Not finding time

I confessed that I had not read the book my mother was recommending, but that with luck I soon would. “Now that all my December deadlines are behind me, I’m hoping to find time to do some reading,” I said as our Christmas dinner conversation rolled onward.

“We don’t find time; we make time,” my father admonished gently.

He’s right, and I’ve been thinking back on his words ever since.

Surely that’s not a sentiment new to me, but sometimes when someone says just the right words at just the right time, they seem to increase exponentially in impact. I’ve been thinking about time management for my entire adult life. I’ve read books on time management, attended lectures, perused articles, interviewed experts.

But sometimes it’s the simplest words – even wrapped in the form of a father’s admonition – that carry the most weight.

“We don’t find time; we make time,” I repeated to myself as I cleared the dinner dishes and started measuring coffee grounds.

Even that act seemed to align with my thoughts. I love coffee, and I love it best of all the way I make it. If I want a perfect cup of coffee, I thought to myself, I don’t wander around hoping to find one. Hey look, maybe someone happened to leave a cup of coffee in my kitchen! No, of course not. I take out a filter, measure the grounds, pour cold water from a clean pot. Even choosing the right mug becomes part of the process.

I’m not sure what the parallel to choosing the right coffee mug is when it comes to time management, but the idea of making coffee just the way I like it rather than hoping to chance across it brought my thoughts back to my father’s words. Time won’t just appear like a magical cup of coffee in my kitchen. I will have to make it for myself, every bit as deliberately as I make coffee every day.

And what I want is specific: not endless amounts of time, not days or weeks, just a half-hour or so every day to devote to reading fiction, something I never seem to do enough of.

There are ways that I can make that time, I told myself with determination. I can get more efficient with housekeeping. I can consolidate my errands a little better. I can spend less time dabbling in social media or paging through catalogs and magazines full of products I never really intend to buy.

We don’t find time; we make time. I’m trying. The new year is less than a week old, but I’ve already managed to carve out some reading time every day. It didn’t find me; I created it. Dad was right; it’s a matter of agency. If I want time to read, I need to create it myself.

And then I’ll be able to savor it the way we savor anything we’ve made from our own hands and our own will, knowing it’s a gift not of chance but of effort. A little bit of time. What a gift to craft for myself, if I can just somehow track down the materials I’ll need to make it.

The kids are back to school -- so where's my productivity?

It’s bothering me that I’m not getting more done.

The days just after the kids go back to school should be full of quiet, uninterrupted work hours. My productivity should soar in the weeks that follow Labor Day.

But of course, school isn’t the only endeavor that gets under way in early September. There are new community projects being launched, new writing assignments to attack, new clients to cultivate, and all the local friends I didn’t see all summer to catch up with.

Plus the house is kind of a mess, post-summer vacation, and I’d love to do a serious fall cleaning.

So I wake up too early in the morning – or in the middle of the night – thinking about all I’m not getting done: thinking about upcoming deadlines and unanswered correspondences.

Yesterday, for example, I seemed to get nothing done at all. There were just too many distractions. I called the plumber to fix a leak, chopped potatoes to make clam chowder for dinner, went for a run, picked up the mail, finished organizing the school library volunteer schedule, researched some information related to our insurance policies, did a phone interview for an upcoming column, and pitched a story.

And all the while I felt frustrated that I wasn’t getting anything done. Not anything I’d lain awake at night thinking about, at least.

But then I realized what I had in fact gotten done: all of the above. It was one of those times that I needed to turn my focus from my To Do list to my Did list. Yes, there were a bunch of items I didn’t get to, but everything I had managed to address surely didn’t count as nothing, did it?

Sometimes I think I need to get more organized and other times I think I just need to be more realistic about what I can do. Everything I accomplished yesterday needed to be done. To my mind, so did a lot of other things that didn’t get done.

But somehow it all works out, and when I get too frazzled, I just remind myself that by some standards, I’m actually keeping up just fine.

 

The one thing I wish I had more time for...

I was reading an article recently that posed this exercise: List those things you wish you had more time to do. The article even helped the reader along by offering a list of possibilities that might make someone’s list: Exercise more. Travel. Go back to school. Spend more time with children. Work on a hobby. Develop a richer spiritual life. Do more writing.

I made a list, but it wasn’t as long as I expected, and when I got to the next instruction, choose the three most important, I realized there was only one item on my list that was really important to me given the specificity of the question. It’s not that I couldn’t have come up with dozens of ideas for my own self-improvement, but most of them had to do with developing a stronger interest in or commitment to something, as opposed to finding more time for it. I should be more politically active, more environmentally conscientious, and a lot of other things, but it’s not really a function of time that I don’t; it’s a function of my interest level.

When I winnowed my list with a critical eye, it revealed that the only thing I really wish I had more time for is reading. I never read enough. I read for 45 minutes every morning while I ride my exercise bike, but I start with the newspaper, which usually takes up about half the exercise session. That means I often read only 20 minutes or so per day, which given how many amazing and important books there are in the world, with more coming out every day, just doesn’t seem like enough.

So, I asked myself, how can I create more time for reading? How can I make it more of a priority? If I manage to find time for every single one of my other priorities – time with my family, writing, exercise, spiritual contemplation – how is it that I can’t find more time for reading?

Looking at my daily routine, I concluded that one answer is to spend less time doing nighttime tasks and try to get to bed early enough to read. Typically, I focus on the kids until they go to bed; then I start making lunches for the next day, folding laundry, returning e-mails, whatever I didn’t get to in the course of the day. I usually don’t get to bed until it’s time to go to sleep.

Could I cut down on those busy-work tasks in the evening? The laundry does need to be folded, but is there another time I could do it, like during the weekends? Would anything be lost if I spent less time e-mailing? Probably not; I could just turn my computer off early in the evening and catch up the next morning with whatever correspondence remained. The kids’ lunches need to be made, but maybe I could do that at the same time I’m preparing dinner.

So I resolved to try, and the pile of Books To Read on my night table is serving as a powerful incentive. There’s just too much great literature out there for me not to be able to find the time. If it’s the only thing I want more time for, I just have to believe there’s a way to make that happen.

Already, I’m making a little bit of progress. Holly has just started taking an afterschool pottery class that lasts 90 minutes. I thought about all the errands and tasks Tim and I could accomplish between drop-off and pickup. We could buy groceries; get the oil changed in the car; visit the office supply store and the drugstore; pick up dry cleaning. Instead, this week, we headed for the bagel store. I bought Tim a toasted bagel with bacon cream cheese (his favorite treat) and myself a cup of coffee and a chocolate chip cookie (which turned out to be of poor quality, but it made me feel entitled to sit at a table for an hour. Calories don’t count if you’re giving yourself an excuse to take up space at a café, right?). Tim had brought along Robin Hood, a childhood favorite of Rick’s that he’s slowly making his way through; I had a pile of sections from last Sunday’s New York Times.

And together, we read. For a whole hour, we just sat there in silence together reading. It was such a treat. I could have been doing so many other productive things, but I convinced myself that this mattered too. We’ll try it again during Holly’s next pottery class, and see if we can make it a regular habit. One hour more of reading a week? It’s a great start.