like a Hurray!, but realized that I needed to go back and do some tweaking to make a basic change to my main character in order to proceed.

If I had only worked on just those chapters during May, I would have found that out earlier, presumably, and been further along in that project that just never seems to end.

Now I did get some short-form work done and published last month, but a set-aside time like May Days can mean some intense work on something special and I missed that opportunity by trying to do too much. 

I guess we can say not all is lost, because this experience should tie-in with the book we're going to be reading this summer. 

But that begins next week.

Time Management Tuesday: The Chaos Theory Of Time Management

I think from now on the bulk of my time management efforts are going to revolve around living with chaos. We are all a moment away from a time-consuming crisis, another illness (our own or someone else's), a breakdown, or storm damage; we are all a moment away from having today, tomorrow, or most of this week--hell, most of next month--totally consumed with something unrelated to what we had planned. 

You can be broken by chaos or you can roll with it. I'm still working on rolling with it.

A Case Study Using Set Aside Time, The Unit System, And Beginning Again

The case study, of course, involves me, as so many of my case studies do. For the past two months, I've been functioning as back up child care during a period involving a change in school schedules as well as one of those family illnesses that circulates around a couple of weeks and takes the regular child care provider out of commission, as well. 

Set-aside Time. My first step in dealing with this was to treat the period while I was going to be doing this particular part-time job as a set-aside time, like the May Days program I do with a Facebook group or National Novel Writing Month, when people set-aside the month of November to try to write the first draft of a book. During the time I was going to be committing a lot of time to family assistance, I would shift how I work. I wouldn't try to complete any particular work task. Instead, I would try to do something every day. 

This period started at the beginning of March, the beginning of a month, and the beginning of a time period is significant. It's easy to feel excited about starting something new then. 

Unit System. The second step in dealing with this situation was to accept that I didn't need huge periods of time in order to do something. I didn't need the whole month, a whole week, a retreat, a weekend, a day. In fact, there's a great deal of evidence that working over long periods of time actually decreases the quality of work. That's the argument for breaking your time into units or segments. 

The point being, having only a short period of time to work most days isn't a reason to give into the what-the-hell effect . Do something. Do anything.

During the month of March, I maintained a folder in my word processing program and every day I had to put something into that I had done. It could be reading a NetGalley ARC, which will become a blog post here. It could be working on one of several humor pieces I have in progress. It could be research. It could be working on a chapter.

Working like that during the month of March I was able to get a chapter started in the never-ending book I'm working on, finish revising a humorous essay into a humor piece, format it, and submit it, revise a story from years back and submit that, and submit a manuscript to an agent. 

It wasn't orderly, but I did something and moved forward. All the submissions have already been rejected, but one was a good rejection. A great rejection with feedback and the offer to look at a revision. This is a very positive outcome, and it came during a period when I wasn't working at my best.

Unfortunately, the end of time periods are just as important as the beginnings. When the end of March came, I couldn't maintain that daily work load, as minor as it was, because my set-aside time was over. Done.

Begin Again. And that is when beginning again comes into play. The end is in sight with the childcare situation. Gail shouldn't be twisting little minds much longer. I have a couple of days this week to get back on my feet and prepare for my more normal schedule next week. And then after that comes this year's May Days Facebook initiative, which I've found helpful for dealing with chaos in the past. What happened in March and most of April is in the past. It's behind me. I am beginning again.

Now, of course, that's only one possible future timeline, because remember my first paragraph--we are one call or text from chaos. But if I don't begin again next week, I'll try to use the May Days program to get back on task with a daily writing chore. That's a plan! 

Either way, I will begin again. 

Time Management Tuesday: Living Chaotically

I just finished up another May Days, that month of the year when I get together with some Facebook friends to set aside a time, in this case the month of May, to work on something special. For some people it's finishing a draft, for others it's editing, or getting started on something new. Our leader checks in once a week with encouragement. There's a lot less enthusiasm at the end of the month than there is at the beginning, but, nonetheless, a good-ish time is had by all.

