Desperate to Save Time for Writing, Can a Mere Sign Rescue My Sanity?

Another Writer’s Good Advice Inspires an Old Strategy with a New Purpose

Of course, I click on the title, “Saving 1465 Hours to Write Several Books a Year While Working Full Time.” I’m trying to write a book proposal. I have a March 31 deadline. That’s only 720 hours from now — less if you subtract time for eating, sleeping, and a few hours of binge TV.

I’m genius at conceiving how-to-NOT-write strategies. Not so good at doing the project I’m supposed to do first. Accordingly, in the last few days, I wrote three articles for Medium instead of working on my proposal.

Decades ago, I churned them out. I didn’t have a full-time job to worry about, but I wrote for a living. Several years in a row, I managed to produce two books and countless print pieces. I spent hours at my desk, interrupted only by the ring of my landline, a growling stomach, or a dog’s head on my knee.

Now, everything interrupts me, and I feel the tug of time.

I Didn’t See This Coming, Did You?

Who knew that harnessing time would someday become so challenging?

In 1977, when Marie Winn blew the lid off television, dubbing it “the plug-in drug,” my kids were 8 and 5. I feared for their minds — a concern that now seems quaint by comparison.

When the Internet was young, and email was newish, I was intrigued. Familiar words now meant something else. I loved that I could “search” online and “chat” with far-away acquaintances. My gerbil brain was in heaven.

By the mid-2000s, I was researching and writing about our new “affordances” as sociologist Barry Wellman called them. He and others said this was “only the beginning.”

Still, even as we eased past the Y2K scare, I couldn’t imagine mere mortals strapping on Dick Tracy’s “two-way wrist radio” — no less, billions of us romping through a “metaverse” yet to come.

Who knows? Today, it’s virtual reality goggles. Tomorrow, an AI “Scotty” will “beam me up” to my grandson’s college dorm for a tour!

It already started. We might not — yet — be able to project our physical selves. But video-chatting with a 19-year-old in another country still smacks of science fiction to me.

This must be how my great-grandmother felt when airplanes were invented.

But I digress…. It’s not just the ease of distant connections that entrances and distracts me. I can access everything now: information, images, ideologies, opinions. And as one who long ago chose “snooping” as a profession, I am the proverbial pig in $h!t.

The Problem with Distraction

Admittedly, some of my online forays are a waste of my time.

Zelda, my old lady in Miami who almost made it to 105, would not be happy to hear this. She became most aware of time in her nineties and started writing poems about it.

“Before that,” she told me, “I didn’t feel old or think about ageing. We don’t realize how time runs out until it starts trickling away.”

Zelda had buried two husbands by then and watched family and close friends die or, almost as bad, get too sick to socialize. So she made the most of every day, and every hour in it, always telling herself….

Time is the most important thing we have.

Memo to Self: Save Time

I don’t want to disappoint Zelda, and I don’t want to waste time. I do want to keep writing.

This paragraph, in the conclusion of Dr. Mehmet Yildiz’s excellent piece, inspired me:

When I discussed these points with one of my mentors, he responded that “saying yes to these time-wasting traps means no to write.”

Powerful, true words. The choice is mine; I know that. I also know myself.

I will have to keep making the right choice, again and again, even in the course of a day. I will have remind myself to just say no.

No! Don’t stop now to check your emails.…

No! Play today’s Wordl after you finish writing this.…

No! Don’t switch screens to Google how Flash Gordon stayed in touch with Headquarters. You’ll end up cutting it anyway.

Inside me, there’s wise person who knows better. But her voice is sometimes drowned out by the cacophony of Internet sirens begging for my attention.

For me, visual cues work best. Hence, I’m trying a mindfulness aide — a sign over my desk — that I’ve used successfully to remind myself that my life is the only one I can run. Why not do the same thing to keep myself focused?

Feel free to follow my lead if you’re among the gerbil-brained or the time-challenged.

Create a sign like the one below. You might prefer to hand-write it and/or to use wording of your own choice. Post it where you will see it often during your day — a kitchen cabinet, your bathroom mirror.

Mine is scotch-taped to the wall I face every time I lift my eyes from my laptop screen:

YES to WASTING TIME = NO to WRITING

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