But first, I have to correct an grave oversight from Tuesday’s essay, in which I neglected to use the made-up word succinctitude even though I promised myself I would use it. I’m sorry; I let us all down and I regret that. Still, there’s no going back—only forward. I cannot return to the article on succinctness. I will have to find another opportunity to use succinctitude in an essay. Maybe not today. Maybe not next Tuesday. But soon and for the rest of our lives.
Today’s article was originally titled “making time to write” but that was quickly struck through and revised because you can’t make time. Except in the sense that we, all of us, are making time all the time, meaning that time is a hallucination we all share. We made it up in our collective unconscious. Time is a construct. It only exists because we all agree that it does. It’s five o’clock somewhere. However much of it there is, nobody can get more. It’s one of the only truly finite resources, the other being helium. Helium is a critical component of rocket propulsion, semiconductor manufacture, and cryogenics (among other things), our planet’s supply of it is limited—and we can never, ever get more—and yet we fritter it away filling party balloons. That’s humanity for you.
To the best of my ability to describe how much “time” anyone has, it’s the amount of wakeful hours in anyone’s life, those we don’t spend sleeping. We don’t all have the same amount. Some of us sleep more and some of us sleep less. Me, I sleep more. I’m always tired (and cold). Probably I should get my thyroid removed, or replaced, or whatever they do with your thyroid if it sucks. They can rebuild me. They have the technology.
In whatever waking hours anyone has, we have to fit all our obligations. Personally, I hate obligations and I try to get out of them whenever I can. Being forty something years old, I have a lot of experience at this. Therefore, I’m able to maximize my awake time by getting out of everything I possibly can. Although I have no kids to take care of, and I don’t have to commute to an office most of the time, there are still big chunks of my day that get eaten up by the obligations I just can’t wiggle out of: Work (I am fortunate that this is limited, for me, to about 40 hours each week; many people work much more), taking care of my dog (at least an hour a day, or 7 hours a week), preparing food (so I won’t starve to death), going to the grocery store to replenish the food supply (again, so I won’t starve to death), and writing Shelf Life so I don’t let you down.
Most people have to do a lot more than that. My partner keeps the house clean and handles many of the domestic responsibilities, including the laundry, and I generate a lot of laundry. Like, so much laundry. You would not believe how many clothes I wear.
I candidly acknowledge that, unlike most things (Money? Pets? Kids?), time is easier to manage when you have more of it than less. Where, then, as a person with lots of time, do I come by the audacity to impart wisdom on managing time to those who have less than me? For one, it hasn’t always been like this: I have a long personal history of painful overscheduling. Further, I’ve spent many years managing staff in a publishing project management environment at all stages of their career (from first-time-hires to about-to-retires) and I’ve given a fair number of time-management workshops in my day and I’ve had feedback they’re pretty effective. In fact, the advice I have on time management can’t fit into one essay: Hence, today’s Part I and next Tuesday’s Part II.
So: In the event they can help anyone reading this find more time to write, or read, or study writing, or do any other creative activity, or enjoy more leisure time, or organize your workday better, or whatever you might use it for, I’ve put the time-management tricks I’ve used and taught into today’s and Tuesday’s Shelf Lifes for you.
In this pair of essays, I won’t suggest things for you to stop doing and take out of your life in order to have more time for writing (or whatever it is you want to have more time for). I’m not going to suggest you sleep one hour fewer each day, or eat breakfast at your desk while you write, or skip your favorite show, or give up doom scrolling social media. I don’t know what activities everyone has in their life and, even if I did, I couldn’t put any kind of value judgment on them (as in, this one is good and can stay but this one is bad and should be quit). Whatever you have going on in your life is what you have going on in your life. This advice is about how to manage what you have going on as efficiently as possible to maximize time for the things you want to do.
Group Like Activities
No, you don’t have to do group-like activities; everyone hates group activities. Everyone wants to do a solo project. If you are a college professor I’m talking to you specifically.
