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First off, let's go over again why meditation has a connection to time management, particularly time management for writers. Managing time requires self-discipline. Meditation helps develop that. From last year's discussion of Kelly McGonigal's The Willpower Instinct:

McGonigal even explains why meditating helps with self-control and attention, something I've been hearing about for years, though no one felt a need to explain why it would work. Meditating, it appears, develops the prefrontal cortex, the portion of the brain that deals with impulse control. Good impulse control helps people stay on task with goals. Find meditation difficult because your mind keeps wandering and you have to keep bringing it back to the breath? That's actually good, according to McGonigal. The effort to do that develops the brain just as physical effort develops muscles.

Okay, that brings us up to this past Saturday, when I attended a five-hour meditation workshop sponsored by Dharma Drum Mountain's Hartford group. During the fifth hour, our monk leader was taking questions about the meditation we'd just done. Someone brought up seeing images of the Buddha while meditating.

The monk's response was that his group's particular meditation method didn't involve imagery because it can be distracting. When you have a meditation method, you need to eliminate anything that distracts from it. If that means eliminating Buddha, you eliminate Buddha. You kill the Buddha to protect your method.

Turns out killing the Buddha is a thing in Buddhism.

Writers develop a writing process just as meditators develop a meditating method. Writers need to eliminate anything that distracts from their process just as meditators have to eliminate anything that distracts from their method.

And that is why you frequently hear of writers practicing meditation. They're hoping that learning to kill the Buddha and protect their meditation method will give them the ability to protect their writing process as well.

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To bring everyone back up to speed, during the month of October I divested my home of one item a day because

• The Environmental Disorder study found that a disorganized environment can undermine impulse control. You need a little impulse control in my line of work.
• Owning a lot of stuff is time consuming because you have to take care of it. 
• According to the author of  Overwhelmed, the Danes don't buy and save a lot of stuff. It's good to be a Dane.

So how did that work for you, Gail, you may ask? Remarkably well.

During the first week, I noticed that I was close to emptying a drawer in the kitchen. And then I thought, Hey, I could start keeping the junk in that basket on the counter, in this drawer. Clean(er) counters make for a more organized environment.

Then I realized that just getting rid of thirty random items out of an entire house wasn't going to do much to help me organize my environment, improve my impulse control, and manage my time. But focusing on specific areas, like that kitchen counter, could. Thus I got rid of table cloths from the china cabinet in the dining room so that I won't have to spend time on my knees in front of it looking for linens when I'm expecting guests. I worked on the pantry so I, well, could walk through it, to be honest.

I got rid of some random things, too. But, really, the way to get a usable result from a possession purge is to apply a little logic, do a little planning. I may do an annual purge.

The Last Week's Most Interesting Ditched Item

Actually, I did this after the end of October, but I got the idea back in September. I don't use wine glasses at home, myself, because years ago I saw Nikita and Michael drinking wine from from tumblers, and I thought, Gee, that's kind of cool. And what was cooler? Tumblers could go in the dishwasher.

So when a waitress in a restaurant in Ohio brought me my wine in a highball glass, I thought, Hey, I'm getting myself some of these things.

But, Gail, you're probably thinking at this point, how will being the only woman in your town serving guests wine in what are glorified juice glasses do anything about your use of time?

Answer: As God is my witness, I will never spend so much as a minute washing and drying stemmed glasses again.

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Multi-tasking doesn't have a great reputation anymore. Some would suggest we stop doing it right now. I'm definitely not a fan.

Except when it comes to listening to podcasts.

I can't imagine sitting and listening to a podcast. Unless there's some fantastic footage, I can't even imagine sitting and watching a lot of those videos people make where they just look into a camera and talk. Talk? I can't imagine sitting and watching a Tedtalk.

But I can listen to all those things while I'm working in the kitchen. And I'm one of those people who will work in a kitchen for hours on a weekend, a weekend that is pretty much lost to other kinds of work. But if I can suck in writing- and reading-information while making bread, baking cookies, roasting asparagus, or any of the other things you might find me doing on a Sunday, we're talking a massive two-fer.

Yes, there is a wealth of info in oral form out there, but who has time to just sit in a chair and listen to it? Listen to it while you're doing other things. I have a Facebook friend who listens to podcasts on an iPhone while he's stacking wood. I have my laptop set up on the kitchen counter.

My most recent podcast listening experience was an interview with Joanna Penn. I've gotten some good ideas from Penn, one of which I may be discussing here later this week. Other podcast options:

• Lisa Cron's Wired for Story Tedtalk
• Write the Book, a Burlington, Vermont radio program with podcasts available on-line. Oh, I haven't been to this site in a while. They have an interview with Megan Abbott I'm interested in.
• National Public Radio
• Any local public radio program probably has its programs available as a podcast. This Colin McEnroe Show on sanitation included children's author Sarah Albee as a guest.
• The Narrative Breakdown,  Cheryl Klein and James Monohan discuss storytelling

Any other podcast suggestions for busy writers who want to listen while they're not at their workstations?

