Time Management Tuesday: Situational Essentialism

Part III in our discussion of  how we writers can apply Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown to our lives. 

While I find this book directed primarily to business executives (not that there's anything wrong with that), there are some ways that we can apply some of what McKeown writes about to the writing life.  One of them is to connect essentialism to the concept of Situational Time Management.

No one time management process is ever going to work for us throughout our lives. Life is chaos. We can't expect to come up with what is essential to our lives or work and expect it to hold true forever. What is essential to us right out of school is going to be different from what is essential to us ten or fifteen years later or essential to us another decade on. Or maybe even next year. Or  a few months from now. We have to keep evolving with the situations we find ourselves in. Accepting that and working with it is what I refer to as situational time management.

For writers, there's another whole level of situation that's going to keep changing, though in a pretty predictable way. 

Finding What Is Essential At Different Points In A Writing Life

One of the important points McKeown makes early in his book is that essentialists accept that we can't do everything. Thus, it's important that we prioritize what is essential to us so we can let other things go. Writers can do that in very situational ways.

• The Acquiring Craft Skills Situation--Actually learning to write is a first step that many writers undervalue. If you read on Medium, check out the many--many, many--articles on writing for Medium that focus on creating lots of content to become successful. There's not a lot on holding back and studying, practicing, or working with critique groups. There aren't a lot of professions where you can hang out a shingle or throw work out before the public with no training or experience. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that early in their careers, it's essential for writers to learn to write, whether we do it in traditional college courses, or in  workshops or by reading or some other way. While in this situation, we really don't need to be spending valuable, limited time on reading about and attending workshops on how to submit to agents or promoting and marketing books, because we don't have anything to submit or promote and market. The one essential is to learn how to do what we want to do.
• The Writing Situation--Again, until the project we're interested in is done, writing is our priority. Years ago I attended a writers group with a writer who had barely started a fantasy novel. She clearly was struggling with basics. But she was spending time and energy on promotional ideas. Much more recently I heard about a flash fiction writer who was also a college professor. She wrote in the summer. Writing was what was essential for her during that particular situation, when she had more time to give it. She made submitting essential the rest of the year, because submitting doesn't take the same level of time and involvement. It most definitely takes time, but not the kind of time that writing does. We're talking two different situations.
• The Submission Situation--The book/short story/essay is finished. Now we're in the submission situation when the search for agents and publications that might be interested in our work takes place. This is way more time consuming than it sounds. In addition to finding people who might be interested in what we have to offer, there is the issue of how to submit--How many pages or chapters does each agent want? Who requires a synopsis? Do all the publications we think might be interested in our short form work accept submissions by email or do some of them use Submittable? Trying to prioritize both submitting and writing at the same time can drain time and energy from both.
• The Marketing and Promotion Situation--It turns out every damn piece of published writing needs to be at least promoted (seeking attention for it, usually without money being involved) if not actually marketed (more traditional advertising that involves money). This becomes essential once something has been published. But not before. Again, prioritizing marketing and promotion at the same time that we're prioritizing submission or writing can mean that we're not doing any one of those things well.   

Overlap among these situations may occur, particularly for writers who are publishing regularly. Those of us who do that may still be in the Promoting Situation for Book B while we're in the Writing Situation for Book C. And writers who work primarily in short form writing may spend a lot of our reading time when we are in the Writing Situation with journals and other kinds of publications, which will give us a background knowledge in who is publishing the kind of work we do. That would give us a leg up when we get to the Submission Situation.

But overall determining the essential task for any particular situation can mean getting more done.

Time Management Tuesday: Mom Writers

Since reading that Ursula LeGuin once referred to herself as a middle-aged Portland housewife, I've been thinking about housewife writers. I will need to think about that some
more. 

But today I stumbled upon something that got me thinking about mom writers, which is like a housewife writer but also different. Are You a Mom Writer Thinking of Quitting? Read This First at Jane Friedman was a bit of a blast from my past. Guest writer Denise Massar's description of what she went through getting published while working as a full-time mom was different from my experience in that I was submitting directly to editors instead of agents (this was a long time ago), but on the other hand, the whipping back and forth between jobs/lives is very much the same.

Massar says,"Mom writers are wired to succeed at writing (and querying) because we can multitask like no other. We can switch gears in an instant." I can't agree with her first line, since I don't believe multi-tasking is an actual thing. However, that switching gears business is a whiplash inducing reality.

It Doesn't Get Any Better After You Start Publishing

Massar's description of submitting to agents prior to publishing books is very accurate. It is a job all by itself. As I said, I wasn't doing that during my high mother years. That came much later, after my career took a hit with the 2008 economic crisis, at which point I was dealing with eldercare, not childcare. The point where I considered throwing in the towel with writing came earlier, after I'd had a couple of books published. That was when I had two children in elementary and then middle school and was writing draft after draft of new books, swinging from one kind of work situation to another, depending on whether I had publishing deadlines to meet or was struggling to come up with ways to promote a new book or the books I already had in print. I also had periods when I was working up school presentations, which functioned, in part, to promote my books, but which needed to be promoted themselves. With writing, everything, absolutely everything, has to be promoted. (I will be promoting this blog post.)

