Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 21.32: Barrier Breaking - Time Constraints

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-32-barrier-breaking-time-constraints

Key Points: Prioritization, circumstances, brain. Time blocking. What's the shape of the time constraint? Strategies. Acceptance of the circumstance. Write to deadline or without deadline? Burnout! My writing self is a good friend. Things change. Micro sessions. Pomodoro. Breaks. Life turbulence. When is your best writing time? Learn how to carve up your tasks. Signals! Delegation. Systems. 

[Season 21, Episode 32]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 32]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Barrier Breaking - Time Constraints.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm on the clock.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] There's this science fiction novel that I read when I was in high school that I have never stopped thinking about called Beggars in Spain...

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[DongWon] And it's about a group of people who have science done to them. I don't remember why or how...

[Mary Robinette] Their parents.

[DongWon] And then they never need to sleep again. And...

[Howard] I want that so hard.

[DongWon] I think about this every day as my deepest wish... maybe not deepest wish, but of many things that I would like to be able to do, not sleep is one of them, because I have too much to do and there's not enough hours in the day. And I say this, full well knowing that if I had 24 hours a day, I would still have too many things to do and not enough time to do it in. Because tasks fill a space, right? And then they overfill it because I will always find more things I need to do, more work to be done, more hobbies, more games, more things to read, more things to watch, whatever it is, right? So, time constraints are inevitable and I think recognizing that and dealing with that is certainly one of the big challenges in my life and I suspect everyone in this room has this issue too. So my question to you all is when your barriers are the constraints of you only have so many hours you can devote to writing, you only have so... I mean, even when you are a full-time writer, there's all these other tasks that I think of as authoring, right? Answering emails, travel, going to events, doing marketing, doing promo, all of those things...

[Howard] Sleep.

[DongWon] That take up an enormous amount of your time professionally, and then family, sleep, hobbies, whatever it is, so...

[Mary Robinette] So, this is hard, right? And the answer for this is going to be different for everyone...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because what we're talking about is a combination of prioritization, circumstances, and the way your own brain works. So, for prioritization, one of the tools that I will use is I will use time blocking, where I basically make an appointment with myself. And then circumstances. For me, I'm now in a place where I have, I have a lot of travel. Previously, I was in a place where I didn't have a lot of travel, but I was doing elder care. And so, those are two different states. And with each of those, I have to make decisions about like when I'm going to write and the fact that I don't get a regular schedule, the whole write every day fundamentally doesn't work for me. And then the way my own brain works, write every day has worked for me, but it doesn't work for me all the time. So for me, I have to look at... I'm looking at those three basic areas, and then I have tools, because they also shift for me, as well, over time, like, my priorities shift, my circumstances shift, my brain shifts. So for me, having a bunch of different tools is very useful.

[Howard] I carve this up differently. The first skill is knowing the shape of the time constraint. How long does it take me to do a thing? And how long do I actually have? Most of us, I myself included, when we're spitballing, we estimate wildly incorrectly. We don't know how long it'll take and we don't know how much time we have.

[DongWon] [garbled] project management.

[Howard] Developing that... oh, my gosh. But just developing that skill, understanding that time is a constraint and knowing the shape of that constraint. That's skill number one. Skill number two is the whole raft, the whole slew of strategies for working within the constraints that you've identified. And skill number three is arguably the most important one for your own well-being. And that is acceptance of the circumstance. Because at the end of knowing the shape of the problem and trying to deal with the problem, there will be failures. There will be grief over not having accomplished enough. And I have to give myself permission to accept that it is okay to be sad that I didn't do as much as I did. I have to allow myself to be happy with what I did accomplish. And... that might sound silly, but with that third piece in place, when I come back around to counting the minutes and looking at the strategies for working with things, my fear of the outcome goes away and I actually relax a little bit into being productive.

[DongWon] It's not silly at all. I think the hardest part of this entire process is accepting reality.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Both in terms of what my constraints actually are, what my throughput actually is, and how much I have accomplished, but also being realistic about how much I do have to accomplish and on what timeline. I think it's hard in both directions.