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At the half-year point in June, I felt I'd done better than I expected to on this year's goals and objectives. At that time, I determined which goals I wanted to focus on for the rest of the year. Not so happy about how that's been going.

My plans in June for the rest of the year:

• Goal 3. Finish a draft of the mummy book, I hope by September when I go on vacation. That's been a disaster, in large part because I became obsessed with a short piece I was working on in August (Goal 2), have been planning for an appearance I might be making in November, and working on another project.
• Goal 2. Write short pieces. Anything. Yes, I did complete one short piece. May have spent too much time on it, in fact.
• Goal 4.  Make submissions. I hope of some of the short pieces from Goal 2.Yes, I made a submission
• Goal 5. Work on community building. See how things go with the writers' group, and it would be terrific if I could find a workshop or other program for later this year. This is the goal I've done the most on, but that also meant spending the most time on it, too. It's a goal that doesn't produce real work. I made three appearances this summer, that involved some rubbing of shoulders, and I'm very happy so far with the writers' group I've joined.
• Goal 6. Continue marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook. A contact I made this summer led to yesterday's review at Reduced Footprints, and I have some more leads for contacts.

Well, let's get a little Zenny here and remember that these past few months are in the past, and I need to think about the present. What can I do with the rest of my year?

• Goal 1. Finish the revision of The Fletcher Farm Body I did finish this earlier this year, but guess what? I'm revising it again. This time I'm concentrating on making sure that scenes either advance the story or reveal new information and that chapters involve a change. (I got this idea from Rachel Aaron's 2,000 to 10,000.) Yes, I've become obsessed with this book, just as I was obsessed with the flash story I was working on in August.
• Goal 4. Make submissions. I'd like to work on submitting some of the work I've already completed, so I'll focus on trying to match new marketing possibilities with manuscripts on hand.
• Goal 5. Continue to work on community building Continue the Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar, try to cover the Connecticut Children's Book Fair for my blog, I have created a new author talk that I may be presenting next month, attend my shiny new writers' group, continue to build my Twitter following.
• Goal 6. Continue marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook I do have some ideas for contacts.

So three-quarters of the year is gone, and while I've been working away, really, I have,  I've wandered off goal. A bit. Some. Should I just give in to the What-the-Hell-Effect and spend the rest of the year lying in bed reading, which I kind of desperately want to do? No, I should not!  I have two and a half months left. That's a lot of units of time.

This Week's Most Interesting Ditched Item

Sorry I haven't uploaded the picture, but I had a great one of a twin mattress and spring set in the back of a pickup truck. I would have sent those things out of here at some point, but maybe not this month. Thank goodness for the purge.

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I was able to sneak onto Blogger this morning and check my e-mail, but I'm having trouble getting other places on-line. (The new modem is here in the house. We're hoping to get it out of the package tomorrow.) I'm cobbling this post together with the help of my iPhone, which can zip me around the Internet.

I heard about write jars at the 10-Minute Novelist Facebook page. Vickie S. Miller's blog post What's Your Reward? #Writejar describes how it works. Write jars are similar to swear jars or any other kind of system you create to either fine yourself for a behavior you want to avoid (swearing) or pay yourself for a behavior you want to encourage (writing).

I believe that in the case of write jars, this would be considered an external support for willpower. You're using something outside yourself, a money reward, to help you stay on task. (Timers are also external supports.)  I'm not aware of any research on how well monetary support works, and given my crippling Internet problems this week, I'm not going to be able to hunt for any. That will be another blog post. Vickie had only been using a write jar for a couple of weeks at the time of her post, so we won't know for a while how it ends up working for her.

If I were going to try this, I think I would use a simpler system than Vickie is. Keeping track of the different cash amounts for the different types of writing would be unwieldy for me. But like anything else related to managing time, everyone should fine tune systems to suit their own needs.

This Week's Most Interesting Ditched Item 

I just tried to upload a picture relating to my October purge, but that's not going to be happening. But it was a Swiss cowbell. I kid you not. We had a Swiss cowbell here. Brought back from the Land of Heidi by in-laws a few decades back. I mention that because I want to make sure everyone knows that I wasn't responsible for bringing it into this country, just into my house. I was able to unload it on my sister-in-law. 

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Earlier this year, I heard about the Environmental Disorder study, which found that a disorganized environment can undermine impulse control. Lack of impulse control is what leads one to hunt for pictures of George Clooney's wedding instead of working. In August I read that owning a lot of stuff is time consuming because you have to take care of it. And then just last month I read that one paragraph in Overwhelmed about the Danes not buying and saving a lot of stuff. And, according to Overwhelmed, the Danes are good with time.

