Managing your
work is a fool’s game because work is infinite. Good work only creates
more work; in fact, bad work creates more work too.
So the more you work the more work you will have to do. It’s basic common sense that you
can’t manage an infinite commodity.
What can you manage? Time.
You not only can, but
must, manage your time because time is all too finite.
They say, “If you want to get something done, find a busy person.”
The busy person succeeds in getting things done because he knows how to
manage his or her time.
We all have the exact same amount at our disposal: 60 minutes each
hour, 24 hours each day, 168 hours each week, 8,736 hours each year. If
you put
one hour into a project each day for a year, you’d have
worked on it for 365 hours—more than enough time to write a book, and a
screenplay, and a treatment or two.
“If you place a little upon a little,” explained the ancient Greek almanac writer Hesiod in his
Works and Days, “soon it becomes a lot.”
Time Management Should Be Easy
Where do you find the time to get your most important work done every day?
One memorable day in Manhattan I was delivering a broken antique wall
clock to my favorite repair shop. As I completed my drop off and turned
to leave, I noticed an ultra-modern stand-up clock constructed of shiny
pendulums, a different metal each for hours, minutes, and seconds, all
enclosed in a sleek glass case. It was simply the most beautiful
timepiece I’d ever seen.
Then I realized: it had no hands. At first I thought,
No wonder it’s in the shop. It’s broken. But I studied the clock more closely.
No.
It was designed without hands. It was a timepiece that Salvador Dali
would have been as thrilled with as I was. Time moves in its own way
unless we somehow capture it.
It reminded me that time is a free force. It just happens, whether
you do anything about it or not. It’s up for grabs. It doesn’t belong to
your family, or to your friends, or to your day job, or to anyone but
you! What you’re working on at
any given moment is how you control it.
The trick is
where do you find that free time?—a question busy people are asked regularly. Here’s their secret: busy people
make time,
for the activities they decide to prioritize. One good way to wrestle
with the problem they’ve solved is to ask yourself, “Where do I
lose it?” When you find the answers to that question they may shock you.
I ask writers to make a chart of their weekly hours and use it to determine how many hours they devote to
each activity in their cluttered, over-stimulated lives.
Maybe you’d be surprised—or maybe not—that most people have no idea where the time goes.
They come back to me with a grand total of 182, or 199, or 82 hours
of activity—until I remind them that they, like every other human, have
the same 168 hours each week to spend.
Then we get serious and analyze exactly where they’re lying to
themselves about the time: forgetting about the endless phone calls with
friends, or the true amount of time in front of the television, or the
accurate time devoted to the daily commute, or the time doing absolutely
nothing but staring out the window. When we get the time inventory
accurate most people are surprised at the truth. But truth is the first
step to freedom, and managing your time effectively is the greatest
freedom of all.
I call it “making the clock of life
your clock.” I believe
in this philosophy so much I haven’t worn a regular watch for nearly
thirty years, despite owning a vintage wrist watch that belonged to my
father and an even older pocket watch that belonged to my grandfather.
The only chronograph I carry around with me is one that allows me to
make life’s clock
my clock:a stopwatch.
The stopwatch makes the Spanish proverb,
la vida es corta pero ancha (“life is short but wide”) come true.
You can get a free stopwatch app on your cell phone! In fact, most
smartphones come with a built-in stopwatch app like the Clock app on
iPhones.
The Stop Watch Method of Time Management
The stopwatch method of time management is simple. You use it to
capture time, to
make sure
that your Priority Writing Project is getting the amount of attention
you want to give it to move it—and your career success–ahead with
certainty.
You know that the wall clock, or the one on your wrist or displayed
on your cell phone, has a way of running away with your day. You say
you’ll work on your Priority Writing Project from seven to eight a.m.
and something is certain to come along to disrupt that hour almost as
though life were conspiring against you.
What’s really happening is that you’re
letting life interfere with your personal time management.
Of course when the interference occurs, you tell yourself I’ll catch
up later,or say, “I’ll start again tomorrow and this time protect myself
from interruptions.” But over the years we discover that life usually
runs rampant over any and all such resolutions.