I Love Set-Aside Times

I use the term set-aside time for blocks of time set aside for a special project. You see them a lot in writing. National Novel Writing Month is a famous one. Last November I wrote flash for a month. Last summer I wrote it for six weeks while taking a flash writing workshop. I've been doing May Days for years, and my May group gets together in October to do it again.

Set-Aside Times have a couple of benefits.

• Concentrating on one thing helps you to slow down. You're not frantically juggling multiple tasks and can thus be more productive with one of them. Working harder on just one thing is a relief.
• Working on one thing for a relatively short time helps us to manage chaos. At least that's what I speculated last year, and last month it actually worked for me.
  

 

My Plan For May Days

For this year's May Days my goal was to get through first drafts of 3 chapters, which I thought might get me to an important turning point in the story. Recently I had only been doing 2 chapters a month, so this would be a push. I wasn't thinking in terms of writing every day or of writing a certain number of words. I was thinking in terms getting to a certain point.

Living Chaotically

As so often happens for me, I started May Days unable to work for the first four or five days of the month to tend to family. I can't even remember how long I had to put off starting, but it was a significant chunk of time. 

 

I was experiencing my old friend, chaos. I took a breath, didn't give in to the what-the-hell effect, began again, and leaned on whatever other tricks I'd learned for dealing with chaos.

Then I learned another one, which I'm calling Living Chaotically. 

Remember, I was only thinking about getting to a certain point in my manuscript. The only way to get there, I decided, was to give in to the chaos and give up my weekends. If I couldn't get to the end of a chapter or some other good stopping place by Friday, then I would have to give up the order I've established in my life--no working on weekends--and get to those points by working then. Essentially, I was adding more chaos.

But only for the month of May. I thought I could live with this kind of chaos for one month. And I could.

What Did I Get For Living Chaotically?

I didn't actually get to the point I wanted to get to, because I added at least one more chapter. And then I was noticing that the point I wanted to get to was coming too late in the story. And then I realized I needed to start another draft. 

Since I am a big believer in not pushing through to the end of a first draft when you know something's wrong, that was exciting rather than despair-making. Beginning again, in my experience, always leads to moving forward. 

So I was very happy with my May Days. I got some significant work done, but more importantly, I found a method I plan to use again to deal with and become comfortable with chaos.

Time Management Tuesday: Managing Chaos With Set-Aside Time

Back in 2012 I did my first writing project with my May Days Facebook group. I started calling setting aside big blocks of time like this for particular writing activities...ah...set- aside time. I've written about it a few times here over the years. In fact, just this past August I wrote about this issue in relation to an article by Anne Marie O'Connor in which she referred to set-aside times as "concentrated blocks of time." I was hopeful organizing time in that way could help writers slow down and become more productive.

Well, my group gets together every October, too, so I have started a new set-aside period for working on one of my goals for this year, the "YA thriller that could become an adult thriller." Since I'm now thinking in terms of chaos, I'm hoping set-asides will be useful for that, too. 

Why Set-Aside Times Could Slow You Down

To quote me: "Sometimes you have to juggle multiple projects--editing one thing while submitting another or marketing still something else. But finding blocks of time you can dedicate to just one thing slows you down, because you're not racing to work on multiple tasks. And that can increase productivity, because you can see some work getting done."

Why Set-Aside Times Could Manage Chaos

Organizing time like this could also help with managing the chaos of our lives long enough to do something. Mainly because we're only trying to do the something for a specific, and relatively short, period of time. Looking forward to our future, which we, of course, expect to go on forever, it's hard to get a handle on controlling things, because will power and self-discipline are finite. And time management is situational. We can't foresee what situations are going to arise over the next year or multiple years that will have an impact on how we are able to spend our time. Did you see the 2020 Pandemic coming? I rest my case.

But shorter periods of time are much easier to deal with chaos-wise. We can make a good guess about what's going to happen in the next month and plan for it. We have a good chance of extending our will power that long. Or maybe we can do it for a week? Or a long weekend? 

Can Set-Asides Counteract Chaos?