The Plan For October

I'm a big believer in managing all our time, not just our work time. Hunting through piles of possessions... shoving things out of the way...if stuff both undermines self-control and takes up time, then stuff is something I'd like to have less of. So this month, I'm following the example of Joshua Fields Millburn who got rid of a possession a day for thirty days. I started last Wednesday.

This isn't that big a stretch for me, to be honest. We've kept a "church tag sale" box and a "library book sale" bag for years. I'm not talking about something I'm going to find painful. I have been concerned, though, that because we try to unload regularly, I won't have 30 days worth of meaningless material to offload on relatives or the community. However, this first week I could have done more than one item a day, and one day I did.

This means that, like so many others, I'm living with pileup that may be impacting my control and costing me time I'd like to use on other things. Like writing, for instance.

I will, of course, issue a report on how my month goes. Hmm. A month. That's a unit of time. A long one, but a unit nonetheless.

This Week's Most Interesting Ditched Item

When my kids were little, I asked for these walkie-talkies for my birthday because I read a book that suggested to me that we could use them for playing hide-and-seek. I think we used them once, which is why they look like new. Not only is my heart not broken to see these things go, the drawer they were in had a wealth of other junk I can get rid of. (I just want to go on record as saying I wasn't the one who saved all those swizzle sticks.)

I could end up with an empty drawer in my kitchen by the time I'm done.

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What I Learned On My September Vacation

When I got my own personal laptop and was no longer sharing computers with family members, I became very excited over bookmarking sites. I bookmarked a lot of them. I classified them. I stockpiled the things and fantasized about reading them. I looked forward to reading them on this vacation I just took.

I did read a great many of them. And what I found was that in many cases I didn't need to have bothered. A lot of these things were repeats of information I'd already seen elsewhere. There is only so much information out there on writing and marketing, but there are a lot of blogs and websites with writers who have just discovered this stuff and think it is newsworthy.

How much time could I save myself by being a lot more discriminating about my reading material? Well, I decided, let's see.

Personal Precedent For Creating More Time By Cutting Reading

Quite honestly, I've been cutting reading for years.

• Giving up. Yes, yes, I used to be one of those readers who had to finish any book she started. It was an obsession or some kind of moral code. When did things change? I don't know. Maybe around the time I started hearing stories about a million books being published every year. (I don't know if that's actually true, by the way.) Which may have coincided with me reading one too many bad books. Which may have been around the time I realized life is short. I should be fussier about how I spend my time.
• Skimming. I also skim books, particularly those that have some significance in my field but I just don't like. Skimming definitely lets you hit the high points in a work, get a feeling for its world, and just find out what happens. "That's a skimmer," is a phrase I often use, but only to myself. (Did I just write that out loud?)
• I gave up reading listicles a year or two ago. There's something I've never missed. Seriously, ever seen a listicle called "The Top 10 Cures For Cancer" or "5 Ways To Find God?" Okay, you probably have. In which case, you know what I mean.

How Can I Cut More?

• Impose Limitations. Some time management specialists suggest making to-do lists on post-it notes in order to force yourself to be reasonable about what you can do in a day. I'm going to try limiting myself to just three to five bookmarks in any category. I want to add a new one? I have to take one off, either by reading the thing or just dropping it.
• Give Them A Chance To Make Their Case. To make the bookmark list, a post will have to meet a two-paragraph test. It has to prove to me in that time that it has material new to me or compelling in some new way.
• Size Matters. Personally, I believe the Internet is different. Material written for it should be concise. Otherwise, it should be in The New Yorker. Over the years, I've moved away from blogs that regularly ran long. I'm not saying I'll never read a magazine article on-line, but if I do, it won't be a random act.
• If You Haven't Read It In A Year... Ever hear that advice about getting rid of clothes you haven't worn in a year? Yeah, I could do that with bookmarks.

Seriously, How Much Time Do You Expect To Gain With This, Gail?

Hmm. Maybe not that much. But I won't have a long list of bookmarked sites hanging over my head, which can only be a good thing.

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I am beginning this blog post in the solarium of a lovely lodge that would make a great place for a writers' retreat. Unfortunately, last night I was so into this place and its wonderful writer retreat possibilities,  that I totally forgot about writing this Time Management Tuesday post. And, thus, I am a day late.

Okay, reading Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has The Time by Brigid Schulte was a fascinating experience because of the very different ways she and I look at the time issue. She is interested in support. I am interested in skills. At the end of her book, Schulte briefly covers some of the things she's doing differently now to help her manage time. She talks about "pulses," for instance, which are similar to the units that many time management people recommend. She describes the Pomodoro Technique in a footnote.