I believe I actually said out loud to my husband that I needed to quit writing, because I wasn't doing a good enough job with it or the kids. I wanted to be better than that. I didn't quit, however. I don't remember what actually happened, though I am pretty persistent and obsessive and that may have been all it was. Then, of course, the kids grew up. And then the deadlines and promotional concerns dried up. It all took care of itself!

How Different Is The Mom Writer's Situation From That Of Other Writers?

I am, and it sounds as if Denise Massar was, talking about those women writers whose day job is...ah...momming, I guess we'll call it. But a great many women writers are momming while holding down entirely different day jobs. They're doing three jobs. I can't even touch what that life must be like for them. Are they mom writers? Are they doctor writers? Are they professor writers? Shop keeper writers, librarian writers, farmer writers? If I was struggling to switch gears in an instant, what are they doing?

What about dad writers?  Are things that different for them? Arguably you could say they were in the past, because society expected more of mothers than it did of fathers. But I don't know if that's the case, anymore. I'm seeing dads at home with kids, dads taking kids to doctors, dads taking kids to activities, dads taking time off from income producing jobs to stay home with sick kids. 

Certainly it can't be much different for dad writers who are the primary caregiver in the home. How many writing men planning to write while they cared for children got the surprise of their lives when they found out how much of their time was going to go to childcare? 

For that matter, a lot of writing moms were surprised to learn that fact of life. 

What Does This Have To Do With Time Management, Gail?

 

It all gets back to how our life situations are constantly changing. How we use our time today is determined by what we need to do today, which may be different from what we need to do tomorrow or next week. And what we need to do today is determined by who are today, which may be different from who we are tomorrow or next week. Writer or tinker or tailor or soldier or spy. Or mom.

Time Management Tuesday: Stay Calm And Carry On With Those Goals And Objectives

Yesterday is probably going to be the only full day of work I'm going to have until next Tuesday. A full week. We have no crisis here, no high temps, body aches, or runny noses, just the usual whack-a-mole family this-and-that. How did I manage that day, and how do I plan to manage whatever bits of time I'll find coming up over the next seven days?

I'm a broken record on this, folks.

Situational Time Management

This an acceptance thing. It's alright that we can't write every day because of family, income-producing work, tending to the apocalypse, and other types of obligations. Writing this week is different than writing last week or the week before, and it's going to be different than writing next week or next month. Don't panic!

The Unit System

Recognizing that it's not necessary to work in eight-hour shifts is a huge help. The knowledge that creative work, and, for that matter, many other kinds of work, can be done in small units or segments of time, when you're not washing your hands or wiping down the kitchen counters with disinfecting wipes, is encouraging. You can do something with 45 minutes or even 20 minutes. Again, do not panic, people!

Goals And Objectives

Knowing what you want to work on ahead of time may be the best technique for using time when you don't have a lot of it because you're going out to the store every other day to buy toilet paper, soap, and every kind of over-the-counter viral treatment you can think of. Determine your goals for a period--a year or the summer or a two-week quarantine period--and then decide what objectives/tasks you need to do to meet those goals. Then when you only have a day or a couple of hours or thirty minutes, you can work on a task you really want done.

Personally, yesterday I worked on Goal 4 of my 2020 goals, a YA thriller, because I want to bring some material from that project to my writers' group next Monday night, assuming we are still gathering in public places here. And, if we're not, I've revised part of a scene. How great is that? Hey, nothing to panic about here!

Time Management Tuesday: "The Upside Of Stress" Wrap-up

I'm ready to conclude my summer read of The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal.

What "The Upside of Stress" Isn't And Is

First off, I want to point out that The Upside of Stress is not a time management book. It is not about how managing stress can help readers manage their time. I cherry picked material from the book to apply to my obsession with managing time.

The Upside of Stress is actually about what it says it's about in the title. The author's argument is that while stress has gotten a bad reputation over the years (and she covers why), there are actually aspects of stress that can help us function better. Thus, there are upsides to stress.

Whether or not we can take advantage of the upsides of stress may be determined by how we perceive stressful situations. McGonigal refers to ways of perceiving stress as "mindsets." She says once we identify our stress mindsets (I, personally, am pretty much full-on flight because stress is threatening), we can change them to be more useful to us.

Stress Mindsets That Might Be Useful For Managing Time

Those of us who perceive stress as a threat and want to flee from it often just drop our work and head off to more relaxing activities. The stress of work can lead to procrastination, a flight from said stress. So finding a more positive mindset sounds as if it should have a positive impact on managing time. I focused on three that McGonigal writes about.

