Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Time is a funny thing

I'm chopping through my extended absence, returning back onto the OA blog like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Minus the axe.

"Here's Lindsay!"

Time is a funny thing. There's never enough of it. And, as always, time is the first thing that races ahead when you've got a million things to do. You get trapped in an endless cycle of knowing you have ALL the things to do, but then you get pulled under. You drudge through the daily chores, but the things that you love can get pushed aside. And days/weeks/months have rushed past without you realising it. And while you've gotten some things done, others have slowed down (like reading and writing and blogging).

So how do you manage your creative life when other life bites you on the bum and steals you away?

Writing:
Life is busy, but a notepad or a phone is wonderful for writing ideas, notes, scenes, blog post etc. And the fact that I can email myself the notes and copy/paste to a Word document makes the nerd in me smile.

Sometimes it's hard to get a solid block of writing time. Snatching twenty minutes to write is just as productive as sitting for an hour. Sometimes, when time is tight, I word war by myself to see how much I can get done in that time. Even if I've got an hour, I'll set my phone timer to break up the time.

Reading:
Snatching ten minutes reading time is the norm sometimes. I do love holding an actual book, but this is where a Kindle or iBooks really comes into play. I have a book (or 1,000) on me all the times.

Scheduling:
We often live our lives by our calendars and diaries. Or a to do list. I sat down at the weekend, looked at my diary and worked out blocks of time where I can write, blog, Tweet etc. Having it written down is an extra push to make it happen.

So that's me.

What about you? How do you make time to keep writing in your life when time gets tight?

3 comments:

Kim Van Sickler said...

No easy answers there. I cope by varying the amount of time I spend in each of these categories, based on grooves I get into. For instance, I haven't blog hopped for nearly a week, but I'm raring to go today!

Angelica R. Jackson said...

I've definitely scaled back on how many blogs I read and comment on, but I've likely replaced it with more FB and Twitter time so I'm not sure that's a win. I establish Tu and Th as "no call days" so that I can get large chunks of writing time, but otherwise I have to work around existing commitments. When I'm really in a crucial spot where I have to keep up my momentum, things like laundry and housecleaning suffer.

J Lenni Dorner said...

Time is a funny thing. We measure it in Earth terms. This is totally off topic, but I've always wonder why, in certain Sci-fi works, time is still measured in Earth terms. For example, a year (a calculation of how long it takes Earth to get around the sun- an irrelevant number on Mars, much less on MK-1582 or Blargyark).

Making time write, or to do the job(s) of a writer, is difficult. Just as it is difficult to make time to be a doctor, a secretary, a fast-food flipper, or a computer programmer. Our job is just less defined, partly because marketing is part of writing, so we need to use social media. Research is part of it, so we spend a great deal of time on that. Editing (let me see a doctor edit their work...) is also part of writing. Many hats.