Irons, Fires... it's all a mess

Being a textbook Type B Personality, I run the constant risk of complacency. Lately I'm getting the sense that the worst feeling I can have is: I'm either really bad at time management or I'm just lazy.

I go through my days with my eyes open. I see other writers and authors doing these amazing things and I wonder how they find the time for them. With the recent website creation, I devoted a huge chunk of my time not only to building the framework but also writing the content, and the latter is still only about 40% done. Getting the trivia up there was probably my last major update for a few weeks, as now I need to focus on everything I've been neglecting to get the website running.

The more time I put into promotion, website stuff, facebook and twitter, the less time I have to write (among other things). There are only 24 hours in a day, and I'm only awake for 18 of them.

So often I feel like I'm playing Missile Command with life. That hectic desperation when you just can't shoot fast enough is the best metaphor, outside of Tetris. Despite my laid-back attitude, I get just as stressed as the next person. I let the impossible fade, try my best to focus on what I can accomplish, but it's incredibly difficult to avoid worrying about what I felt I could do and didn't. This is doubly true when it comes to writing.

I buck really hard when it comes to "writing every day." It's not for any fear of lack of creativity or hand cramps, writer's block, or even outright laziness in this case. I know I have motivation problems and this is one of them: I want to treat writing like it's important. I don't want it to be some routine exercise, putting words on a page because I have to, because my calendar says so. It may seem like semantics to you, between laziness and "making it special," but I'm sure you've avoided doing something you enjoy for this very reason.

I love to write like I love pizza, and that's saying a lot. But I don't eat pizza every day, for myriad reasons (mostly health-related), and neither do I write every day. I think about writing every day, and I certainly worry about when I'm going to finish my current WIP, but only until I realize I have 500 other things to do. I feel just as guilty for neglecting writing as I do about neglecting the gym, especially when the end of my WIP is all outlined out for me, or when I have an event to train for.

But I also have a day job. Garbage to take out and other chores. Vehicle maintenance and home upkeep. Dogs to walk. Friends to converse and laugh with. Social and political and relationship issues to understand and deal with. Books and blog posts and forums to read, games to play. You get the idea. I have "life" to do, and wedging time in for one thing inevitably means I must neglect something else.

So, either I'm really bad at time management because I'm not writing as much as I should, or I'm just lazy because I can't fit writing into my busy schedule on a more regular basis. What's really obnoxious is when your own stress stresses you out, and that's the direction things have been going. I resolve, I schedule, I make myself notes, and in the end I have to defer to whatever is the highest priority at the time.

This, more than any other reason, is why it's difficult for me to plan very far into the future. Something may come up and, yes, it may be more important than what I had planned to do. In my experience, that's the way life goes, particularly when you are beholden to others to decide your priorities for you (e.g. your employer). And yet, if I were only able to organize and plan better, my priorities wouldn't clash so much. Poetic justice if I've ever seen it.

I'm impulsive, so a project that takes hundreds of hours of writing is automatically difficult. Novels require so much more of me than I'm able to give on a daily basis, and it's a constant struggle to find balance. Work/life balance, life/writing balance, life/life balance; it's all a mess.

I think, perhaps, I need to pace myself a little better. Cool some of these irons. Prioritize, organize, mobilize. But following through on resolutions was never really my strong suit, either. Maybe it's just a matter of taking more control over how my time is spent, making conscious choices instead of unconscious ones (whether I use a calendar or not), and seeing how that works for a while. Then again, "planning ahead" and "one day at a time" are the opposites of the spectrum.

I'm sure it'll make sense at some point, but now is not that time. Now's the time to try harder, adjust as necessary, and move forward. Like I told someone yesterday, "It's like walking in a dark room. You don't have to see where you're going to get there."



If you enjoyed this post, please Follow this Blog or use the subscribe button (below) to receive updates.