The Challenge Mindset. This may be the most useful mindset for writers managing time while dealing with stress. There's some real action you can take with stress and time, if you can convince yourself that what you're faced with is...a challenge!...rather than a threat.

• Recognize the resources you can draw upon for this stress situation.
• Think of the stressful situation as an opportunity.
• Train for the challenge.  

The Values Mindset. This could be the second most useful mindset for our purposes. According to McGonigal, dealing with stress that relates to a personal value makes the stress less burdensome, because it's more meaningful.

Of course, you have to be aware of your values in the first place. And then you have to actually be able to connect a stressor to one of them. You can see why I didn't put this mindset in first place.

The Tend-and-Befriend Mindset. This seems to me to be a mindset that can help you deal with stress, but won't be a lot of use as far as managing time is concerned. If anything, it could eat up time. Those people who see stress through a tend-and-befriend mindset deal with stress by tending to others and befriending those who can help them or others. It's a mindset that helps those feeling stress become parts of groups...like writing groups or professional organizations...that can provide them with support. The reverse of that is those groups and organizations then need support. Tend-and-befriend can make people feel better about themselves, because membership in groups "takes the toxicity out of striving," as McGonigal puts it. But membership also takes up time.

Is There A Situational Aspect To This?

I've written here before about what I call situational time management. My argument was...and is...that we can't create one schedule or time management model and expect it to work for us in every situation we find ourselves in. We need to be "constantly switching time management plans as situations change because situations change constantly." (Gauthier, Situational Time Management)

Maybe the same is true of stress mindsets. Some types of stress may lend themselves best to a challenge mindset, some to a values mindset, and some to a tend-and-befriend mindset. Some certainly require a threat/fight-or-flight mindset. Being able to identify the correct mindset and switch to it may be the first step toward managing time during stressful experiences.

Time Management Tuesday: Take Your Wins Where You Can Get Them

Up until around five o'clock Sunday afternoon I thought Monday was going to be a big workday for me. Instead, I wrote five sentences yesterday. A paragraph. A transitional paragraph, to be precise. And I was delighted to get that much done.

You have to consider and accept your situation. Beating your head against a wall because you're not doing a cliched butt-in-chair thing while your personal life is spilling all over your work table will destroy self-esteem. And that endangers your impulse control. No impulse control, no staying on task. We're talking about a downward spiral at a time when you are least able to afford one.

Given yesterday's situation, a five-sentence para was a win. A big, big win. Last night I actually felt pumped for my next work session, which did turn out to be today. And I'm happy with the blueprinting and research I'm doing today, too.

I would not say, "It's all good." I'd say, "Anything's good."

Time Management Tuesday: Carry On Carrying On

I am not back at Original Content, or work, for that matter, in any kind of organized way. I am not back to normal after fighting the most recent eldercare fire. Of course, there has not been a normal for long periods of time at Chez Gauthier for over eleven years. I know one couple who dealt with the swings of eldercare "issues," as they're often called, for well over two decades. Maybe close to three. Open a paper or look around at your friends, neighbors, and relatives. Tens of thousands of people can never be sure of how they'll be able to use their time because they are caregivers for parents, spouses, siblings, or children. For some people, that may be the reality of big chunks of their adult lives. Their time goes to care giving and the kind of work that puts bread on the table. If there's time in their lives for other kinds of work, it's hidden somewhere where they have trouble finding it.

Recently I recalled my inspiration for starting the Time Management Tuesday feature here at OC. A memoirist had written an essay responding to new writers who had asked her how they could find time to write. She advised them to take a few hours from the time they used for exercising and housework. From all of us who use up most of our exercise and cleaning time making multiple emergency room visits, lining up home companions, connecting with visiting nurses, hunting for nursing homes and assisted living facilities, visiting said nursing homes and assisted living facilities a couple of times a week, researching medications and treatments, meeting with doctors, social workers, physical and  occupational therapists, audiologists, the occasional lawyer, and even a minister when a funeral needs to be planned, let me just say that that was enormously, enormously unhelpful. Glib. Shallow. I ran out of adjectives early on and became royally pissed. Time Management Tuesday came out of rage.

I'll be up front here and admit that being judgemental is my worst fault. Dwelling on what I've passed judgement on is probably a close second. But there you go. On the plus side, rage and holding a grudge led to a multi-year study of time management that has provided some help to me this past month.

A Three-Pronged Modest Proposal For Those Writing During A Crisis. Or Two Or Three.

 

So you have day after day and week after week and month after month of dealing with family problems. In all likelihood, year after year. It's clear this stuff isn't coming to an end any time soon--which is just as well, given how some of these family problems end--and you'd like to keep writing. Realistically, what can you do?