[Erin] Yeah. I think I love the idea of sort of also giving yourself credit for what you have done...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think that works on two levels. One is I think it helps you keep you realistic about what you can do and have done, but also, I think we have a tendency to... you can overestimate how much you can do because you judged yourself as lacking. So it's like you climbed a mountain, right, and instead of being like, oh, my gosh, I climbed this mountain, you're like, I was so slow, but future me will be so much faster, because it was a personal failing, not just my pace. You know what I mean? And because, if you judge it...

[DongWon] Stop reading my brain!

[laughter]

[Erin] If you judge it as a personal failing, then you often overestimate what you think you can do...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because you optimistically project your future self as being faster, fitter, more productive than you actually are. And I think it's better to be like, okay, this is the pace I go. Let me adjust my expectations to that pace.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Then let me judge myself and then always set myself up to fail by thinking I'm going to get there faster.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think that one of the things about this, about like knowing the pace and how fast you write and setting goals is that know whether it is better for you to write to deadline or for you to write without deadline...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because that's one of the things that can make a time constraint feel like a constraint. Instead of, oh, I have time to write, it's like, oh, I only have this much amount of time, because I... and that feels pressure because there's a deadline. Like, I was talking with a friend who has long Covid and her books no longer have deadlines attached to them. She writes when she can write, and when she can't write, she doesn't write. Whereas I with my ADHD, when you remove a deadline for me, that is never going to get written. Like...

[DongWon] The hardest time for me to get stuff done is when I don't have that much to do. When I have two tasks, those tasks are going to take me forever to get to. If I have a 100 tasks, I'm going to knock all of them out. You know what I mean? And it's the thing of I need sort of that accumulation and that pressure in a certain way. But with all of this, I do want to also bring up that this topic is very deeply connected to the idea of burnout as well. When you get bad at time management, when you get bad at recognizing your constraints or like not able to see clearly where you are in all this, that leads to a state of constant pressure, constant stress, and then that results in burnout.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. I think one of the things... this is why I said that for me one of the questions was one of priorities.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That it's really easy to prioritize everything else except writing, especially if you are early in your career and you're doing it just for fun, or if you don't have a deadline or if it's a passion project, it's really easy to push it to the back burner. So, the thing that I would say is one of the ways that you can... I have a relationship with burnout because I have depression and now, looking back at the times when I had burnout in the past, I'm like, "Oh, I think that was actually just situationally triggered depression." >> That it's the overwhelm, it's the too much, you've exhausted yourself. So, one of the things I just kind of want to say to you, listeners, is that it is okay to take up space. It is okay for your loyalty and your priority to be to yourself and your writing. That doesn't mean that you get to have the entire day for it, but some of the day gets to be yours.

[DongWon] I also want to flag it from the other direction, though, right? Which is it can also be all consuming.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? And that both extremes are a problem, right? And for me, pre 2020, pre pandemic lockdown, I had let work truly become 95% of my life, right? It had sort of taken over everything for a variety of different reasons. And that led me to a state that when things got very difficult in lockdown, I was completely tapped and I had no resources and was at a place where I really needed to shift how I was doing things. And so I started putting more constraints about what is work and what is not work, and learning to clock in and clock out in a more deliberate way of I'm not responding to texts right now, I'm not responding to emails right now. This is when I'm working. This is when I'm not working. Right? And so I think I've seen this happen with writers too, where they get this feeling of, oh, if I'm not putting words down on the page, then I'm failing in some way, or I can't take time to watch that TV show, I can't take time to go for a walk, or whatever it is, because they feel such pressure to get the work done or such need to get the work done, whether that's external or internal pressure, right? It can come from yourself, or it can come from deadlines, and the world. So being realistic and setting those boundaries in both directions is just incredibly important in my mind, to keep your long-term mental health and productivity.

