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Life Hacks for the Riff Raff: How to Steal More Time for Your Writing

Money heist the shit out of your busy schedule

In this new series, I, former member of the riff raff, now medium.com writer and member of the literary ey-lite, will provide an illustrated (by unsplash) and documented manifesto for success. As a self trained self help transcendialiser, I can take you to the stars, and you won’t have to blow Jeff Bezos to get there.

Your first step? Steal more time for your writing.

Does a busy life get in the way of you chasing your dreams? Got a full time job? A spouse or significant other? Dog? Kids? Online vegetable-based porn addiction? Fear not. Here are some handy hacks to secure more time for writing the next great literary masterpiece. Combine chores via multitasking. This has been around for a while. Make a phone call while washing up, eat your toast in the car etc. Been there done that. You need to take this to the next level. If you’re anything like me — one plate of linguini away from a small bowel obstruction — you spend a good whack of time on the crapper. Now instead of reading idiotic articles like this one, do something useful with your pants down. Here are a few of the tasks you could complete while defecating:

-eat your breakfast (I have sultana bran with prune juice. It works, trust me) -brush your teeth -floss (your teeth) -write about how to steal more time for your writing -delts and bi’s workout -take a shower -skype call with Tim from accounts -practice the tuba -playtime with your pussycat or sausage dog

The possibilities are almost endless, but I would avoid clipping your fingernails while wiping.

Zone out of boring conversations. Let’s face it, the good majority of conversations we have each day are so boring the transcripts could be used to torture eastern European intellectuals. Or even the proles. I’ve stolen this time back by implanting a small speaker in the roof of my mouth. The speaker is linked to an app on my phone, and will play appropriate verbal responses dependent on the situation. This frees me up to have much more interesting conversations in my head, which may form the basis of the dialogue driven silent movie I am composing.

For example, here are some of the phrases I have recorded for, ‘Co worker wants to chat to you about the game last night.’

‘What a game what a game what a game what a mighty good game.’

‘The refs were a joke: what’s black and white and has a bunch of no ideas? A chain gang of blind Bambi’s.’

‘They should fire the coach. He jogs like a paedophile.’

Now, you do have to pay enough attention to the beginning of the conversation to select the appropriate batch of responses. Once I selected ‘favourite snacks’ to soak up half an hour with my mother-in-law before she veered into her grief over Auntie Jane’s untimely death. ‘I’d love some jerky right now’ was not an appropriate response to ‘Auntie Jane used to beat my arse with a fly swatter.’ Set up an automated email system to pretend you are working. A friend of mine did this successfully for a few years. He left the office for 3–4 hours each day and played indoor tennis and outdoor basketball. Unfortunately he got tennis elbow from all the tennis and skin cancer from all the outdoor basketball, and never became a professional athlete. Perhaps you could use this system for a safer pursuit, like indoor writing. Rob a bank. Hear me out. Most people looking at bank robbers from a task analysis perspective would think the primary goal is to steal money. Wrong. What they are really stealing is time. The money is just an intermediary. Imagine if you suddenly had an extra couple of million schmackos stashed under your mattress. You no longer have to waste the hours between 9 and 5 running laps on the wheel with your other rat mates.

You no longer have to sit through business school, or dental school, or high school. (Handy hack: the punishments for thievery as a minor are much less severe)

You no longer have to play golf with your Trump supporting father-in-law just to stay on the good side of his inheritance. You can write! And you’ve got a hell of a story to tell. And worse case scenario, you end up with an extended stay in the crowbar hotel. Plenty of time for writing there too. Everyone loves a good prison romance story.

There you go. A shit ton of opportunities and no more excuses. Grab life by the clock hands and stick a pen in it.

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