What About John Robinson And Leisure Time?

Another fascinating part of reading this book is that it didn't cover what I was looking for. What grabbed my interest in the articles I read about this book was Schulte's coverage of John Robinson's contention that we have far more leisure time than we think we do. Schulte's response to that was that the time he claimed was her leisure time didn't feel like leisure time. 

Here is a Gail life experience that I think illustrates her point:

When my children were young, I, like so many other mothers in my town, took them to the local beach in the summer for a couple of weeks of swimming lessons. For at least one year when they were in grade school, we'd hang out at the beach for hours, eating lunch, reading magazines (in my case), catching minnows with nets, digging in the sand, and planting all kinds of plastic tubing brought from home.

I saw the swimming lesson hangout as being the closest I'd ever come to owning a lake house. It was like going away. After reading Schulte's book, I realize that many woman would have perceived those days as childcare, since, technically, I was supposed to be taking care of my kids. For those women, it would have just been more work.

Why does how that time was perceived matter? Because the parent who sees hauling two boys, lunch, towels, sunscreen, magazines, shovels, buckets, and leftover construction pipes to the lake as a glorious summer getaway is going to go home feeling as if she's been on vacation for the afternoon. That will have an impact on how she's able to use the rest of her day. The parent who sees hauling two boys, lunch, towels, sunscreen, magazines, shovels, buckets, and leftover construction pipes to the lake as childcare/work is going to go home feeling overwhelmed. And that will have an impact on how she's able to use the rest of her day.

And The Writing Connection, Gail?

I'm not sure. But if I've got 30+ hours of leisure time that I don't realize is leisure time, I'd sure like to be able to repurpose some of it for work. I suspect many other writers would, too.

I'm thinking that I want to try to find more on John Robinson, who has been taking a bashing over his spin on women and time. And when I get back from vacation, I may try to keep a time journal. If I have the time.

Speaking of vacation, I am finishing this blog post while looking out at the mighty Monongahela River outside of Pittsburgh. Yes. That's leisure time. I own it.

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What's With The Danes And Time?

I think Brigid Schulte's big interest in Overwhelmed: Work, Love, And Play When o One Has The Time is seeking support for her struggles with time, which means support for others like her. She contacts a number of groups of women who are doing things like trying to simplify their lives or managing to function comfortably as high achievers.

I'm more interested in going right for the skills. When Schulte wrote about Denmark, seeking out a culture where time studies show that women workers have more leisure time than in other countries, I wanted to hear more about how they did it.

The Minimalist Thing

Schulte says, "I am struck for the first but certainly not the last time as I began to visit more Danes' homes that there is no junk...I was assured again and again that Danes simply do not buy, produce, or save as much stuff." She only gave one paragraph to the issue of material possessions' impact on our use of time, which just happens to be one that I'm interested in. Does lack of stuff really have an impact on the Danes' overall use of time? If they really aren't into acquiring and keeping, why not?

How Do They Stay On Task At Work?

Schulte is assured by the couple that is the main focus of her Denmark chapter that Danes "work in a very focused way. Lunch is usually no more than half an hour...In Denmark, there isn't a whole lot of joking around the watercooler or Facebook checking in the office, they explain. You do your work and you go home." That's how Danes are able to stick to a 9 to 4:24 schedule and get home without bringing work with them.

How, how, how? How are they able to deal with interruptions from clients and supervisors with surprise assignments? What about chatty co-workers? Do Danes not get chatty at the office?

Gail's Needs

I'm not questioning whether or not these people are doing these things. I just want to know how so I can do it, too.

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I've been reading Overwhelmed: Work, Love, And Play When No One Has The Time by Brigid Schulte and began blogging about it last week. This week I bring you up to speed with my reading.

What is Overwhelmed Actually About?

Overwhelmed is not a time management book. The "overwhelm" is Schulte's term for that feeling of being buried with things to do. Her book, so far at least, is not about how to deal with the overwhelm but how it comes about, particularly for women. How does the workplace contribute to this? How do perceptions of what mothers should be contribute to it? Are there workplaces/countries where things are different?

Writers Have Some Experience With Working At Home

Schulte writes of companies that put performance and production before "face time," having to be in the office where managers and co-workers can see you. These particular employers allow their employees to work from home, where parents can

Many writers work in that way. What many of them find, though, is that without the external structure of an office and "traditional" hierarchy, "the boundary between professional and personal time is very thin and very wobbly. It is all too easy for personal time to bleed into work time." What I'm talking about ends up being a lot like the overwhelm, it's just that now you're working at home.

That's not to say there isn't a way of dealing with this situation--bringing some kind of childcare into the home where parents are working might be a huge help, for instance. But if writers' experience is any indicator, just shifting work from an office building to a home isn't necessarily going to solve the overwhelm problem.

