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Marketing - Ten: Time management

© Joanne Reid

INTRODUCTION

An elderly man once told me during an interview that "each one of us has all the time there is".

I have thought frequently about his concept of time and how each of us have all the time that there is. It makes me think about how I use the time I have. Like many writers, I fret about the time I need to write and where oh where will I find it. I don't need to find time; it isn't lost. It's right here with me.

Look at the writing of a novel this way: 300 pages at the rate of one page every half hour equals 150 hours. Take an hour a day, including weekends, and you could find those pages in about 22 weeks.  Not so scary.

Aha! Where do you find the hour a day?  On the line at the end of each of the following, pencil in the number of minutes per week you spend on each activity:

1. watching a sitcom rerun _____
2. watching a drama rerun _____
3. talking on the phone about nothing _____
4. running to the store for thing you forgot to get because you didn't have a list when you went in the first place ____
5. sitting in waiting rooms _____
6. looking for socks that match _____
7. playing on the internet  _____
8. spending more than 15 minutes a day getting dinner in the oven _____
9. "doing" lunch _____
10. staring at the wall wishing you had time to write _____

Okay.  My list may not include your serious time wasters. To find yours, chart yourself for a few days and see where things might work out differently. But as an example, let's look at this list. I'll go first.
 

1. I watched Cheers reruns every weekday night = 2.5 hours
2. Law & Order reruns three times a week = 3 hours
3. 45 minutes a day = 5.25
4. 0 (I don't do the shopping)
5. .25 (averaged over a month)
6. 1 (and for pantyhose that don't have runs, etc.)
7. What?  Everything I do on the internet is work.  Yes, nothing but work. (Yeah, sure!)
8. I don't do the cooking in the household. (When the smoke alarm goes off, my son thinks it's the dinner bell.
9. 1.5
10. 3.5

My total = 17 hours.  All right, I took this test a while ago when I decided to get serious about writing. I was desperately afraid of getting in my own way again. 

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