The stopwatch method works best in a life jam-packed with stimuli and distraction. It allows you to
steal
time. While clocks on wrists and walls record public time, your private
prime time happens only when your stopwatch is running. The stopwatch
allows you to call “time out” from the game everyone else is engaged in.
Simply promise yourself you won’t go to sleep at night until, by hook
or by crook, you’ve clocked on your stopwatch one hour (sixty minutes)
of working on Priority Writing Project.
Turn the stopwatch ON when you’re working on it, and OFF when you get interrupted.
Your stopwatch minutes may be harvested over a six-hour period, or
over a twenty-four-hour period. You steal them when you can: waiting at
the dentist’s, commuting to the ferry, when your lunch appointment
hasn’t shown up yet, when your cell phone dies and no one can reach you
until you’ve replaced or recharged the battery, when your date for the
evening calls in sick.
It takes a few days to get used to this process, but once you do you’ll recognize the power it gives you over time.
If I could give you a magic pill that guaranteed you would work on
your most important goals and dreams in life for one hour each day,
would you take it?
Of course! And that’s exactly what the stopwatch method of time
management does—it guarantees that your most important work gets done
each day if you stick to the plan.
Optimum Attention Span (OAS)
How do you know how much time to devote to your Priority Writing Project—or to
any activity, for that matter?
That’s a function of what I call Optimum Attention Span (OAS). For
some activities, like watching your favorite sports event or shopping,
your OAS might be extremely wide; for others, like listening to your
boss complain or to your domestic partner nag, it might be miniscule.
The trick is to determine what the OAS is for that Priority Writing
Project.
At the start of any project, OAS tends to be smaller; as the project
gains momentum and begins to appear reachable, your OAS expands. So when
you start planning to write that novel, nonfiction books, or
screenplay, give yourself 30-45 minutes on the stopwatch during the
first week.
But reassess OAS at the end of each week because OAS changes and
evolves. By the fourth week you may well be up to an hour and a
half—ninety minutes on the stopwatch.
Increasing Productivity with “Linkage”
Isn’t it hard to work in fits and starts?
You might very well ask that very good question. The answer is that it’s actually
easier to work that way than it is to work without stopping
if you employ my time-management technique of linkage, what Hemingway referred to as “leaving a little water in the well.”
Here’s how linkage works. The phone rings, so you have to turn off
your stopwatch. But you let it ring one or two more times, taking that
time to make a mental decision about what you’ll do when your stopwatch
is running again—that is, in your next Priority Writing Project
stopwatch session.
And here’s an interesting secret: it doesn’t
matter what decision you make when you turn the stopwatch back on.
The minute you make that decision, as you answer the phone and go on
from one activity to the next, your mind starts thinking of
better decisions
than the one you just made; in fact, your mind becomes increasingly
motivated to get back to that Priority Writing Project because it knows
exactly what it will do when the next session begins.
You’ve created an automatic linkage—that makes restarting when your stopwatch is next running no longer an occasion for blockage.
Instead, you’re fully ready to jump in and get as much out of that
next session as possible before it’s interrupted by life’s next
distraction.
And, yes, have a desk drawer filled with stopwatches so you can
employ a different colored one for each major project you’re engaged
with. Or you can use different stopwatch apps on your phone.
The stopwatch method will truly make the clock of life
your clock.It’s the magic writing pill.
Dr.
Kenneth Atchity (Georgetown B.A., Yale Ph.D.) has been teaching time
management throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe for decades.
Books include
A Writer’s Time: Making the Time to Write (ebook:
Write Time: Guide to the Creative Process, from Vision through Revision—and Beyond)
; How to Quit Your Day Job and Live out Your Dreams; Writing Treatments that Sell (with Chi-Li Wong),
Sell Your Story to Hollywood: Writer’s Pocket Guide to the Business of Show Business and, with Ridgely Goldsborough,
Why? Marketing for Writers. Dr. Atchity’s more than thirty films include
Meg, the Emmy-nominated
Kennedy Detail, Hysteria, Erased, Joe Somebody, and
Life or Something like It.
Companies serving writers include www.thewriterslifeline.com,
www.storymerchant.com, and www.storymerchantbooks.com. and teaching sessions can be accessed at
www.RealFastHollywoodDeal.com.