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Several months ago, I stumbled upon an article about Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has The Time by Brigid Schulte. Then I stumbled upon another. Of course, I was attracted by those words "No One Has The Time." But I also was interested because both the articles included information about John Robinson, a sociologist who has studied how people use time through "time diaries." Robinson told Schulte that people have an average of 30 hours a week of leisure time, far more than most of us believe we do. This made me wonder if how we perceive what we're doing comes into play here, and, if so, can we writers use that somehow.

So I'm reading Overwhelmed.

So far, the book reminds me of Welcome to the Lizard Motel and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. All three books take a memoirish angle to nonfiction. And all three authors have a personal issue that they're trying to support with their books. (I am not the only reader to get the introverts/good, extroverts/not so good feeling from Quiet.) In my early reading of Overwhelmed, for instance, Schulte really isn't having any of Robinson's contention that she has so much leisure time. She seems determined to prove him wrong.

The portion of the book I've completed has a lot of information about the traditional work world. A lot of it will sound familiar to anyone who has been reading about women and work for the last few decades in terms of women's treatment in the workplace. The new information is that this is still going on and that men, too, are now negatively impacted by what Schulte calls our culture's commitment to a retro "Ideal Worker," one who can live at the office.

Her point is that work life has an impact on how we spend our personal time, which I certainly agree with. I still have to see if Schulte will give some advice on what to do about it.

Check out blogger Becky Levine's response to Overwhelmed.

Yes, I'm a day late with Time Management Tuesday. I was having problems last night. 

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"No matter how organized we are, we must continue to care for the stuff we organize, sorting and cleaning our meticulously structured belongings."

You'll find that line in  A New Memoir About What Happens When You Get Rid of All Your Stuff , an excerpt from Everything That Remains by Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus that appears in Slate. The point Millburn and Nicodemus are making is that so long as you keep the stuff, you have to continue to take care of it.

Taking care of stuff takes time.

Dealing with life's stuff may seem beyond the focus of this blog series, which is time management for writers. But, remember, "the boundary between professional and personal time is very thin and very wobbly," particularly for writers who often work without workstations outside the home and function as their own supervisors. The less we have to deal with in our personal lives, the more we'll have to give to our professional lives.

Millburn and Nicodemus say that organizers accumulate things, they just think they have control of the situation because they're organized. But organize is a verb. It's something you have to do. Minimalizing, simplifying, not having a lot of possessions to handle may be the more time and energy efficient way to go.

You can minimalize your work world, too. I tossed some writing books a month or two ago. And then there was the file purge I did a couple of years ago.

Of course, minimalizing takes time, too. But once things are gone, they're gone. Keeping them organized, on the other hand, goes on forever.

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Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson wrote a post at her website last winter on procrastination called How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don't Want To. Among her suggestions and my take on how they apply to writers:

Promotion vs. Prevention Focuses

A promotion focus encourages someone to work to better themselves. Will working today mean meeting a deadline or enable you to make a submission? Will studying today enhance the quality of your writing? Will just putting in time writing enhance the quality of your writing? That's all about promotion.

A prevention focus encourages someone to work to maintain what they have and prevent loss. Will working today help me to maintain my tenuous place on the writing career ladder? Will it help me to stay published? That's about prevention.

Halvorson argues that choosing a focus can keep you working.

Do You Have To Feel Like Working In Order To Work?

This is a question of particular interest to writers and other creatives because there is a stereotype that we have to be inspired in order to work. There are muses that are supposed to visit us. Personally, I think this is a very old-fashioned attitude, at least as far as creative people are concerned. I never hear it from published writers or anyone serious about publishing. Actually, I only hear it from people who don't do creative work, and even then rarely. I don't hear about writer's block, either. The realities of publishing have moved most of us past that.

If-Then Planning

Timothy Pychyl also talks about if-then statements, calling them implementation intentions.  You plan ahead to deal with problem situations--form an intention and plan how you'll implement it. I, for instance, plan to keep working until a timer goes off. Halvorsan says, "...if-then plans dramatically reduce the demands placed on your willpower... In fact,  if-then planning has been shown in over "200 studies to increase rates of goal attainment and productivity by 200%-300% on average."

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You may recall that I blew the better part of a month on a piece of flash fiction I still haven't finished. I have written flash fiction before, and I know it took me a while to write it. But my recollection is that I worked on it now and then over a long period of time while working on other things. It didn't keep me from other projects the way last month's short story did.

Several years ago I heard a couple of writers leading a workshop on nonfiction say that they determine how much time they'll commit to getting a new project started before they get going. I e-mailed them to ask if they'd like to elaborate on that. They didn't. This past week, I threw a question out on this subject at Facebook. Again, no one wanted to discuss how they decide to let a new project go or at least put it aside on simmer.

