What can you manage? Time. You not only can,
but must, manage your time because
time is all too finite.
They say, “If you want to get
something done, find a busy person.” The busy person succeeds in getting things done because he knows how to manage his or her time. We all have the exact same amount at our disposal: 60 minutes each hour, 24 hours each day, 168 hours each week, 8,736 hours each year. If you put one hour into a project each day for a year, you’d have worked on it for 365 hours—more than enough time to write a book, and a screenplay, and a treatment or two. “If you place a little upon a little,” explained the ancient Greek almanac writer Hesiod in his Works and Days, “soon it becomes a lot.”
Where do you find the time?
One memorable day in Manhattan I was delivering a broken
antique wall clock to my favorite repair shop. As I completed my drop off and
turned to leave, I noticed an ultra-modern stand-up clock constructed of shiny
pendulums, a different metal each for hours, minutes, and seconds, all enclosed
in a sleek glass case. It was simply the most beautiful timepiece I’d ever
seen.
shop. It’s broken. But I studied the clock more closely.
No. It was designed without hands.
It was a timepiece that Salvador Dali would have been as thrilled with as I
was. Time moves in its own way unless we
somehow capture it.
It reminded me that time is a free
force. It just happens, whether you do anything about it or not. It’s up for grabs. It doesn’t belong to your
family, or to your friends, or to your day job, or to anyone but you! What
you’re working on at any given moment
is how you control it.
The trick is where do you find that free time?—a question busy people are asked
regularly. Here’s their secret: busy
people make time, for the activities
they decide to prioritize. One good way to wrestle with the problem they’ve
solved is to ask yourself, “Where do I lose
it?” You’d be surprised.
I ask writers to make a chart of
their weekly hours and use it to determine how many hours they devote to each activity in their cluttered,
over-stimulated lives. Maybe you’d be surprised--or maybe not--that most people
have no idea where the time goes. They come back to me with a grand total of
182, or 199, or 82 hours of activity—until I remind them that they, like every
other human, have the same 168 hours each week to spend. Then we get serious
and analyze exactly where they’re lying to themselves about the time:
forgetting about the endless phone calls with friends, or the true amount of
time in front of the television, or the accurate time devoted to the daily
commute, or the time doing absolutely nothing but staring out the window. When
we get the time inventory accurate most people are surprised at the truth. But
truth is the first step to freedom, and managing your time effectively is the
greatest freedom of all.
I call it “making the clock of
life your clock.” I believe in this
philosophy so much I haven’t worn a regular watch for nearly thirty years,
despite owning a vintage wrist watch that belonged to my father and an even
older pocket watch that belonged to my grandfather. The only chronograph I
carry around with me is one that allows me to make life’s clock my clock: a stopwatch.
The stopwatch makes the Spanish proverb, la vida es corta pero ancha (“life is
short but wide”) come true. You can get a free stopwatch app on your cell
phone!
The stopwatch method of time management
The stopwatch method of time management is simple. You use
it to capture time, to make sure that your Priority Writing Project
is getting the amount of attention you want to give it to move it—and your career
success--ahead with certainty. You know that the wall clock, or the one on your
wrist or displayed on your cell phone, has a way of running away with your day.
You say you’ll work on Priority Writing Project from seven to eight a.m. and
something is certain to come along to disrupt that hour almost as though life
were conspiring against you.
What’s really happening is that you’re letting life interfere with your personal time management. Of
course when the interference occurs, you tell yourself I’ll catch up later, or I’ll
start again tomorrow and this time protect myself from interruptions, but over the years we discover that life runs rampant over any and all such
resolutions.
The
stopwatch method works best in a life jam-packed with stimuli and distraction. It
allows you to steal time. While clocks on wrists and walls record public
time, your private prime time happens only when your stopwatch is running. The
stopwatch allows you to call “time out” from the game everyone else is engaged
in.
Simply promise yourself you won’t go to sleep
at night until, by hook or by crook, you’ve clocked one hour (sixty minutes) of
working on Priority Writing Project on your stopwatch. Turn the stopwatch ON
when you’re working on it, and OFF when you get interrupted. Your stopwatch
minutes may be gleaned over a six-hour period, or over a twenty-four-hour
period. You steal them when you can: waiting at the dentist’s, commuting on the
ferry, when your lunch appointment hasn’t shown up yet, when your cell phone
dies and no one can reach you until you’ve replaced or recharged the battery,
when your date for the evening calls in sick. It takes a few days to get used
to this process, but once you do you’ll recognize the power it gives you over
time.
Optimum Attention Span (OAS)
How do you know how much time to devote to Priority
Project—or to any activity, for that
matter? That’s a function of what I call Optimum Attention Span (OAS). For some
activities, like watching your favorite sports event or shopping, your OAS
might be extremely wide; for others, like listening to your boss complain or to
your domestic partner nag, it might be miniscule. The trick is to determine
what the OAS is for that Priority Project. At the start of any project, OAS
tends to be smaller; as the project gains momentum and begins to appear
reachable, your OAS expands. So planning to write that report, give yourself
30-45 minutes on the stopwatch during the first week. But reassess OAS at the
end of each week because, like everything else worthwhile in life, OAS changes
and evolves. By the fourth week you may well be up to an hour and a half—ninety
minutes on the stopwatch.
Don’t forget “Linkage”
Isn’t it
hard to work in fits and starts? You might very well ask that very good
question. The answer is that it’s actually easier
to work that way than it is to work without stopping if you employ my time-management technique of linkage, what Hemingway referred to as “leaving a little water
in the well.”
And, yes, have a desk drawer filled
with stopwatches so you can employ a different colored one for each major project
you’re engaged with.
The stopwatch method will truly make
the clock of life your clock.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Kenneth Atchity (Georgetown B.A., Yale Ph.D.) has been
teaching time management throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe for
decades. His twenty books include
A Write’s Time: A Guide to the Creative
Process, from Vision through Revision (ebook: Write Time); How to Quit Your Day Job and Live out Your
Dreams; Writing Treatments that Sell (with Chi-Li Wong; ebook: Write: Treatments), Sell Your Story to Hollywood: Writer’s
Pocket Guide to the Business of Show Business and, with Ridgely Goldsborough, Why? Marketing for Writers. Dr. Atchity’s more than thirty films include Meg, the Emmy-nominated Kennedy Detail, Hysteria, Erased, Joe
Somebody, and Life or Something like It.
His companies serving writers include www.thewriterslifeline.com, www.storymerchant.com, and www.storymerchantbooks.com. His
most recent novel is The Messiah Matrix
(messiahmatrix.com) and his teaching sessions can be accessed at www.RealFastHollywoodDeal.com, Master Class in Achieving Your Dreams, and Master Class in StoryTelling. For updates on writing, visit Ken
Atchity’s Blog
No comments:
Post a Comment