Situational Time Management. Don't expect to be able to manage your creative time or any of your time the same way every moment of your life. Our life situations are always changing, so we change how and when we work in order to work around them. What's more, our work situations are always changing. Are we prepublished writers trying to generate work? Are we making a living from our writing and have to keep the income coming? Are we established writers working on projects that aren't in the publishing pipeline yet or do we have books coming out soon so we have to work on marketing? Everything we do is dependent upon our life and work situation. We only have to wrap our time around the situations we're in, and we can do it in any way. What a relief. Shifting from situation to situation is a whole lot easier than trying to work with only one schedule, and if we can't conform to it, believing we're out of luck.

The Unit System.  One very good way to wrap our time around whatever situation we're in is to stop thinking that we need a full day to work. In the fields of time management and productivity, there's a lot of support for breaking work days into units or segments of time. The theory is that the first 45-minutes of work are the most productive of the day. The longer we spend working past that point, the less productive we become. Thus working, taking a break, and working again tricks the brain into thinking that each new start is the beginning of a new day. Meaning that a short work period squeezed in before heading off for the nursing home or the couple of hours you have after you get back can be valuable. Doing something is always better than doing nothing, and it has the benefit of making you feel you're still in the game. Also, coming home to your laptop or a book you're reading for research can be hugely relaxing after having lunch with a table full of ladies all at different levels of cognitive decline but all certain that they don't like oven-roasted sweet potatoes.

Use Your Goals and Objectives. How can we make the best use of whatever units of time we have while in our particular situation? Make sure that we're always using them to work toward one of our work goals. That way, we're always making some kind of progress on the work we want to do. That's good both practically and emotionally. In addition, we're not wasting time, which we don't have very much of, trying to decide what to do. Having established goals at the beginning of the year that I could work toward was hugely helpful last month.

Does that sound more useful than "use some of your exercise and housework time for writing?"Am I still being judgemental here?

How Did You Use Your Units Of Time This Past Month, Gail?

 

Goal 4. Complete a second draft of Good Women by September. I've spent more time working on this goal than I expected to at this point. Why? Because so far it's been easier than I expected. This suggests to me that working on an easy goal while I have other kinds of stress going on in my life may be a very good idea.

Goal 1. Work on short-form writing, essays and short stories. I've hit a couple of objectives for this one. "Revise His Times Or Mine essay" and "Read an essay or short story every day."

Goal 2. Concentrate on submitting completed book-length projects as well as short form work. I submitted His Times Or Mine and received a very good rejection. Yes, there are good rejections.

Goal 6. Research and create notes for a happy apocalyptic story. I happened to stumble upon a book dealing with a historical event that should be helpful for this, so I've been reading that.

Carry On Carrying On

The above doesn't sound like a lot, but I've had periods when we had elder crises when I threw in the towel and didn't even try to work for months at a time. I ran into a member of my writers' group recently and she said to me, "Well, Gail, carry on." The fact that I've been able to carry on this much is probably due to my writing about situational time management, the unit system, and goals and objectives over and over again these past seven years here at Original Content and to my toughening up over these past eleven years of older relatives going up in flames over and over again.

Please excuse me now. After visiting the nursing home and dropping a hearing aid off at the audiologist (yes, I do go there a lot), I returned some books to a library where I stumbled upon still another book dealing with a historical event that relates to my happy apocalypse story. I have about an hour and a half left today, and I'm going to use it for research.

Time Management Tuesday: When To-Do Lists Go Bad

I'm a big fan of to-do lists. I've been keeping a serious weekly to-do list for years, and I occasionally supplement it with other lists. I tend to feel that if I want to be sure to get something done, I should put it on a list.

But just writing things down on a piece of paper, one item after another instead of in a paragraph, won't necessarily provide you with a to-do list that will get you anywhere. Melissa Thompson explains why in 2018 Is Your Year For Avoiding These 6 To-Do List Mistakes.

How Writers Can Make Mistakes With To-Do Lists

1. You Put Too Many Things On The List. Overwhelm. Few people deal well with that. And, remember, we're most likely to experience failures of willpower when we feel bad about ourselves, for things like not getting everything done on our to-do lists. Less. My word for the year is less.
2.  You Don't Plan For Interruptions. For instance, your editor gets back to you with content editing and that is the end of the new work you were getting started on. Or you suddenly hear of an opportunity to submit work, but the submission, itself, requires some unexpected work when your to-do list says you're supposed to be doing marketing. Or you're suddenly dealing with a problem with the pharmacy or a medical bill you think you already paid or a family who is sick. I don't see how you can plan for these things. Unless you go back to Item 1 and don't have your to-do list jammed packed in the first place.
3.  You Don't Prioritize. Writers have an array of tasks these days. Which one is the most important? That's easy, right. Writing, of course. Not always. It's all situational, lads and lasses. Research may be a priority one day. Marketing another. Editing. Teaching. Appearances. You have to constantly be changing your priorities. Sad to say, you can't pick one and create a long-term habit.
4. You Don't Set Deadlines Or Estimate Time. The unit system can help with this. Whatever time segment you choose to use becomes an immediate deadline. You can assign yourself a number of units for a particular task, and there you have an estimate of time.
5.  You Aren't Specific. This is where having objectives for your goals comes in handy. For instance, a goal of "Generate New Work" isn't very specific. The objectives for the goals are. 1. "Finish a draft of Good Women." 2. "Write food essays." 3. "Write essays using outlines created for workshop submissions." And you can get even more specific. 1. "Write food essays--draft an essay about baking pans." (Seriously. I want to do that.) 2. "Write essays using outlines created for workshop submissions--draft an essay from the procrastination submission."

