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matociquala, you'll see an interesting discussion about how freelance writers spend their day. I started thinking, how do we day job writers spend our day? I was thinking about doing some work with schedules anyway, so I thought I would talk about what writing is like for one of us who have to/choose to work other jobs. Maybe so I can finish this rewrite before the year is out...
Here we go!
5 am: Pry self out of bed. Feed cats, eat breakfast, put on workout clothes.
6:10 am: Hit the exercise bike at the gym. Wear weights. This is my fiction reading time. Shower, make self glamorous, drop The Man off at his place of employment.
7:30 am: Coffee! He doesn't drink it, so I outsource. Morning stop now at superlative small shop called Coffee Talk not far from campus.
8 am: I'm in the office! Ostensibly, here's what we do first: Phone calls, email and internet (I do some writerly stuff here, so it's a bit of a cheat), settle check book, check day off calendar ('cause I'm anal that way). If it's a Monday, I check placement tests and mail in the International Office.
Now, here's where the day gets dicey. Usually I'll have a few hours in which I must teach (1-5, depending on the day). With the remaining time, I try to work on various work projects in the following priority:
1. Class prep for next week.
2. More pending ELA projects.
3. Less pending ELA projects.
4. Dream ELA projects there is never time for.
5. Research projects there is never time for, which will occasionally encroach my writing time, masquerading as a different type of writing.
All this can and often is interrupted by students and teachers who have questions about classes, their test scores, recommendations, college policies, etc, etc. A day can be just about helping students. Or it can be about arguing with people who don't realize Dr. Catherine is a rock in regard to testing scores and college policy. Or it can be me getting lots of things done on paper. Some days this is really frustrating. Some days this is really rewarding.
Caveat: Most of the things I do at work are ongoing and long term, so I never finish projects until suddenly they are finished. I think this turns out to be excellent training for a writer.
Caveat Two: I no longer check student essays at the office, unless I have an incredibly looming deadline (that afternoon!), or an incredibly social weekend. Otherwise all this work goes to the weekend.
Caveat Three: Lunch, a very small production number, wolfed quickly, is in here somewhere, usually around 11-12.
Caveat Four: Three days a week, I have a 20 minute tai chi lesson/break. Great for centering!
3 pm: I leave work. If there is something special going on, or I have a meeting, sometimes this can be at five, but generally I get to The Man's high school by 3:30. We carpool from home. It saves us money and makes us feel good about the environment.
If it's the first week of any month, I can count on my evenings being co-opted by:
Monday: HPEF Board Meeting
Tuesday: First 10 weeks of semester, night class. Remaining 5 weeks of semester and summers, Outreach Meetings at church.
Wednesday: Mindbridge Meetings
Otherwise an evening looks like this:
3:30 pm Errands Sometimes as short as a stop at Target so my toy collecting sweetie can check out for, say, Gorilla Grod. Sometimes more extensive. If errands are likely to keep us out until 5, or if we feel crapped out from the day, we eat out. I detect there will be much less of that now, because of my dietary restrictions.
5:00 pm By this point in the evening, I've sorted the mail, checked the phone messages, we've done cat chores, restuffed gym bags for tomorrow, and gotten our lunches ready for the next day. If we're cooking, we're about done, although sometimes we may take until 6 to have dinner prepared.
6:00 pm This is the point where I weigh the rest of my night. If I have household clerical work, it'll usually go here (bill paying, social events, checkbook balancing) I try not to do more than an hour of this a night. It can usually wait until the next night.
Then I divide up whatever time remains half project, half school work, depending on pressing deadlines. So, I may get in 2 or 3 hours of writing a night, depending. I do have some television shows I watch on a few nights, so I also figure these in. Right now, I only have two and a half hours of tv a week, so it's more writing than not.
9:00 pm This is usually me winding down by watching a video. If I work right up to 10 pm, when I hit the sack, I have trouble sleeping, so I try not to do that.
Just like the writers who don't work other jobs, my weekends are full of a variety of things, from social engagements to conventions to educating myself/promoting my work. I also have to get out there and present academically sometimes, so at those times I travel and do this thing.
I also occasionally go to various types of conventions for my own enjoyment. In an ideal world, I would do this sort of travel no more than once a month, but there are months where I have 3-4 weekends of travel in a row (Example: July: Trip to Japan followed by Gathering of the Gargoyles, followed by Convergence, followed by Portus, followed by international ed conference.) Enjoyable and/or necessary, depending, but a time drain nevertheless
Typical weekends.
