I ask my son “Where does the time
go?” and he replies, “Gone.” This is a conditioned response,
but it's funny. He's two years old, his concept of time is
astronomically different from mine. In the grand scheme of things, my
concept of time has changed over the years too, this is probably a
function of age, and of experience.
However, I do wonder sometimes: Where
does the time go? I feel like
I've always had a great deal of time, not too much, and always not
quite enough. From time to time, when the conversation comes up about
the writing of novels, people ask: where do you find the time?
I have thankfully
avoided all the common time suckers. I do not, and have never had a
television. The tv and all the great stuff that comes piping in on it
is perhaps the greatest time sucker of them all. Sometimes I wish I
liked the tv and the reality of it and the sports because I could
have a whole lot less to say to many more people. If you want to
really think about it, translate all the hours you sit in front of a
tv and translate that into a garden, an artist project, or a novel.
Where do you find the time? If you have a Facebook account, a video
game machine or a bag of weed in your house, well, you have the time.
This is nothing you
have not heard before. It's old news. I suppose you could balance the
time with the mary jane and the xbox and still be able to do so much,
but why? I feel like the best waste of time is the waste you want.
Who knows? If you're the sort of person who wonders where to find
more time, you just have to look and learn about yourself and that is
never very easy.
I never took a
seminar about time management. I never read a book. But I have had
the benefit of life going for me. I mean, when you're a college
student and working full time or more than full time, you will
understand quickly the need to manage your time. And as I had spent
many years in the service industry time management was a necessity
for the job. You can imagine, or you may know what it is to have a
six table section all in various stages of savagery and satiety and
you got a finite amount of time to get it all done. This is, of
course, an over simplification of time management, but you get the
point.
So how do you get
all those things you want to get accomplished done in a finite amount
of time. Well, I think you first have to understand that the most
valuable resource is time. Some may argue it's water, or air, or oil,
or the democratic party, fuck all. Without time, what do you have?
When you run out of time, all the water and air and oil and democrats
will not be able to bring you back.
The second thing is
to know and understand what's important and what is not. I would
reckon the longer you think about it the longer the list will become
of the not important stuff. If it's not important, stop doing it.
This is where I
like to think. Of the important things, do what your high school
guidance counselor told you to do and prioritize them. Write it down
on a list, and then revisit the important and non-important lists.
Distillation is a wonderful thing.
The
last part, and I don't know if this is something that I can convey in
such a short space but here goes: break it down into smaller more
easily attainable tasks. For instance, if I want to write a novel or
100 poems, I won't sit down and do it in one sitting. I would like to
sit down and do it in one sitting, but that is just not possible. So,
here's the smaller easily attainable task: today I will write one
page, one poem, 100 words. That's the way to break it down. It takes
no time at all to do that, and as you look back over a period of days
or weeks or even months it's absolutely astonishing what you'll get
done.
Don't waste time.
Don't waste time for no other reason that it feels terrible when
you've realized what you've done.
Next time: My experiment and the
Results
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