I would like a formula, an equation that I can plug numbers into. Something very linear. (I did a little research on linear and nonlinear systems for that 1,000 word project.) 

The amount of time I put into this story, which I can't even name because it doesn't have one yet, made me feel I needed to put more time in so I wouldn't have wasted all the time I'd already used up. Just a little bit more, then I'll get my payoff. Hmm. Does that sound like gambling? In the meantime, I was loosing a big chunk of the time I'd wanted to use on the project I'd made progress on during May. I'll be on vacation a large part of September, so that stinks. I also was drifting away from the new writing process I was working on in May. This was all for a 1,000 word story that I had no market lined up for. If I had been able to publish it, it might have ended up being with a publication that doesn't pay.

Now my work provides a very small portion of our family's support. But there are writers out there who have to generate income. They can't use their time like I used mine last month.

I had a flashfic obsession, and others could tell. My husband used the word in relation to my writing behavior and constant discussion of the story. Now that it's over, I feel confident that in some point in the future, I'll finish that piece and be able to submit it. But I also feel I should have been able to get to that point with a normal work method.

Knowing when to lay off may be a matter of knowing. Without the knowing, I'd like something else to push the Put It Away Button.

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I try to blog in the evening, so I'm not using primo creative day time on what is essentially marketing. The last two Tuesday evenings I've been making appearances. And that's where my time went the last two weeks.

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Last week I did a Time Management Tuesday post on using time during dry spells when you're not making sales. One of the things I suggested doing was studying, including the possibility of working on a MFA. I wanted to include a link to Karin Gillespie's New York Times' essay, A Master's in Chick Lit, but I'm embarrassed to say I couldn't remember Karin's name, so couldn't find the essay.

Seriously, I should be embarrassed not to have remembered her name, because we were both members of an on-line writers' community years ago. Karin had a blog at that time, which was what got me interested in starting Original Content.

Check out her experience with an MFA program in creative writing.

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As usual, the weekend was brutal, which is why you haven't heard from me. I will admit I had some time for blogging Sunday afternoon, but I used it for recovery.

So, let's see, I believe that last Tuesday we began talking about the time problems involved when writers are working but not making sales. We said they came in two flavors: problems related to how others perceive us and problems related to how we perceive ourselves. Today we'll cover some ways to try to deal with them.

Problems related to how others perceive us. When we aren't generating income because we're not making sales, others perceive us as not working, and thus available for everything.We can't control what they believe or how they behave toward us. We can only control ourselves. So what we can do to better manage our time:

1. Set blocks of time when we aren't available to others, even if it's just a couple of days a week. They can call us, but we don't have to answer the phone. This will work better if you have Caller ID. All I have is a Caller ID Box, no answering machine. The calls I need to take for work or to make sure there are no family emergencies, I can take. Without an answering machine, the callers I don't respond to can't leave messages for me to hear coming in. That can be just as disruptive as calls. If you feel uncomfortable about this, you can spread the word about what you're doing so family and friends understand. My experience, though, is that the people who believe I'm on call for them don't believe me. This really is a case where controlling ourselves is probably our only option.
2. Be quick to adapt to each week's situation. If, say, you're loosing an extra day of work time to elder care, you just can't accept that invitation for lunch. I speak from experience. This happened just a couple of weeks ago. I didn't think ahead and adapt quickly enough. I accepted the lunch invitation on top of that extra day of elder care and lost a lot of work time that week. 

Problems related to how we perceive us. We give up a lot of personal life to find time to work. Time with friends, time for book clubs,  time for volunteer work, time for other creative activity. Going without the reward of publication for too long can eventually lead to big time discouragement, making it hard to stay on task. What can we do to get the energy up we need to keep making good use of time? And make good use of time while we're doing it? If you follow me.

1. Consider yourself a novelist? Use some of your writing time to try generating shorter material so you can submit more widely. The more you submit, the better your chances of publication. Even if you get published in nonpaying journals, the publication fills gaps in your publishing history and gives you something to show editors and agents.
2. Try finding a writers' group. If the writers' group advocates are correct, this will provide work feedback as well as networking. You have to be careful, though. Writers' groups can be very time consuming, if they meet often and require a lot of work from individual members. You have to balance benefit and costs here.
3. Try doing some studying. There's always a possibility that there's a reason for the publishing problem, one that you could address through education. There's no one way to do this. You can do a do-it-yourself MFA type thing with self-study. You can take workshops and go to conferences and retreats. I know of published writers who experienced a publishing drought post 2008 who used the opportunity to go to graduate school. Again, you have to be careful to make sure you're balancing study with writing. Also, keep in mind that some critics believe that MFA programs turn out uniform, cookie cutter writers.