I've actually signed up for a 5-day mindfulness event this week. Because:

• Yeah. I am chaos. What could possibly go wrong with doing two set-aside activities at once? What? You say two simultaneous set-asides contradicts the whole issue of dedicating your time and energy to one thing? Won't that cause chaos? Those of us who are chaos just grab for the gusto.
• The mindfulness event is short. It's 5 days. I'm not planning some big mindfulness activity for the rest of my life. Talk about looking for trouble.
  

So my hope is that the shortness of this new event will counteract my running toward chaos with arms wide open.

Because when struggling with chaos, my thought is less is always going to be more.

Time Management Tuesday: Slowing Down With Concentrated Blocks Of Time

So a few weeks ago, I started an arc on slowing down work by using suggestions from Anne Marie O'Connor's Why You Should Be Single-Tasking, Not Multitasking & How To Make The Switch. 

I've already covered using to-do lists. In this final post I'll be writing about what O'Connor calls concentrated blocks of time. This is something I've called set-aside time.

Concentrated Blocks Of Time Can Be More Than An Hour Without Internet

O'Connor talks about shutting off unnecessary technology in order to concentrate. I'm talking about actually planning to use big chunks of time for a specific writing project or writing-related task.

• Think National Novel Writing Month
• Think the May Days Facebook Group I often take part in. 
• Think the time frame Martha Alderson uses in Boundless Creativity
• Think traditional writers' retreats 
• Think writers who teach who use school breaks as a set-aside time to get one particular project started or finished

Keep in mind you don't actually have to complete an entire project in one of these blocks. You decide what you're going to do with it. Will your block be for generating new work, just getting something started? Completing a draft? Working on scenes? Revising? The idea is to plan what you're going to do for a specific block of time and then concentrate on just that instead of running from task to task. 

I've had good luck with setting aside blocks of time this year, using May Days and Alderson's time frame to get major work done on a blueprint/outline and using June to turn out some writing for that some project. Mid-July and the first half of August have been dedicated to flash writing as part of a six-week workshop I've been involved with on that subject. I'm going to stick with that and submitting flash for the rest of the month.

I want to plan the rest of the year so that I'm dedicating blocks of time--weeks or months--to working on a specific writing or research or submission project. 

Blocks Of Time Slow You Down And Make You More Productive 

Sometimes you have to juggle multiple projects--editing one thing while submitting another or marketing still something else. But finding blocks of time you can dedicate to just one thing slows you down, because you're not racing to work on multiple tasks. And that can increase productivity, because you can see some work getting done.

Time Management Tuesday: Set Aside Times

My May Days group started work today. This is a Facebook group whose members encourage each other to write during the month of May. I've been looking forward to this all year. In fact, prepping for May Days was one of my objectives for this year. I only managed to get five chapters blueprinted, so my goal for this month is to write those five chapters, which, added to what I've completed, will give me twelve completed first draft chapters.

Set Aside Time

I think of units of time like May Days and National Novel Writing Month as "set aside times." It's time we set aside for specific tasks. Back in 2012 I said of set aside times:

"What we might be talking about with this kind of set aside scheduling is binge writing, a term I hadn't heard for years until someone on Facebook linked to some interviews on it just last week. Author Sally Bosco interviewed self-described binge writers Emily Asad and Leslie Davis Guccione. Note that both authors are not binge writers in the sense that they are moved by a muse to write like crazy. They prep for their intensive writing periods."

I'm definitely binge writing this month, on one specific project that I've prepared for for months. I can't take off on any spontaneous writing tangents. Maintain some impulse control, Gail.

Reality

Forget about the actual writing. Setting aside this much time for one particular project is extremely difficult. Today is the first day of this project, and except for some reading of and tinkering with early chapters I didn't do a thing, because I had family members here for lunch. I knew this was coming up and thought, Well, I'll start working on Monday, the day before. Nope. Had another family member here yesterday. Then last week an appointment came up for tomorrow. I almost had to take an elderly family member to the dentist the week after next, but, thankfully, that fell through. Now there's talk of some of us driving to another state in a couple of weeks to pick up still another family member.

Note that I don't have young children or even older ones living here. I don't have a day job. And, yet, look what happens to my time, over and over again.

Dealing with family is a whole different management issue when you're trying to set aside big chunks of time for projects.