The Author And The Time Bandits

This week’s blog owes its origins to Facebook writers’ groups once more.

A common question for consideration is “How do you writers find time to do a full time job, look after your family AND write?”
 
Well, the simple answer is “time management”.
 
When I still worked in business, time management was identified as a skill that some colleagues didn’t possess. They got behind with their work, missed deadlines, suffered with stress and a whole lot of other issues that degraded their performance. When this was discussed at reviews, the answer those colleagues gave was always “I just don’t have enough time!”.
 
However, when the discussion was opened up to discover why the colleague didn’t have enough time, it wasn’t that they were overloaded with work, it was more that they managed their time poorly, which meant that a lot of time in the day was wasted.
 
And this is the difference between writers who manage their time so that they can write, and people who want to write but can’t find the time to do it. We are all the same in many respects – we all have things going on in our lives other than just writing. The difference is how we manage our time so that everything gets done, including our writing.
 
Because the time management issues that act as a barrier in the workplace, can also act as a barrier in the rest of a person’s life.
 
The reasons for this break down to some common areas and I’ll address them under their headings.

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Time Bandits
 
At work, Time Bandits are the people who steal time from your working day so that you don’t have enough to do whatever it is that you want (or need) to do.
 
It is the colleague who comes and perches on the corner of your desk and starts to talk about what was on TV last night, or who wants to talk about their troubled love life, or whatever it is they want to unload onto you.
 
It is also the colleague who comes to you looking for a favour, because “they haven’t got time to do it themselves”.
 
We’ve all met these people in the workplace.
 
The key to getting rid of them is to remember that THEIR problems are not YOUR problems. You don’t have to sit there and listen to them. You don’t have to do their work for them. You can ask them to go away. You can even insist by pointing out that you have work to do, even if they don’t seem to have any, and you want to get on with it.

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Translating that into home life, it may be the neighbour who stops you outside your house and, instead of just exchanging polite hellos, they start to unburden themselves on you and before you know it, half the day has slipped away. Or maybe the neighbour that pops by “just for a coffee and a chin-wag”.
 
I’m not suggesting that you should be rude to these people. After all, we all have to live side by side, but you do have to find a way to extricate yourself from the situation without causing offence.
 
The easiest way is to invent an urgent engagement. “Sorry, I’d love to stay and listen to your problem, but I have to be at the (whatever) in ten minutes and I’m running late.”
 
Or you can invent something happening inside your home, such as a running tap that needs to be turned off, or a casserole that needs to be attended to. Whatever it is, put a smile on your face and suggest that you really would like to stay and listen to the story about how their bunion operation went, but you really do have to go and turn that tap off.
 
And it isn’t just the people in the street. It’s the phone calls, emails and social media that suck you in to lengthy conversations that you just don’t need to get sucked into.
 
Just don’t allow it. Take control and prevent the Time Bandits from robbing you of valuable writing time.

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Distractions
 
Distractions take many forms. Social media is perhaps the greatest distraction of our age, with FOMO dragging us in to make sure we don’t miss the latest video of a cat playing a piano.
 
I am guilty of this one myself. Many’s the time I’ve logged on to social media with the intention of taking a “quick look” only to find myself, 3 hours later, trying to win an argument over which actor was the best James Bond (Sean Connery, obvs).
 
But there are other distractions in our lives, and we have to learn how to deal with them and prevent them from taking up our valuable time.
 
For social media I now set a countdown timer on my phone for the amount of time I can afford to allow myself to be on there. Typically, that is 15 minutes in a day, per social media channel that I use (mainly Facebook and X), so for me that is 30 minutes a day. When the timer runs out and plays its little tune, I then stop whatever I’m doing on social media and get back to doing something more important.
 
Other distractions include TV, YouTube, streaming services (Netflix et al), gaming and more.
 
But here’s the great thing about these distractions – they are inanimate. If you stop doing them abruptly, no one is going to be offended.
 
I now use these sorts of things as rewards for hitting a word count or editing target and similar. That way I can justify my half hour of TV soaps without feeling guilty.
 
But it is only half an hour!

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Task Overload
 
This is all about working out what is actually important in your life and what you can get rid of.
 
A lot of the things we do, we do out of habit. If we thought about them we could cut some of them out of our lives completely, or at least reduce the amount of time we spend doing them.
 
A “time management journal” is great to help you sort this out.
 
At the end of each day, take 10 minutes to write down all the things you did that day, and how long you spent doing it.
 
And I do mean everything. Yes, even that 5 minutes you spent making coffee (multiplied by however many cups of coffee you drink each day) and the ten minutes you spent completing your time management journal..
 