[Erin] Yeah. I think one way that I think about this is to treat my writing self like a good friend. And what I mean by that is that, like, I love to work. But, if I have a friend in town, I will think from my future self's perspective, will I rather have gotten this extra hour of work done or will I rather have seen my friend? Like, because, like, ultimately in the long term, I like my friend and I want to see them. And that could be an actual person, it could be a walk, whatever works for you. But like, I need to take time away because I do need to nurture the self underneath. And thinking of my writing self as like that type of friend is really nice, because. like. at some point you want your friend to go home, like, so you can't spend all day every day with your friends, like, whoa, okay, like, I need a break, dude, but also, like, you do want to leave room for them, and I sometimes in thinking of myself, my writing self, as a friend, it allows me to leave enough room in the way, because they're important to me and that time is important to me, without letting it dominate to the point where that's my only friend, which is also can be problematic for me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, sorry. I just had this entire thought that I will unpack, after the break.

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[Mary Robinette] So before the break, Erin was talking about meeting the writer friend and unpacked a whole bunch of things that I should probably talk to my therapist about...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But one of them was that, oh, that's part of, I think, why going to a coffee shop works for me so well, is I'm going to go meet my writing friend, and that writing friend is me. And it's like, oh...

[Howard] I was pretty sure your writing friend was going to be coffee, but I'm glad to have been wrong.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes. pastries sometimes... 

[DongWon] Coffee is a writing companion.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. But that is... I'm like, that is part of why time blocking will work for me. But also sometimes while it... why it fails for me, because I... it is when I'm thinking about... when I'm not thinking about it as this, like this external. It's like, oh, this is time that I can use to get these other things done and I disrespect my writing friend.

[Howard] I could literally lecture for 90 minutes about the way I managed time in order to produce Schlock Mercenary, a daily web comic, for 20 years without ever missing a day. While having the usual spate of real life intrudes. What I'm going to say instead is that it was incredibly serendipitous that the planned ending of Schlock Mercenary only overlapped about four or five months with the long Covid disability. Because the state that I'm in right now, none of the tools that I used before would give me enough time to produce a daily web comic. And that circles me around to the third part of my three skills, which is I just have to allow myself to accept that and to grieve and then to move on. And yeah...

[DongWon] I think you bring up truly one of the most important points here, which is things change, right? Your life will have seasons. There will be seasons of busyiness and there'll be seasons of relative rest. And your job circumstance could change. You can move cities. You could get into a new relationship. You could have kids. Your availability to work is different when your kid is between the ages of zero and three than it is when they are between 10 and 15, right? And it may not be better or worse. It just is going to be different, right? If you have pets, if you're traveling, if... there are a billion different factors. If the world is on fire for a variety of reasons, your capacity to work and your time available for that will change, because you will be needing to be doing different things, right? And so I think being able to be grounded and realistic and kind to yourself and generous with yourself in those moments is very important, right? And I've seen writers have a kid, and then really struggle emotionally with the lack of time that they could have for writing, even though they knew intellectually things were going to change.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And some of this goes back to stuff that we were talking about with interruptions.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You've got time set aside, and then something interrupts you. So, one of the skills that I've learned for time management is to embrace what I call the micro session, which is, like, I was in the car going to an event. I'm like, I have 20 minutes in this car, Someone else is driving. So I can write for 20 minutes. Sometimes it... you only get three sentences down. Sometimes all you get down there is just, like, part of a thought, but it's still something where you're making progress. So, going back to things we talked about before, celebrating that... the victories, it's like, oh, I made progress. It's not I hit X word count today. It's like, I made progress and celebrating that every time it happens.

[Howard] Back in the penciling and inking Schlock Mercenary days, I was introduced to the Pomodoro time management method...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Which is... it's named after an Italian or maybe Spanish tomato timer, for... I don't know what the recipe is and it doesn't matter.

[Mary Robinette] No, it's just because it was a... the timer was shaped like a tomato.

[Howard] Shaped like a... Okay.

[Mary Robinette] That's why. Yeah.

[Howard] Anyway, the point is... it was... I can't remember if it was 20 minutes or 25 minutes.

[Mary Robinette] It's 25 minutes and then a 5minute break.