The husband and I sleep late-ish (9 am is late for us. We are binge sleepers, as society as taught so many of us to be). Sunday we alternate between two churches, so we may need to get up at 7 am on some Sundays. Sometimes we have social engagements that call for travel, and often those are shot as work days, although like any good English teacher, you can count on me to take a stack of papers to correct. I will also occasionally throw my laptop into the travel mix if I know there will be down time. Or my Russian or Japanese books.
I try not to have more than one social engagement a day, tops. What do I do around those? Well, if I have papers to check, I spend 3-4 hours a weekend doing that. I try to pick out half of my spare time that weekend, whatever it might be, to write. If I'm working on a craft project or costume I try to spend about a fourth of my spare weekend time doing that. I also try to keep my evenings free from a certain point (at least 9 pm, but sometimes earlier) to wind down, bearing in mind that some of the social events are all about winding down.
Wow! It looks like I am a machine! But I have to be. Because I have to/want to work, and I have to/want to write. That's a fragile place to be.
Sometimes it's hard to sympathize with folks who don't work, and complain about deadlines or not getting things done. Just writing seems like such a luxury to me! And I know it's also work, yet, I too must generate proposals, promote myself, and do it all in a significantly smaller window.
I know it's my greed and my debt-to-bone ratio that keeps me working, and they probably envy me my steady income, insurance, that sort of thing. That's okay. I envy them their time. On the other hand, I need to do something that makes me feel like I'm contributing. For me, working with students is that.
No solution is perfect for a writing career, but it is interesting that whatever circumstances we have in our lives, we manage to find time to do it somehow.
I'm very lucky because I get the added insight of what freelance life is like occasionally on extended Christmas and summer breaks. I work this summer for six weeks, but there's a lot of time in there where I'm not working. An academic is a little amphibious and I'm grateful for that. If I were just teaching, instead of teaching and administrating, I might have the best of both worlds. So I have sympathy for both free lancers and people who are more full time than me. Don't kid yourself. Managing your own time can be both awesome and terrible!
And yes, this exercise was very helpful to me, as I can see now that I am using my time pretty well overall. What I need rather than tighter scheduling, is goal setting, so I can get to a certain point with my writing each day. I'll think about that.
I'd be really interested to hear from others of you who write and work about how you manage your time. Unless you're supposed to be working, of course... :)
Catherine
matociquala, you'll see an interesting discussion about how freelance writers spend their day. I started thinking, how do we day job writers spend our day? I was thinking about doing some work with schedules anyway, so I thought I would talk about what writing is like for one of us who have to/choose to work other jobs. Maybe so I can finish this rewrite before the year is out...Here we go!
5 am: Pry self out of bed. Feed cats, eat breakfast, put on workout clothes.
6:10 am: Hit the exercise bike at the gym. Wear weights. This is my fiction reading time. Shower, make self glamorous, drop The Man off at his place of employment.
7:30 am: Coffee! He doesn't drink it, so I outsource. Morning stop now at superlative small shop called Coffee Talk not far from campus.
8 am: I'm in the office! Ostensibly, here's what we do first: Phone calls, email and internet (I do some writerly stuff here, so it's a bit of a cheat), settle check book, check day off calendar ('cause I'm anal that way). If it's a Monday, I check placement tests and mail in the International Office.
Now, here's where the day gets dicey. Usually I'll have a few hours in which I must teach (1-5, depending on the day). With the remaining time, I try to work on various work projects in the following priority:
1. Class prep for next week.
2. More pending ELA projects.
3. Less pending ELA projects.
4. Dream ELA projects there is never time for.
5. Research projects there is never time for, which will occasionally encroach my writing time, masquerading as a different type of writing.
All this can and often is interrupted by students and teachers who have questions about classes, their test scores, recommendations, college policies, etc, etc. A day can be just about helping students. Or it can be about arguing with people who don't realize Dr. Catherine is a rock in regard to testing scores and college policy. Or it can be me getting lots of things done on paper. Some days this is really frustrating. Some days this is really rewarding.
Caveat: Most of the things I do at work are ongoing and long term, so I never finish projects until suddenly they are finished. I think this turns out to be excellent training for a writer.
Caveat Two: I no longer check student essays at the office, unless I have an incredibly looming deadline (that afternoon!), or an incredibly social weekend. Otherwise all this work goes to the weekend.
Caveat Three: Lunch, a very small production number, wolfed quickly, is in here somewhere, usually around 11-12.
Caveat Four: Three days a week, I have a 20 minute tai chi lesson/break. Great for centering!