You don’t have to be 100% accurate in your time keeping. If you can approximate to the nearest 15 minutes that is fine.
 
Do that for about a month, then open a spreadsheet on your PC or laptop and create 6 columns.
 
Head 3 of the columns “Essential”, “Desirable” and “Could Live Without” The adjacent column to each of those headings is where you insert the amount of time you spent on each activity each day, and you can total that up at the bottom to show you how much time you spent doing each activity each month..

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The aim from here is to move activities out of the “Essential” column and into the “Desirable” column, and from “Desirable” into “Could Live Without”.
 
Now, when it comes to essentials, everyone’s lives are different. Some people have frail family members to look after. Some have children to raise. Some people have to do 2 jobs just to live. Some people are in relationships and others aren’t and have no desire to be. So, what is essential to one person is not necessarily going to be essential to another.
 
You have to decide what is really essential to your life and therefore can’t be moved out of that column.
 
But you don’t have to move an item out of the “Essential” column to benefit. You can reduce the amount of time spent on an activity.
 
My wife assures me that doing the laundry is essential, and I’m not going to risk my life by arguing with her. But ironing sheets is not essential. Nor is ironing towels, socks, underwear and some other types of laundry.
 
By taking my approach to ironing I was able to save nearly 30 minutes a week (2 hours a month) on the laundry task the last time I undertook it. My wife didn’t approve, of course, but she was unable to come up with a valid reason for ironing towels (I think she went back and ironed them later, when I wasn’t around – but that was her time, not mine).
 
The same applies to the “Desirable” column.

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I can agree that it is desirable to meet up with friends, but it doesn’t have to be every day (or 2 days, or each week). It also doesn’t have to be with “friends” you  don’t actually like that much. Evaluate these activities objectively and ask yourself what you would lose if you were to move them to the “Can Live Without” column, or if you were to reduce the amount of time you spend doing them..
 
You will be surprised what you can actually live without when you start to take a critical look at your life.
 
I’m not suggesting that you should cut all entertainment out of your life. As we all know, all work and no play makes Jack (or Jill) a dull boy (or girl). Everyone needs to relax and let off steam from time to time. But you may not need quite as much time as you take.
 
That “quick drink” after work that ends up 3 hours later really can be just a quick drink. That trip to the shopping mall with a friend to buy new shoes doesn’t have to take all day.
 
So, at the end of the exercise you have to look at the “Can Live Without” column and, in particular, the total number of minutes that you spend on those activities. That is the amount of time you can free up to do your writing because if you can live without them, you can cut them out without losing anything from your life.
 
Get rid of those things from your life and you WILL have time to write as well as to do the essentials and the desirables.
 
The last time I undertook this exercise (I do it about once every 2 years, because new habits develop without us noticing them) I was able to free up around 10 hours a month from my life. That’s about the time I need to write 10,000 words of a novel.

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Dead Time
 
Not all the time we save is in nice chunks like 1 hour. Some of them are a few minutes here and a few minutes there. Those few minutes are “dead time” because they are too little to use productively.
 
Or are they?
 
At the same time there are things we do that have “dead time” included in them. Dead time is also time we spend waiting for something else to happen. Typically, this is things like waiting for buses or trains or waiting for the washing machine to finish its cycle.
 
But that is time that can be used for something else.
 
So, there is one final thing we have to do and that is to plan our lives a little bit better, so we can make use of dead time, or so that we can add those odd minutes of time together to make longer periods. 

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I discussed laundry a few paras ago, but our washing machine takes about an hour to run the cycle we use, so that’s an hour I could be using to clean the bathroom, for example.
 
Or maybe I could use that hour to work out the plan for the next chapter I’m going to write, Or maybe I can research deadly poisons for use in the murder mystery I’m going to write. You get the idea.
 
The same applies to the time spent waiting for the bus or sitting on the bus. In fact, the only commuting time that can’t be used is if you have to drive yourself. That’s where car shares come in handy, if you can arrange one. It’s also better for the environment.
 
Doing the school run? Maybe you could arrange to take turns with another parent, so they do it one week, and you do it the next. How much more time would that add to your day?​

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Whatever remains in your “essential” and “desirable” column needs to be planned out and scheduled in, so that you can maximise the “free” time you need to write. Fail to plan – plan to fail!
 
This is not rocket science. Lots of people have learnt how to do this and, while I can’t claim to have covered every time management technique you may need, I have given you some basics to work with.
 
But the most valuable technique by far is that time management journal.
 
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