I keep thinking about the story of the young boy in the candy store staring at all the candy, anxiously trying to decide what one candy to get with his allowance, standing next to an adult who could afford to buy everything in the store but is under strict doctor’s orders that he’ll have another heart attack if he doesn’t stop eating candy. The analogy with time doesn’t quite work, except maybe if you make the boy the one with all the time in world but not knowing what to pick or do, and the adult has much less time and is doing what he thinks he has to do and is hoping there will be some time left over to do what he thinks he wants to do. And then there’s a third much older adult who has done the things he had to do and now feels he has very little time left and must carefully choose how to spend the rest of his time. Why does Time have to be such a Bai@%^ch?!

Yeah, I’m six-weeks into not returning to work and I’m still adjusting to not having to wake up at 5:30 and leave the house at 7 every day. Over the past weeks there have been more than a few days when it was a bit of a struggle to get out of bed, but I’ve had serious deadlines that have more than filled my days. I had to update all of my online profiles, blogs and resume and I spent a lot of time researching and applying for mostly journalist jobs (just in case). Then I needed to make copies and save all of the work I did for the courses I created from the past three years before the district cut off access to my account (which they did on September 1st). Also I needed to setup my medicare accounts before losing my healthcare through the district (which has now involved working with an insurance broker because the system is so broken that a person with a masters degree in educational technology can’t seem to get a Plan D policy working with the pharmacy of his choice…. More on that later!). Besides running through those deadlines, I’ve continued to write every day (even though I ran into a bit of a snag last week and only posted an article on Friday…). So, even though most days I can pick anything I want to do, I’m more than a bit overwhelmed by the number of choices plus managing the things that have to get done. 

Back in the Before Time, things seemed “easier” because I had no time for anything from the beginning of August until the end of May that wasn’t directly related to teaching and would try to satisfy myself with a Monday and/or Friday night spent at a local pub each week. Now things are inverted, with more time to do what I want than before, but less time left in life and an endless number of things that I have been either putting off or only dabbled in for the whole of my adult life. I’m like the kid in the candy store trying to figure out what I want to do with the handful of coins left in hand. 

Making a commitment to writing and posting something every day was a good idea and organizing my writing schedule around five basic topics (religion/technology/news/education/media) was a good start. But then there have been more than a few times when what I was writing wasn’t work out or something better was inspired by something that popped up in my feeds and I’d end up spending the whole day writing or rewriting the day’s post. And then there have been times when it’s taken me more than a day to research and write an article, like last week, and that’s caused me to rethink how I have been “organizing” my time.1 Besides sometimes needing more than a day to write some articles, I’ve noticed that what I was doing was still causing me the same anxious sense of not getting anything done. And I still wasn’t spending time on the other things that I’ve wanted to do besides writing. Damn, I’m going to have to come up with some kind of daily/weekly schedule or list. I’m not a fan of lists. 

Covey's Four Quadrants
Covey’s Four Quadrants

Time to think about Priorities and Time Management (the original title of this article). The last time I explored this topic was in 2014, which was the last time I found myself unemployed and contemplating my next career move.2 Before the layoff, I’d read Covey’s Seven Habits  book while studying at Pepperdine, and immediately understood how important it was in an environment where there was always too much to do with limited time, that one needed to triage using the matrix of Important/Not Important and Urgent/Not Urgent. While at Full Sail I also took a “Productivity” seminar from Stedman Graham  (Oprah’s boyfriend) and the only thing I remember was him saying that if something is important to you it needs to be on your calendar on a regular basis (his example was making sure to schedule regular rounds of golf…). It’s my calendar, I need to dictate how the hours are going to be spent. 

FACT (Furgeson Academy of Communication & Technology) logo
FACT (Furgeson Academy of Communication & Technology) logo

The problem with the daily/weekly schedule idea is that creative processes are generally resistant to set start times and “hard out” schedules. When I taught and ran the video journalism studio at Furgeson ES it was hard for admin and my fellow teachers to understand that I couldn’t shuffle elementary classes into the studio in 40-minute shifts and expect a weekly news show to pop out at the other end. We needed bigger blocks of time with the two grade levels who would be shooting, editing and presenting the news program. This process was not a respecter factory model school schedules. That said, I’ve been at this long enough to know that nothing happens without some kind of meaningful deadline. In a previous life I used to be an aerobics instructor teaching classes three or four times a week but quit because my voice couldn’t handle shouting over my very loud music in aerobics and talking (loudly) all day/everyday as a public school teacher. Sadly, without the regular commitment to be in the gym to teach my classes I stopped going to the gym. No deadlines, no work. So, I need to figure out how often I need to post my articles based on how long it’s going to take to write them and still feel like I’m getting stuff done, AND make room in my schedule to do all the other things that I want to do. No problem. 

The illusion of an organized life

First thing I decided to do was to jettison the strict daily themed posts. I will write everyday and alternate between the five (or more) subjects that I tend to write about, but I’m not going to sweat it if something isn’t ready to be posted, or feel like I can only post meditation/religion articles on Mondays and technology articles only Tuesdays, etc. On days when there isn’t a completed article ready to go, I’ll post a short “s’up?!” progress report or something from my “Daily Random Sh*t ” blog category. 

daily-random-sh*t_confused

I still believe in the “daily” writing process, but the daily posting will need some adaptations going forward. I need to figure out the hours that work best for me. I need to block out daily writing time and block out other fun things times and not leave the not-writing-things to when I’m exhausted and falling asleep. There is no “save it for later,” this is that “later” that I had been saving things up for. There’s too much that I want to do and learn to do that I can’t wait for a “free slot” to open up on its own. I didn’t do well the last two times I was unemployed because I was anxious to “get back to work” and could not wrap my head around the opportunity these events could have been had I been able to focus on what it was that I really wanted to do. This process doesn’t neatly fit into a box and it’s never really done, and there is no one solution or way to organize ones finite amount of time in order to do creative work. We do what we can with the time we have. We spend the coins we have in the candy store of time. 

I remember watching Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk about creativity, the need to show up every day and about trying to develop a healthy approach to creative work. The talk is not really about time but about ones attitude while engaged in creative work, and the need to change things so that the process does not kill you. Enjoy.

Sources:

  1. I really don’t know what happened last week. I had the whole week mapped out but then writing this article fell apart and that delayed me writing about the Apple event on Tuesday, and I never bothered working on the Navigating Digital Information for Wednesday or the Education article that I’ve been working on… etc., etc., etc.[↩]
  2. I had started my podcast, JBB’s Final Thoughts , just six months prior to my layoff and found doing the podcast therapeutic. But when I got the job at Full Sail Labs I jumped back into the work-until-exhausted pattern with no time to do anything except work and then attempt to recover before the next day. Do we see a pattern here?[↩]