[Howard] What I realized is that if the writing has been done, if the script has been printed out and is sitting in front of me, and if I have time to think about it, if I've had time to think about it, if I only have 25 minutes, I can pencil an entire four panel comic strip in 25 minutes, well enough that I can come back to it and begin inking. And I... recognizing that meant that when I saw, well, I only have 20 minutes. I only have 25 minutes. I only have... I only have 35 minutes. That's not enough time to get any work done. Well, actually, Howard, you know enough about how you work that that is exactly enough time to perform a task that will move the progress bar forward. And that made a huge difference for me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And it's also having... recognizing with the Pomodoro technique, the importance of breaks.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. And I think, going back to sort of the... all the external things that can be messing with your time. Two thoughts I had is, one, getting back to, like, sort of treating yourself as a friend is that... one way to think about it is, like, if you and your friend always got together and made, like, five course meals. Like, that was your thing, and then your friend had a kid and was like, yo, I really love you, but, like, I have this kid and there's a lot going on. Like, maybe we could just order in. You would not say to your friend, "You failure! How could you not spend as much time on this task as you did?"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You'd be like, oh, man, I'm so glad we spent any time together. Like, I know you've got a lot going on. If your friend was like, "I read the news today and it totally, like, messed with me, and, like, it's going to take me a little bit to, like, get in the right mindset for us to hang today." Like, we might, like, need... I might need a little time to unpack and only have 20 minutes to talk. You'd be like, "Okay, great. That's fine." But when it's ourselves, I think, like, we always think, like, this should not affect me. This should not be part of it. So part of treating myself as a friend is thinking about. like, I would... I am often kinder to my friends...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And more understanding of the things going on in their lives than they are... than I am with other people, except when I'm on a plane.

[laughter]

[Erin] So, something that I found to be, like, a really fun technique is I like to try to get work done when I fly, but I hate working during turbulence and I have given myself permission. So I'll be, like, okay this is the work I'd like to get done. I know what the project is. I've got everything set up for my little seat. But if turbulence hits, I'm going to game, because turbulence is distracting and I don't like it. And I'm going to use a game to, like, refocus my attention. And when the turbulence ends, I can decide, okay, can I get back to what I'm doing? And it occurs to me that maybe this is, like, something to think about, like, in the broader life. As life turbulence happens, there are times you just got to set the work down and deal with that moment, and then trust that when it ends, you're not going to forget that you liked writing or forget what's going on. You're going to come back to the work, but at the moment, plane shaken.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I am 100% on board with this. I do this periodically, like when there's big stuff going on, I'm like, "Okay, writing is not happening." And also recognizing that as someone with ADHD, that I'm often a binge writer. It's like it's really head down in a big burst. But the other part of that is thinking about when your best writing time is. Like your writing time, your best writing time is not during turbulence, but on a macro to micro in your day. There's a part of your day that you are your most creative, that you have the best problem solving skills. Because this is one of the time management issues that I'll hear people talk about, and they say, "When I get home at the end of the day, I just don't have the energy to write." Like, okay, well, when do you have the energy? And a lot of times, what we're doing is that we are taking our prime time, our prime creative time, and we're giving it to tasks that don't require it. Like, if there's a job, a thing that you do at your job, especially if your work at home and no one's looking over your shoulder. But if there's a thing that you do that you have done so often that you can do it by rote, you don't have to... it doesn't take all of your brain power. Why are you doing that during your writing time? Because that's our habit. So maybe, figure out, okay, I'm most creative here. I'm not going to be able to take a two-hour block off during this prime time, but I can say, I can gift myself a half hour of writing time, during this bright spot of my day.

[Howard] That was one of the things that I loved the most about making Schlock Mercenary, is that I got very good at carving up the tasks, and I knew at full pace, it took about 10 minutes to script one day's comics. because I would script a week at a time. And when I say one day's comics, one row of comics. It took me about 90 minutes to script an entire week of comics, and then it took about 20 minutes per, to pencil them. And that was all very thinky. That's writing. That's composition. Inking for me was chop wood carry water. And if... once I realized, no, don't try to write it and then pencil it and then ink it and then do the next one. Write a bunch. pencil a bunch and then when you hit... when you hit brain is tired but hand can still work and the day is not over yet, chop wood, carry water, ink, ink the comics. I loved that. I don't have a similar structure now, which is one of the challenges I'm facing, but knowing how to carve up your work into those sorts of things is incredibly useful.