To some extent, you can consider a period of not publishing an opportunity to do some different things like those I suggest above. Because once you've made a sale, particularly of a book, you're going to lose a lot of your writing time to the publishing process and marketing.

Yeah, writing's a trial.

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Sometime in the last few months, I saw a blog post/article asking a variation of How do writers keep working when they aren't making sales? I thought it was an excellent question. Though I'm sorry to say that I can't find the piece of writing I'm referring to, my recollection is that the answer was a little on the warm and fuzzy side, something like "we all deserve to write, whatever the outcome." Though that's certainly true, I'm not very warm and fuzzy. Plus, I think trying to continue writing without the traditional reward of publication and payment has an impact on time, which is our business here.

The Time Problem

• How Others Perceive Us. In our culture, we perceive people who aren't getting paid for their labor as not working. Ask any homemaker or stay-at-home parent. When we are perceived as not working, we are perceived as being available during our work time. We are available for lengthy personal calls. We are available for lunch. We are available for shopping, for get-togethers, for athletic events. The belief that we don't work can drain away our work time.
• How We Perceive Us. Going long periods of time without the feedback of a sale is discouraging, just as it is discouraging to be applying for jobs and not getting them. For writers who are part of a family and not generating any other income, it's easy to start feeling that life would be better for those around us, and maybe for us, too, if we got a job that made some real money. For writers who have day jobs, maintaining a writing practice that is "just" a practice can be exhausting. What are we giving up to do it? Friends? Creative and engaging volunteer work? Yoga class? Book Club? Studying that foreign language/philosophy? Cooking decent meals? Keeping on, keeping on can drain away our personal time.

All this draining--I need more than some warmth and fuzziness to help me deal with it. Next week I'll cover that.

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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.

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I was going to write this week about the value of making a planning list and checking it twice. However, something happened last night that changed my mind. I found two items in one of my filing cabinets. Immediately.

A couple of years ago, I did a massive reordering of my filing system, and I've been able to maintain it. Yesterday, I needed a couple of journals that had published my nonfiction so I could make clippings to submit to still another publication with new work. I found what I wanted immediately, but not because I remembered exactly where they were. I found them immediately because because I went to the drawer marked essays and pulled it open. Then I saw that I had a section for completed, published work. Files for both essays were there, and each file included a few copies of the journals in which the essays were published.

Voila.

Finding a magazine sounds like a small thing. But those publications mean the difference between being able to make a submission or not make it. If I hadn't had them carefully filed away, I would have had to look for them. Hunting for things takes time, time I could spend writing.

As it turns out, I did a lot of writing and research today because I didn't have to hunt through the entire office looking for those back copies of The Horn Book and English Journal.

Maintain order + filing = time for work.

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I've been thinking for a while that I need to check my New Year's goals and objectives. I wasn't eager to do it, because I suspected that I haven't been staying with the program, and who wants to have that confirmed? As it turns out, I've been doing better than I thought.

Goal 1. Finish the revision of The Fletcher Farm Body  Done.

Goal 3. Complete a draft of the so-called mummy book  My objectives were to get up to speed on this project by February and start working on this then. It didn't happen until May, but I do have 9 chapters toward meeting this goal now.

Goal 4. Make submissions  I've only met one objective here for this goal, the one regarding an agent search.

Goal 5. Continue to work on community building  I've only managed two objectives, continuing the Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar and looking for a writers' group. I may have found one just this week.

Goal 6. Continue marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook  I've met several of the objectives for this goal, restarting the Environmental Book Club, getting the trailer up at Twitter, and reducing the price for a week around Earth Day.

The goal I've really fallen down on is 2. Write a number of short pieces All I've done is work on the Statics and Dynamics for Writers essay.

How Will I Use My Time The Rest Of The Year?

• Goal 3. Finish a draft of the mummy book, I hope by September when I go on vacation.
• Goal 2. Write short pieces Anything.
• Goal 4.  Make submissions. I hope of some of the short pieces from Goal 2.
• Goal 5. Work on community building. See how things go with the writers' group, and it would be terrific if I could find a workshop or other program for later this year.
• Goal 6. Continue marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook.

In January I also wanted to check up on myself each week to make sure that a good chunk of my time went toward objectives to meet my goals, an idea I got from Peter Bregman's 18 Minutes. I haven't been doing that at all. But I still have half a year to get started on that.

Check your goals and objectives for the year. You can feel good about what you've accomplished and decide which ones you want to focus on for the next six months.

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This past April, I wrote about whether or not a disordered environment could have an impact on work. A recent study suggested it could cause "reduced stamina on tasks that require advanced thinking skills." At that time I also wrote about my own disordered office environment and how the system I'd set up the year before for keeping filing done and order maintained had fallen apart.