Clearly, there are ways to get more bang for your buck with to-do lists.

Time Management Tuesday: A Gardening Model

I've written a lot here, and I mean a lot, about working with units of time. I've gone on and on about working in forty-five minute units. And I've written about working in month-long units.  I don't think I've considered a year-long unit, planning work for a whole year or around the seasons. That's what gardeners do, or so I've been told. They practice a form of of situational time management, with the requirements of the season determining how they'll spend their time.

You see any grass? No.

To be honest, I don't actually know much about gardening. Like Buffy, we live on the Hellmouth. The soil around here has been scorched by Satan and his minions. Grass does not grow. It can't. The ground cover we bought to plant on a bald spot got the blight. Landscaping stones don't stay put in these parts. It's as if they're alive.

But when I stumbled upon a copy of C.Z. Guest's 5 Seasons of Gardening at my local library book sale earlier this month, even I was reminded that real gardeners do certain things at certain times. C.Z. Guest was a socialite gardener who maintained gardens at her multiple homes. At one of them, she grew vegetables for her French chef. Do not be put off because Guest thinks there are 5 seasons when there are only 4. (She includes Christmas.) In spite of her wealth and rather over-the-top blue blood lifestyle, she couldn't bend nature to her will. She, or maybe someone she paid, had to work with it.

The Blight

Writers Who Use A Gardening Model

For the most part, writers who use a gardening model, working around specific situations in their year, are responding to work and/or family restrictions. For instance:

• Writers who teach on any level may plan to use school vacations to do their heavier writing work, such as generating new writing or doing a big revision.

• Writers who do freelance work and can control the number and kinds of jobs they do, can plan writing around the times of year when they are less likely to have big freelance obligations.

  

  It Lives! It Lives!

  
  

• Writers who are primary caregivers for young children may  plan lighter work loads for school vacations  or plan marketing tours or travel research that they can do with children when they're out of school. This could also be a good time to plan to do small social media tasks--updating websites or blogs--that can be completed in short periods of time.

However, even full-time writers may think seasonally/annually.

• Writers who do a lot of public appearances and workshop teaching sometimes create blocks of time each year when they don't do that kind of work so they can write.

• For children's writers who work regularly in schools, the school year is a significant period, almost seasonal in nature.

• Some full-time writers who presumably can write any time still use National Novel Writing Month as a tool for getting new books started.

For the past couple of years, I've treated April as Earth Day Month, a specific time for marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff. September is a travel month (which has to be prepared for, by the way) when I do professional reading. As I've mentioned recently, I'm thinking of doing NaNoWriMo this year. I'll need to be prepping for that during most of the fall season.

 

Gardeners cannot change the coming and going of the seasons and what happens during them. They have to plan what they can do within those periods. For writers, it's the same thing. We can't change our family responsibilities or ignore the fact that we work with all kinds of restraints. We can do long-term planning for working around and with those restraints, though.

 

We are not quite halfway through the calendar year. This would be a good time to think about what you could be doing "seasonally" through December. Can you plan to work on specific 2016 goals/objectives at different points the rest of this year?     

Time Management Tuesday: Okay, We Know What To Do During The Holidays

Every year I struggle with time during the holidays. It's a situational thing. One of my very first Time Management Tuesday posts was on the December Time Suck. For the record, according to the Christmas spark book I mention in that post, we need new lights for the tree this year. That's good to know.

Holiday Time Management Strategies 

No one has time to waste reinventing the wheel between the third week in November and the first week in January, so these holiday time plans come from the Time Management Tuesday archives.

• The Unit System Lifeline During That Time Of The Year  Basically, the unit system is my go to cure for any time management problem.
• Will Sprinting--And A New Laptop--Get Me Through The Holidays? Yay! I'm glad I saw this one. This seemed to help in 2013.
• Maybe Routine Was What Got Me Off The Mat. Yeah, when time gets away from us, we may need something to get us back on the clock.

So Here's My Plan For The Rest Of This Week

I'm going to use short units of time to sprint, then use routine to get over it when I'm disappointed in what I get done.