3 pm: I leave work. If there is something special going on, or I have a meeting, sometimes this can be at five, but generally I get to The Man's high school by 3:30. We carpool from home. It saves us money and makes us feel good about the environment.
If it's the first week of any month, I can count on my evenings being co-opted by:
Monday: HPEF Board Meeting
Tuesday: First 10 weeks of semester, night class. Remaining 5 weeks of semester and summers, Outreach Meetings at church.
Wednesday: Mindbridge Meetings
Otherwise an evening looks like this:
3:30 pm Errands Sometimes as short as a stop at Target so my toy collecting sweetie can check out for, say, Gorilla Grod. Sometimes more extensive. If errands are likely to keep us out until 5, or if we feel crapped out from the day, we eat out. I detect there will be much less of that now, because of my dietary restrictions.
5:00 pm By this point in the evening, I've sorted the mail, checked the phone messages, we've done cat chores, restuffed gym bags for tomorrow, and gotten our lunches ready for the next day. If we're cooking, we're about done, although sometimes we may take until 6 to have dinner prepared.
6:00 pm This is the point where I weigh the rest of my night. If I have household clerical work, it'll usually go here (bill paying, social events, checkbook balancing) I try not to do more than an hour of this a night. It can usually wait until the next night.
Then I divide up whatever time remains half project, half school work, depending on pressing deadlines. So, I may get in 2 or 3 hours of writing a night, depending. I do have some television shows I watch on a few nights, so I also figure these in. Right now, I only have two and a half hours of tv a week, so it's more writing than not.
9:00 pm This is usually me winding down by watching a video. If I work right up to 10 pm, when I hit the sack, I have trouble sleeping, so I try not to do that.
Just like the writers who don't work other jobs, my weekends are full of a variety of things, from social engagements to conventions to educating myself/promoting my work. I also have to get out there and present academically sometimes, so at those times I travel and do this thing.
I also occasionally go to various types of conventions for my own enjoyment. In an ideal world, I would do this sort of travel no more than once a month, but there are months where I have 3-4 weekends of travel in a row (Example: July: Trip to Japan followed by Gathering of the Gargoyles, followed by Convergence, followed by Portus, followed by international ed conference.) Enjoyable and/or necessary, depending, but a time drain nevertheless
Typical weekends.
The husband and I sleep late-ish (9 am is late for us. We are binge sleepers, as society as taught so many of us to be). Sunday we alternate between two churches, so we may need to get up at 7 am on some Sundays. Sometimes we have social engagements that call for travel, and often those are shot as work days, although like any good English teacher, you can count on me to take a stack of papers to correct. I will also occasionally throw my laptop into the travel mix if I know there will be down time. Or my Russian or Japanese books.
I try not to have more than one social engagement a day, tops. What do I do around those? Well, if I have papers to check, I spend 3-4 hours a weekend doing that. I try to pick out half of my spare time that weekend, whatever it might be, to write. If I'm working on a craft project or costume I try to spend about a fourth of my spare weekend time doing that. I also try to keep my evenings free from a certain point (at least 9 pm, but sometimes earlier) to wind down, bearing in mind that some of the social events are all about winding down.
Wow! It looks like I am a machine! But I have to be. Because I have to/want to work, and I have to/want to write. That's a fragile place to be.
Sometimes it's hard to sympathize with folks who don't work, and complain about deadlines or not getting things done. Just writing seems like such a luxury to me! And I know it's also work, yet, I too must generate proposals, promote myself, and do it all in a significantly smaller window.
I know it's my greed and my debt-to-bone ratio that keeps me working, and they probably envy me my steady income, insurance, that sort of thing. That's okay. I envy them their time. On the other hand, I need to do something that makes me feel like I'm contributing. For me, working with students is that.
No solution is perfect for a writing career, but it is interesting that whatever circumstances we have in our lives, we manage to find time to do it somehow.
I'm very lucky because I get the added insight of what freelance life is like occasionally on extended Christmas and summer breaks. I work this summer for six weeks, but there's a lot of time in there where I'm not working. An academic is a little amphibious and I'm grateful for that. If I were just teaching, instead of teaching and administrating, I might have the best of both worlds. So I have sympathy for both free lancers and people who are more full time than me. Don't kid yourself. Managing your own time can be both awesome and terrible!
And yes, this exercise was very helpful to me, as I can see now that I am using my time pretty well overall. What I need rather than tighter scheduling, is goal setting, so I can get to a certain point with my writing each day. I'll think about that.
I'd be really interested to hear from others of you who write and work about how you manage your time. Unless you're supposed to be working, of course... :)
Catherine