Well, things haven't improved. They're, uh, actually somewhat worse. Back in April, I thought I needed to get some kind of cleaning routine back into my life. Now I'm wondering if routine is the problem.

My self-discipline goddess, Kelly McGonigal, has voiced doubts about the value of habit, saying that it's a nonthinking behavior that works best for small tasks. Managing my environment doesn't appear to be a small task. What advice does she have that I could somehow apply to this issue?

Automatic Goal Pursuit--Keep a goal in mind instead of relying on automatic habits. Remember that I need to maintain order so I can have more time to work instead of relying on automatically and mindlessly doing it.

Implementations--Plan what to do in certain situations. In this case, planning to work on the office at certain times of day. This worked well when I was planning to work on the office every morning. When I started implementing work sprints in the morning, the office cleaning got lost. Yikes.

Well, I know habit isn't working for me on this one. I'm going to try to combo automatic goal pursuit and an implementation. It's worth a try. My office, as it is, is definitely making me feel out of control and undermining my discipline.

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If you've been following my May Days project, you know that I was working on doing more with the time I have by increasing my word count. You probably also know that I didn't get anywhere near the 10,000 words a day mark that author Rachel Aaron describes in her book 2k to 10k. Only once did I approach the 2,000 words she started with. Did this mean my May Days was a failure?

Hardly. I ended up with two things:

1. Rough drafts of four new chapters for a long-term project. Since I already had five chapters, I'm probably past the halfway point. If I were a better plotter, I'd know.
2. A new writing process that involves concentrating on planning scenes and chapters before starting to write. 

In addition to working with scenes, I was also staying immersed in this project, which I find helps to generate new work. But how do you stay immersed? You have to not do other things that need to be done. Planning an appearance. Staying up on promotional activities. Helping a friend move.

Everything you choose to do means you are choosing not to do something else. One of the sad realities of time.

I found this past month exhausting. It was a combination of hustling to stay on top of scene planning and writing and the anxiety of knowing I had other work that needed to be done. The last few days I was hanging on by my teeth. And now I'm right into another binge job, prepping for a speaking appearance at the Ethan Allen Homestead.  

June is going to be lost to Ethan, some family business, and a long weekend. Then I hope to get back to my May Days manuscript. My goal is to finish a rough draft before a September vacation.

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Let's see, one change I've been working on this past month (May Days!) to increase my word count is to pay attention to scenes. I'm planning them ahead of time, structuring them, and confining material to a limited number of scenes in a chapter instead of meandering here and there. I think it's making a difference.

You know what else is making a difference with word count? I think? Not obsessing on making everything perfect before I move on. I can lose forty minutes or much, much more fixating on getting every word right because each paragraph is a foundation for the next paragraph, and I need a good foundation! Then I might come up with something while working on chapter nine that means changes in seven and eight and maybe I need to have one character own a smartphone, so I have to go back and do that.

This kind of thing sucks up time, big time and keeps me from generating new work.

This past week I've been able to make notes about how I want to change a paragraph when I can't get there immediately. Then I jump it and move on. That business about coming up with something in chapter nine that requires changes in chapters seven and eight? That was real. I opened those earlier chapters and left instructions for myself.

And then I moved on.

Now, I won't know how well this works until I get to the end of the road and start the next draft. But for now, I am piling up words.

But nothing like the 10,000 words a day I was shooting for.

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First off, my word count since last we were together: Friday--995 words, Saturday--65 words, Monday--1,640 words, and today 1,009 words. I did get some additional work done today on next month's presentation, which has been hanging over my head.

Note Saturday's pathetic word count. In my defense, I'd like to say that I don't usually work at all on weekends. In my defense, I'd also like to say that on Saturday I also did some scene planning.

In last week's post I agreed with Rachel Aaron that knowing what you're going to write is essential to increasing word count. Or in my case, it seems, maintaining any kind of word count worth mentioning. One way she says you will know what you're going to write is by planning scenes.

As with most aspects of planning/plotting a story, coming up with scenes is easier said than done. The easier part, though, comes along if you keep in mind that scenes keep you from just randomly writing, stumbling around through text. Scenes are specific moments, steps in a story. They are made up of action that takes place in one place at one time, and they reveal new information. You're doing something specific with them. I've found thinking in terms of scenes and planning them hugely helpful this past month.

I include a little something I got from The Plot Whisperer while planning my scenes. I want them to relate to character, plot, or theme. More than one of those items? Terrific. But at least one.

And chapters? Again, they shouldn't be random. You shouldn't be starting a new chapter because it feels right. (Yeah, I've done that.) Aaron quotes Holly Lisle on the subject. In a chapter, something changes. I'm embarrassed that I didn't know that.

Seriously. Knowing stuff, at least about scenes and chapters, means you can write faster. Writing faster is like finding time.

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