[Erin] Yeah. I also find, like, once you recognize this is your most creative time, like, I like figuring out, like, ways to signal to myself that this is the case or that this might be a good opportunity to write. Especially if I can't fully time block it, like, if it's not something where I can absolutely, like, leave the house. And the analogy I always think of for this is when I was working out a lot and I can... I'm not a morning workout person. I'm not a morning person in general. I am an afterwork workout person. However, it's really easy to just leave work and go home and be like, "Oh, well, I didn't work out again," for years. And so, I would always change into my workout clothes at work and then say, "Okay, well, you just have to walk by the gym. You don't have to go in the gym. You just have to walk by it. And if you feel like going in, you're here in your gym clothes. Great." And like, nine times out of 10, I would go in. But the 10th time I'd be like, I have no pressure, like, actually, like, really hungry, or I have something to do at home, I'm going to walk by it. But what was nice is it signaled in my brain, okay, this is the opportunity to work out that we've carved out for ourselves. Take it or don't, but it's like a nice thing to do. And so similarly, like, when it's creative writing time, thinking about what are things I can do to signal to myself, okay, I feel like this is a good time of day. I feel like this is the thing I know I need to do. Let me set myself up and say, okay, like, is there a song that I always play, which I do, like, at the beginning of writing sessions? I don't have to write, but, like, this is a good way to, like, at least put all the pieces into place, and then I can either say yes or no to that.

[Howard] If you don't do that, then you have decided in advance not to.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I have a great tool for you, which you're going to love because I know that... Yes. Because I know that you're playing with the whole smart house thing and the smart bulbs. When we were in Chattanooga, the house was set up in such a way, we had a lot of smart bulbs because mom couldn't get out of a chair. So it was just... and then I was like, oo, a new toy. I had a smart bulb over on my desk, that would turn on during my prime writing time. So, if I'm in another part of the apartment, I would see... and it's like this architectural design that's like, look, this is a warm cozy spot that's right here that could... you could be writing right now. It was great. It does not work in the setup that we currently have in the apartment that I'm in. But, it's so good because I couldn't always rely on my brain to remember, and an alarm, like, the alarm would go off, and I'd be like, "Oh, there's an alarm." and I would turn it off, but the bulb stayed on.

[Erin] What I love about this and I.. what I love about sort of all of these, is one of the things that I always think is that we are not always good, but we try to find ways in our lives to work with things. Sometimes it's like, how do you get your kids to do a thing, like, when you need them to? And a lot of times I think back on what are the habits that I have used...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In any part of my life, to get me to do things or to work with time constraints, because time constraints are a part of our lives in all ways. In some ways they are the thing that, like, once you're over the age of. like, seven that you have to deal with the most over the course of your life other than, like, eating. And so we have a lot of routines around them. And I think we often learn a lot about what works...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And what doesn't work.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But we think of writing, or I have thought of writing, as, like, this grand mystique, this, like, thing outside of my life and I forget to use the strategies that work...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In the rest of my life there as well.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of which is delegating, which I'm a big advocate for. You can't always delegate your writing, but you can delegate all of the other time things. Many of the other time things.

[DongWon] Everything we're talking about here in this sort of, like, back section has been about systems, right? Systems you can put in place to help you accomplish your goals. Whether that's Pomodoro, whether that's me sort of setting boundaries about when I'm working and when I'm not, the light, what a great idea, putting on your workout clothes, right? Like all of these things are just incredible tools to help you do the thing. But before you can put systems in place, you have to do sort of the self-discovery of what you need.

[DongWon] So, my homework for you this week is I want you to make a calendar for yourself, but not aspirational, one about what you're actually doing with your time. And I need you to send should out of the room for this, right? No guilt, no shame. Just be realistic. Here's what I did today. I woke up at this time. I went to bed at this time. I ate my breakfast at this time. You know what I mean? Just like go through and, like, make a list of what it is that you're doing. As much as you can, do not judge yourself for how you choose to spend your time. And then with that realistic picture of that week, sit down and think, okay, what are systems I can put in place to help me achieve my goals, while being realistic about what it is that I do with my time?

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go reflect.