A Fistful of Hours

Five hours.

For the majority of adults (per the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2017 report), you will have approximately 20% of any given day to spend on activities which are not work or sleep.  On average, according to the report, roughly two of those hours will be taken up by care needs.  Cooking, cleaning, and time spent on personal care.

Now you’re down to three.  But wait, there’s more!  If you have children, go ahead and take another hour and a half off that time-table and spread it about the cleaning and cooking required.  I have a tiny human and I can attest that parenting is a black hole that consumes all the time you possess.

So that leaves you, what, an hour each night if you’re lucky?  That’s not a whole heck of a lot to work with.  And that’s your only hour for the whole of your day.  Like video games?  That’s the hour you have to work with.  Enjoy working out?  That’s your whole hour unless your gym is in your house.

Imagine then, that among the chaos of trying to be an adult who takes care of themselves and their family and their job that you’re also trying to be an author.  Writing is a labor intensive endeavor.  Before you write word one, you have to do research.  Heck, for this post alone I’ve had to consult four separate resources and read through an entire governmental report!  Adding time-insult to time-injury, you then have to go back and edit all the words you’ve written.  Often times more than once.  On average, you can expect to spend one minute typing and ten minutes on editing / researching.  If you type up a 500 word essay in 10 minutes, expect it to take almost an hour and half to bring that essay up to scratch.

If you’re anything like me, your ambitions have far outstripped the time you have available to do everything you’ve planned.  In any given week, here are the projects I’m committed to: two roughly 500 word blog posts, one 1000+ word story post, one 2500+ word podcast episode, and at least one 10,000+ word short story which is in the midst of hardcore edits because it will be released soon.  That’s 4000+ words of new material on a weekly basis, which will take me eighty minutes to type but eight hundred minutes to research / edit on top of that.

That’s fifteen hours worth of work that I have to cram into five hours of time.  So where do I find those extra hours?  The most obvious answer is to use the time on the weekends to make up for the lack of time on the weekdays, but that well only holds so much water.  Social commitments are important, and maintaining friendships takes a fair chunk of time out of those days already.  I also have a tiny human and a wife human, and both of them require quality time so that they know I actually love them (which I do) instead of being trapped in a loveless marriage where they share a flat with a really cranky guy complaining 24/7 about not having enough time to write and how loud they are being.

In a vain attempt to keep the peace and what’s left of my sanity, I have established a list of priorities.  The first priority belongs to those things which have the greatest chance at bringing in additional funds (podcast and blog posts).  They are the ones who have called ‘shotgun!’ on my time.  As I write this, I am forgoing my lunch hour to make sure that my blog is uploaded on Friday as scheduled.  Coming in second are my short story releases.  I pay significantly more for art assets than they ever make, but as the wise Jennifer Probst puts it in Writing Naked, you’re using your last book to sell your next book.

Wheezing into third place are my story posts.  No one really reads them according to the statistics, but I stopped viewing them as a way to increase my metrics long ago.  Now they are a way to remind me of who and what I am, and why I continue to write.  If I’m writing a story post, that means I’m writing a story.  I’m not a cliche, the coffee-shop blogger who goes on endlessly about the story they’re never going to finish.  Those posts make me feel once more that I’m an author, someone committed to devoting their time and their talents to bring new things into the world for others to enjoy.

Last night, my priority system kicked in and the blog post was culled to give all that time and energy to my new podcast.  After the dust of three hours of writing and editing settled, the blog post still needed doing, but bedtime had come and gone and sleep is vital to good writing.  That meant I had to find new time in my day for writing, which meant that it was time to sacrifice the next bloc of personal time available: lunch.  I get an hour for lunch, and while I love my time to relax and read and recuperate, Medium has been a godsend and I’ve no intention of losing momentum.  My hour for lunch was pushed into the sausage grinder, and out came my blog post.  Mystery meat?  You betcha.  People love hotdogs though, so don’t discount the mystery meat.

To have any hope of crossing the finish line, you have to find your limits and plan around them.  Prioritize the things which will make you money over the things which won’t, because more funds equal more releases.  And above all, it is vital that you make sure that at least some of your work is written for an audience of one; Yourself.

Writing is something we should enjoy doing, even when managing all of it feels like juggling hand-grenades on a unicycle.

Grenadefully,

The Unsheathed Quill