And, yes, I did sprint this morning. A real writing sprint, not a real posting a blog post sprint.

Time Management Tuesday: Prepping For Those Rough Times

J. M. Levinton has quite an interesting post, Getting Prepared: How to Write When You Can't, at her blog. She describes how she managed to get some social media work done while she was sick. She had prepared for that eventuality. She had a file of tweets ready to go and another of blog topics, complete with rough drafts. During those times when personal life overwhelms, she could at least keep on keeping on with social media.

Work can overwhelm, as well. Having social media topics and drafts filed away can help out when you're dealing with deadline pressures or rushing to get ready for an appearance.

And how about planning smaller projects for squeezing in when traveling, during holidays, or while you're getting ready for those appearances I just mentioned? And then you can always have some light professional reading ready for those hours you spend in motel rooms without On Demand or your dvr. (It's like being sent back to the Dark Ages.)

Seems a little obsessive, doesn't it? But not working makes some of us anxious. This is a way to plan to take care of our anxiety.

This post was written weeks ago. It's being posted today because I'm trying to finish a manuscript revision before the twenty-first and am going to be out several evenings this week.

Time Management Tuesday: A Beginning And Ending Rerun

I'm working on a big TMT post on the wonders of Tweetdeck. However, Blogger won't let me use my screenshots, which I really want for illustration. So I need some more time to work that out with my computer guy, who is not going to be happy about this. I also need to work on next month's Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar.

Most of all, I am rushing/struggling to finish the mummy draft before Labor Day Weekend because I'm leaving for a trip the next day. I have a specific unit of time in which to do this, this summer, which is ending soon. When I get back from vacation, a new unit of time will start, one in which I want to do some other things related to the mummy project, but not the first draft.

Since I am experiencing the end of a unit of time (something I always find exciting, even if there is pressure) and coming up on the beginning of another (exciting, exciting, exciting.), I've decided that rerunning a blog post from June 19, 2012, one on beginnings and endings, will make the best use of my time today. It also introduces the idea of situational time management. Indeed, the end of this summer unit of time I'm working with means that I am dealing with a specific situation--finishing up--totally different from the situation I'll be dealing with when I'm back at work in October. Different situations require different time management from us.

 The Significance Of Beginnings And Endings

When I say that beginnings and endings are significant, I'm talking about the beginnings and endings of units of time, not manuscripts.

The beginning of a new calendar year (I've written many times here, I'm sure, about how much I love the month of January), a new school year, and summer break...fun times, huh? We tend to get excited about our plans for "new" blocks of time. Oh, what we're going to do this Christmas season! NaNoWriMo! May Days! If we can perceive some upcoming time as something new, as something different, a change, it's far easier to believe that we can make a change in how we're going to behave in that new chunk of time than it is to believe we can just change what we're doing now in this ho-hum unit of time we've been living in.

If we think about the unit system I wrote about back in February and the research that suggests that people are productive for the first 45-minutes that they work, there may be some logic to our love of new beginnings. Experience has taught us that we're more productive when we start something new, and we like feeling productive. We like the surge of starting something new. I swear, we once got new living room furniture, and just that change led me to start a new plan to keep everyone from eating in the living room. That probably didn't even last 45-minutes, but I remember the rush I felt not because I had a new couch and two new chairs all at the same time, but because the new furniture changed something and I was going to do something different because of it.

The end of a unit of time is a different story, particularly if things haven't gone well during the time period that is drawing to a close. Take last week for me, for instance. I ended up taking one elder to a doctor's appointment on Monday, wasting a lot of time Tuesday reading a book (on my Kindle!), visiting an elder on Wednesday, visiting the first elder again on Thursday (as well as doing life maintenance work while I was out of the house). It got to be mid-day Friday, and I thought, Ah, the week was wasted, anyway, I might as well surf the 'Net. And start again next week when a new unit of time will begin.

In this situation, you can see the parallels between applying self-discipline to work and applying self-discipline to "problems" such as eating, smoking, etc. Oh, this day of dieting is ruined, anyway, because I ate a second cupcake. I might as well eat a couple more and start again tomorrow. How much time is wasted at the end of a bad work unit because we're too disappointed in what we've accomplished to continue? And how to make better use of that time?

Well, yes, we could suck it up and apply some self-discipline, but if you aren't aware that I'm low on that, you haven't been reading this blog regularly. I wanted to come up with another way to make better use of those bad ending hours. While driving home from my taekwondo class last night, I did. (This is an example of a breakout experience, by the way. I'd been thinking about this situation for three days, and an idea for a solution came to me after an hour of practicing joint locks and knife defense.)

