Do What You Can, When You Can, With What You Have
Hi all,
This post is a bit of a pre-work writing exercise, where I’m giving myself about an hour to explore some idea or thought and tease it out a bit.
I find that my writing ritual is incredibly sporadic and I think about why that is. Sometimes I do a numerical breakdown of time to first assess the economy of hours I have available to even dedicate towards creative or exploratory writing, both fiction and nonfiction.
There’s a 168 hours in any given week. I work 40 hours a week give or take some change bringing that down to 128 hours. Okay that’s plenty to work with though I should probably get some sleep and ideally full nights of rest so factoring that in, 8x7=56, so then we are down to 72 hours, which is still plenty of time to be writing. But of course I don’t just work and sleep do I? What other essentials are necessary?
Well let’s consider eating important. What makes sense for time allocated to food. Some of my jobs in the past gave me a 15 minute food break for shifts under 8 hours, which was most of my shifts for much of my work before getting a salary job four or five years ago. But 45 minutes a day to eat seems scant. Perhaps I should time myself eating to create a pool of data for an informed figure. Putting that aside for now, let’s average it out at 2 hours to allow for cook time (not cleanup.) So that’s another 14 hours, so… oh jeez, 58 hours a week.
Okay that’s a lot of potential time in general, that’s good. But it sure does evaporate quickly once you factor in basic human needs. Fifty eight hours of time outside eating, sleeping and working. What should I do with it?
Well let’s see what other things can typically take time up time on a daily basis. Perhaps we can give half an hour to cleaning, an hour for hygiene, a half an hour for commuting to work or errand destinations such as the grocery store, and we’ll do a half an hour a day for a simple unwind. What does that add up to? 2 1/2 hours times 7 days is 21 hours, subtracted from 58 is 37 hours? Wait 37 hours?
That can’t be right. Let’s go ahead and take out the wind down. I think we can agree that that was pretty generous to begin with. That way we can sit on 40.5 hours of free time. Look at that, just over what we dedicate to the forty hour week.
Well, there’s basic individual clerical work. Filing taxes, paying bills, calling doctor’s to make appointments, waiting in lines, staying on hold, buying groceries, comparing insurance plans, returning products that don’t work, troubleshooting technology and sometimes exercise. Most of these tasks are completely mundane but luckily not always daily, so if we expand our model to a month, we can work with a budget of around 160 hours per month give and if we were to itemize some of these point, I think we’ll have to settle with ranges of time but it could look something like:
Groceries 1hr-2hr
Paying bills - Hmmm half an hour a month?
Troubleshooting tech setups- Let’s hope only an hour
Staying on hold - I think last time I was on hold it was about an hour
Returning products - Half an hour
Comparing Insurance Plans - Half an hour
Making budgets, lists and plans - two hours?
Okay… I’m realizing that these are a little hard to pinpoint how much time to dedicate to this breakdown, so let’s lump this into one item call clerical and let’s throw twenty hours at it and hope that’s enough. Which bring us to 140hr/month times 1 month/ 4 weeks = 30 hours. Thirty hours a week. Hmmm. Well this is a model after all, and we have to be mindful that models are always just a base to work off of. We lose a couple days by using 4 week/month ratios and perhaps we don’t need to return faulty products or compare insurance plans, just to add a little more wiggle room and we can call that 32 hours a week. Okay not too bad.
Okay, so we have thirty two hours a week to dedicate to writing. I’d be content with just a three hour shift a week of writing, even though my preference would be to do it the full 32 hours, but there’s something else I haven’t calculated that I think is worth noting. It’s important to observe that this model is incredibly flawed.
What I’m trying to do is create a writing ritual, which is important and good for any craft. Daily rituals are vital for creatives, organizers and producers of any kind of work. But what I’m starting to do is gamify my life and there is a blurry line that tends to move, and that line marks a point in which I am no longer dealing with reality. I’m dealing with ideals, hopes, wishes and fantasies.
My model thus far does not factor in my emotional interiority. It doesn’t factor that sometimes I scroll on my phone on addictive social media apps that I hesitate to delete because they seem so crucial to our information architecture, and I use them for both work and Martian Radio. I don’t factor in the days I sit and worry about my ailing relatives who need support. This model doesn’t know how to incorporate days spent talking with friends, learning, resting in the sunlight with a partner and just playing around. And if it did, this model would encourage me to set timers and always be looking at the clock. And at what point am I experiencing life and at what point am I merely measuring time passing.
Any model I develop using this methodology would also be impossible to prescribe to others, and I recommend readers to be skeptical of plans that suggest optimizing every hour of every day. All of the numbers I made up are relatively arbitrary and too highly variable to average out. I was at the grocery store and it took me ten minutes to pick a salad dressing. I had to go to the RMV and had to make the appointment a month out in Leominster, and when I arrived they said they didn’t have a record of the appointment making the trip a moot point. There are some weeks that I work so hard that I have nothing left to give to the weekend. Life is chaotic. Life is messy. Life is unrelenting.
This is not meant to be a cynical statement, but a characteristic that I think is important to acknowledge. Speaking for myself, when I think about growing as a person I enter into a state of hope and aspiration and the possibilities seem limitless. And I tend to throw myself fully into projects and encounter the reality of them as I go. And now as I’ve encountered the friction of organizing events, producing shows and the black magic of marketing, I want to take time to rest, contemplate and from that contemplation write and communicate.
And of course, when I write in a state of inspiration and flow, I can do a lot with quite a little, but that state of inspiration is ever flighty, and the words do not always flow. Even now, I have exceeded my stated budget of an hour and I look at the clock as I negotiate with myself, “7 more minutes, that will give me enough time to brush my teeth and go to work.” Writing is work full of repetitive tasks, rereading, reflecting at the blank canvas and constant hesitation. But I’ve always wanted to be a writer and that means finding time for it, so I’ll default to an adage I heard when interviewing an artist:
Do what you can, when you can, with what you have.
What can you do? How much time do you have? And what can you work with?
These are questions only you can answer, and they can always be negotiated.
