I’ve started thinking of time in relative terms. As an author with a full-time career, I’m intentional about my #writing #time. While it’s wonderful when I have entire days on a weekend to write, I’m often grabbing a few hours in the evening or an hour at lunch to bang out a few paragraphs. It’s easy to feel defeated when you think a novel is over eighty thousand words and I’m picking at it an hour here or there. Like other monumental tasks, it’s imperative to take it one word, one sentence, one paragraph at a time. In doing so, the book will be completed.
The longest I can sit and write productively on a novel is about five or six hours. What could you accomplish in six hours? Let’s look at a typical evening. If you’re home from work by six in the evening, you have dinner, settle into your evening by seven, and you go to bed at eleven. Assuming you don’t have chores like house cleaning or laundry, you have four free hours. You could drive from Kentucky to Georgia in four hours. Other things that could be done in four hours include painting a small room, running a couple of marathons, or assembling furniture for the living room.
Let’s look at time from the other side, what if you only have an hour, what could you accomplish? A workout, fold and put away laundry, pick up the house, or make a home-cooked dinner are among a few things that could be accomplished in an hour. Writing this post will take me about an hour but will hopefully have you thinking for many hours.
The next time you think you don’t have enough time to complete something on your list, think about that hour, or two, or four, whatever you have free, and add a little perspective. What can I complete or move toward completion in the time that I have?
All the best,
KK
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