Doing absolutely anything work-related during those lost hours at the end of a unit of time  would be better than just blowing them off because things didn't turn out the way we planned in the days leading up to them. Anything. So we can keep fallback work to do then. For writers, this will not be difficult. We have piles of promotional work, research, projects that we've started and not finished that we could shift to when we realize that we're blowing off time. Filing. Checking up on the status of submissions. A table covered with three inches of books and paper in the office. (Oh? That's just me?) Getting some of this stuff done will positive in and of itself, but getting it done will also free up time in the future for other kinds of work. Win-win, as they say.

How am I going to do those things when I've just mentioned that I'm weak on self-discipline? The plan (And I love a plan! It's as if I'm starting a new unit of time!) is to plan for those situations. The plan is to have fallback tasks ready for when the first task doesn't pan out.

I am going to call this Situational Time Management. I will write more about it next week, since I just came up with the idea as I was getting off the stationary bike less than two hours ago. Any idea benefits from thought.

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: Making Situational Decisions

I am dealing with one of those situational time management issues, this one relating to that thin and wobbly boundary between personal and professional time. We have a major family wedding coming up in less than two weeks, which means extra events, prep, and visitors. I have to make some decisions about how I'm going to use my professional hours during this extended unit of time.

To make a long story short and more time efficient, I'm not going to be doing very sophisticated blogging these next two weeks. Maybe I'll post links and other quick things that intrigue me. I'll probably be blogging less. Instead, I want to focus what little writing time I have on my main work-in-progress. I'm also going to be doing some research on Tweetdeck, which I learned about on the 4th of July, thinking it could have an impact on managing time. I need some moments to do something calming, too.

Recognizing that you can't do it all makes it possible for you to work more intently on what you can do. That's my story, and I'm sticking to 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: Decision-making

Last week's Time Management Tuesday post dealt with an article from the Coaching Positive Performance website. So I went back to take a look at what other time management bits I could find over there and, lo, I came upon this post on decision-making. I promised back in August, 2012 that decision-making would be a long-term study topic here. And, look! I'm carrying through with that!

Why Is Decision-making Part of Time Management?

Decision-making takes time. And it's time when you're not doing anything except thinking about what you're going to do. It's time that doesn't produce much.

You want to spend as little time deciding what you're going to do as possible, so you can spend more time on real work. How to do that?

How To Decide What To Do?

 

The CPP folks talk about knowing which of the tasks you have to do will give you the biggest payoff. That means knowing your goals and objectives. You have to have those in mind all the time. I like to make them at the beginning of the year and check in with them regularly. I've been doing it weekly this year.

The CPP people also talk about figuring out what you can do and how much time you have available. That's always going to change. And why? Because everything is situational. Our situations are always changing, so we always have to work out what we can do with the time we have available.

A case in point? Last week's Time Management Tuesday was about managing sick time. With that we're definitely dealing with a specific situation, different from the situation we were dealing with before we got sick, and different from the situation we'll be dealing with after we're back to what passes for normal. Getting anything done in that particular situation requires making some decisions.

If All Else Fails...

Do something. Anything. Again as the CPP writer says, the only way you can fail is to do nothing at all.

Remember, that's the reason decision-making is an important part of time management. You don't want to spend too much of your available time thinking about what you're going to do instead of doing something.

I decided what I was going to do this week yesterday morning. So now I'm off to do it.

Time Management Tuesday: Managing Sick Time

Last week I had a I'm-coming-down-with-something-hysteria day and spent the morning in bed with my laptop in order to deal with that situation. So you can understand why How to Enjoy a Productive Day When You Feel Bad grabbed my attention when I stumbled upon it at Coaching Positive Performance.

The CPP blogger says, "One of the most important aspects of improving your time management is to enjoy a productive day even when you don’t feel like it. That does not mean that you have to complete a massive workload; it simply means that you have to complete some important work which takes you closer to your goals and objectives."

There's great stuff here: 

1. How to get started on a sick workday: Identify the three most important tasks you need to get done. These tasks relate to your most important goals. Then choose the three next most important tasks. After you identify that second group, you're not going to even think about them again that day. That's kind of brilliant. It eliminates a major distraction. You won't be overwhelmed by all the things you have to do.
2. How to choose what to do first among your three chosen tasks: Do you choose the hardest task? Do you choose the easiest? You choose the one that is most important to your goal!
3. How to work: In units!

One of the big negatives about being sick, besides being, you know, sick, is the stress of seeing work pile up. Thinking of sick days as another situation we can learn to manage is a huge help.

Time Management Tuesday: A Situational Time Management Situation

You know how I'm always talking about how we can't set hardcore schedules, we must adapt to the ever changing situations that are our lives. Well, I am. For me, this week is a case in point.

A family member made a quick and successful trip to the ER this weekend. While he is well on the road to recovery, he is recovering, and I'll be helping out with some of his elder care responsibilities and other life chores. This week just happens to be one in which I had appointments digging into my work time, anyway.