The idea is to group similar activities and tasks together. In my experience (I won’t claim this is universal), I lose a lot of time (and I’ve seen colleagues lose a lot of time) to task switching. When you’re doing one type of activity, and then you switch to a different type of activity, you have to get out of one mode and into another. For instance, if I’m doing hands-on editing work and I have to switch over to working on an analytics dashboard, I have to get out of text-editing mode, or word mode, and into spreadsheet, number-crunching, analytical mode. If I have three documents to edit and two analytical tasks today, I’ll waste time going back and forth between these activities. I will save time and work more efficiently if I edit all three documents, so I have no more text editing to do today, and then switch over to analytics.
Another example of grouping like tasks, one that isn’t work-related, is errands. In the course of a week I might have to go to Target, the grocery store, Costco, CVS, and so on. If I spread that out so I go to one place each day, I lose time because once I’m already out of the house and in my car I can go to all the places in a row. I only have to prepare myself to go out of the house one time instead of four or more times. I also sometimes will do this with meal preparation. For instance, if I’m making a salad for lunch I’ll go ahead and make a few and stick the extras in the fridge so I don’t have to make lunch every day that week; I only have to make it once.
Never Do Today What You Can Put Off Till Tomorrow
Raise your hand if this sounds like the worst advice. Don’t worry, I can’t see you.
I’m not suggesting that you procrastinate, but I am suggesting that not everything needs to be done at once, the moment you find out about it or it hits your desk. For instance, let’s say I realize I need to make a doctor’s appointment because I haven’t had my physical yet this year (or decade). I might think to myself, “That will only take five minutes, I should do that now.”
Instead, I write “make GP appt” on my to-do list (I have a lot of thoughts about to-do lists). The next day I realize I’m low on dog food and I have to call Maxine’s vet and ask them to put some aside for me so I can pick it up when I’m out on errands next. Now I have two phone calls to make. Then I remember I need to make an appointment for my car to be serviced. Hey, I also need to call a guy about re-grouting the shower.
Instead of jumping on making my doctor’s appointment the moment I thought of it (it was important but not urgent), I waited until I had a bunch of appointments to make. Then spent thirty minutes in “making calls and appointments” mode and knocked them all out at once instead of interrupting myself four times for ten minutes apiece.
If something needs to get done, but it’s not urgent enough that it must be done today, I put it on my to-do list until I have a handful of similar tasks that I can tackle at once. And if similar tasks don’t pile up after all, that’s fine. I can do a miscellaneous to-do-list clear-out at the end of the week or whenever I have some time.
Managing Modules
Here’s where the concept of “modules” (from the subtitle) comes into play. I’m using module here in to mean one standardized, independent unit that can be combined with others to form a more complex structure. Like a Lego brick.
The things I have to get done in a day or a week or a month aren’t standardized in that they’re all the same (work, chores, creative activities, self-care, leisure time)—but they can all be standardized as a block of time. That is, the recurring things I have to do each takes up a certain amount of time, and I generally know how much time that is. I know I’m going to spend about eight hours a day working; about one hour a day walking my dog; about thirty minutes a day bathing; about thirty minutes a day eating breakfast and drinking my coffee; and so on.
Once I’ve held over one-off tasks till they piled up some, and grouped my like tasks and activities, I can look at about how much time I have in the day around my working hours (after I wake up until work begins, and after work until I go to sleep) and see where I can fit those modules in. Do I have thirty minutes any day this week that I can set aside for making all these appointments? If I don’t have an hour to prepare dinner each day (and I won’t), can I plan meals that will generate leftovers or cook two meals at once when I’m cooking?
I haven’t found a good app for creating recurring modules and slotting them into a calendar so sometimes I do it with post-it notes and my planner. If I ever find a good app I’ll double back and let you know.
One more item on modules: Try to keep modules, if you’re using them, to nice round numbers like thirty- and sixty-minute blocks. For instance, “walk dog, thirty minutes.” It doesn’t take me thirty minutes to walk the dog, it takes me twenty-three minutes almost exactly. I still set aside thirty minutes for it because you need a few extra minutes between things to grab a drink, use the bathroom, find your missing Chapstick, and so on. I love setting aside an hour for something and then finding out it only took forty-five minutes. That’s the gift of time.
Don’t miss the second half next Tuesday, on the other side of the weekend, which contains a hilarious true story about the nineteen nineties.
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