1. I know I can't do everything I normally do in this particular situation, and I don't enjoy trying and failing to do so as much as I used to. Feeling busy and overwhelmed doesn't really attract me much.
2. I think I might be better off focusing on just a couple of work-related things this week so I can try to make some real progress on them instead of struggling with a number of things and not getting too far with any of them. Practically speaking, I think it's a better move. Emotionally it will be, too. Or not.
3. I've decided that in this type of situation, blogging may not be the best use of my time.  Even though I do most of my blogging in the evening, I have a promotional plan for next month that I could be working on then that might be a better work choice.

Thus, I will be back on Friday to report how things went. 

Time Management Tuesday: The Yardwork Model

A few years ago, a friend told me how much she loved working outdoors. I said, "Yeah, I like it, but only for a half hour or so. It's not so much that I don't have the physical endurance. I get bored."

"But there's so much to do," she replied. "When I get tired of doing one thing, there's always something else I can work on."

She was right. I've gotten a lot more yardwork done since I've followed her work plan. Just this past Sunday, I put in ninety minutes outside, starting with weeding and thinning one of the perennial beds to the right, moving to the back of the house to supervise pruning some shrubs, and heading out front to do some more perennial work.

Very nice, Gail. But this is a blog about writing and children's literature, not gardening. Make a connection. Soon.

I realized Sunday morning that I'd been using the yardwork model for writing last week. And I got a lot done. I started a new piece of flash fiction, which I wasn't expecting to do. I began revising a very old piece of fiction, which I wasn't expecting to do. I read an old article on revising short stories that was absolutely fantastic and did some more work on both those manuscripts. I did some more work on revising my website, which I was expecting to do, and started roughing out a new workshop. I'm not sure whether or not I expected to do that. I made a submission, which I was expecting to do. I began working on the book length manuscript I made so much progress on during May. I've continued this work method this week.

This Yardwork Model, as I'm calling it, is one of those situational time management things. It's only going to work in certain situations:

1. You have no deadlines, contractual or otherwise, that you should be focusing on full-time until they're met
2. You are careful to make sure you're putting more of your attention into creative rather than reactive work

I think that if the Yardwork Model works for someone, it's because it's another variation of the unit system. Every time you change tasks, it's like starting a new forty-five minute unit of work. Your mind reboots, thinking it's starting over at the beginning of the day when your impulse control is at its strongest. And thus you're able to make progress on each new task.

Concerned about not finishing anything? Tomorrow you do this all over again, and the next day, too. You make progress on every task you take on.

And what if you get to the point on one of them that you want to stick with it? That's a new situation. So adapt and keep working.

Time Management Tuesday: Seasonal Situational Time Management

Last week I wrote about trying to find ways to manage time and work while recovering from health problems. That's definitely an example of situational time management. With any luck, for most of us health problems are a temporary situation that we have to work through like so many other changing situations in our work lives.

This past week at Writer Unboxed, Lydia Sharp described another situation to work through, one that occurs with more frequency, writing with seasonal affective disorder. There are times of the year--situations--when she is able to work better than at others. For her, the year is broken into quarters. She has a quarter when she is most likely to be able to generate new work and a quarter when it's best to revise.

If you read Sharp's post and the comments that follow it, you'll see that she and some others manage their writing time by recognizing that their situation will change over the course of the year and planning what they'll do during the different seasonal situations. One writer even determines whether she'll work on fiction or nonfiction by time of year.

Notice, also, the impact of the "write-every-day" and "Butt in Chair" philosophies on people who are trying to manage writing time while dealing with this type of situation. Not only are they not helpful, they often lead writers who just can't work that way to feel guilty.

Time Management Tuesday: A Case Study In Situational Time Management

I've written here frequently about situational time management and the need to constantly adapt how we manage time to the new situations writers (and all people who work for themselves) are always finding themselves in. Last week author Laurie Calkhoven wrote at Smack Dab in the Middle
about authors who work regularly for hire and their need to set criteria for the jobs they'll take on.  But I think her post also was a case study in how a writer's work situation can change and how rapidly it can change.

During a period when Laurie was working on a book of her own, she was offered a freelance job with a deadline that was only a month away. She accepted the job on a Friday, meaning her work situation for the next four weeks had suddenly changed dramatically. Then on Saturday she became ill. On Monday she had to quit the job she had accepted only three days before. Suddenly, her work situation had changed again.

I usually write here about more modest situational changes for writers: dropping everything to respond to a request for a proposal or an appearance inquiry or having to dedicate time to promotion, for instance, instead of generating new work. (Reactive vs. creative time.) But authors who do work for hire face these more extreme situational changes. Early this fall a Facebook friend posted about having just accepted a writing project with a Thanksgiving deadline and last spring I met an author/illustrator who had accepted a job that meant her next two years would be tied up illustrating another person's books. These are changes in work situation that can be sudden and intense, and the use of the author's time while in those situations has a big impact on their work output.