—SALMAN RUSHDIE
On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for consistency.
A tightly regimented schedule—where you do the same things at the same times, every time, whether you feel like it or not—can be another great tool for making time for the important stuff.
A person who swims three mornings a week whether they feel like it or not, or works on writing every Sunday afternoon whether they feel like it or not, or draws for an hour every Tuesday night whether they feel like it or not is carving out and protecting space for activities they know—in their calmest and best moments—are important to them.
Don’t ask your bleary 5:30 a.m. self to make the decision about swimming, because we all know what decision that self is going to make. That self would happily pay every last dollar in your bank account for five more minutes of sleep. Instead, you’re creating a structure that saves that poor self from having to make any decisions at all. The alarm goes off, sleepy-self automatically stumbles into swimsuit and sweatpants, and trundles off to the gym. Done and done.
If this seems to be directly at odds with the previous section about going where the energy is, that’s because, well, basically, it is. We are smart and complicated beings and we need smart and complicated solutions to our problems. We need multiple tools in our toolboxes. Just like there’s a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together, there’s a time to follow our bliss and a time to hold ourselves to account.
Maybe a strict morning schedule where you wake up at a certain time, do certain things in a certain order, and walk out the door at a certain time on the dot is perfect for you, and maybe it’s not.
Learning how and when deploying each of these different tools can help us, personally, make better friends with time—that’s really the secret to the whole thing. When do you need the saw and when do you need the hammer? You will figure it out.
DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB
“Make some money and have interesting life experiences—whether that’s being a teacher, or building a house, or tending a bar—keep those bills paid and write about life.”
—QUIARA ALEGRIA HUDES
There’s a persistent cultural message out there that if you really cared about your creative work, say (or about whatever it is: activism, animals, coffee, tchotchkes), you’d quit your job and go do that thing full time. We’re constantly being told to take our passion and make it our livelihood.
Elizabeth Gilbert sums up the problem with this kind of thinking perfectly in her book Big Magic: “I’ve always felt like this is so cruel to your work—to demand a regular paycheck from it, as if creativity were a government job, or a trust fund . . . Financial demands can put so much pressure on the delicacies and vagaries of inspiration.” Why take this precious thing you love—be it writing or art-making or baking or macramé—and insist that it now has to pay all your bills?
Once again, the culprit is our tortured perceptions of time. We fantasize that the only way to make real time, abundant time, for this thing we love is to do it all day long the way we currently do the work we get paid for.
When, in fact, if we actually made this thing our job we’d spend our days not in a blissed-out macramé haze, but rather doing quarterly taxes and email blasts and all the other things entrepreneurs must do. It would very quickly become, yep, just another day job.
Instead, how about keeping the job you have, the one that pays your rent and (we hope) provides your medical insurance, and commit to making time for those other passions outside of working hours?
In her piece in the New York Times, “Does Having a Day Job Mean Making Better Art?” Katy Waldman evokes “T. S. Eliot, conjuring ‘The Waste Land’ by night and overseeing foreign accounts at Lloyds Bank during the day, or Wallace Stevens, scribbling lines of poetry on his two-mile walk to work . . .”
Waldman quotes the avant-garde composer Philip Glass telling the story of a time he was recognized while doing his day job: “I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of TIME magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him that I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”
These stories are pleasing because we recognize ourselves in them. We have bills to pay and mouths to feed, and so did all the greats of art and literature and everything else. Everyone has just 24 hours in a day to make art and make money and make anything else we want to make.
A new idiom has come into recent parlance—to “daylight in” something. Rather than “moonlighting” as a composer (with implications of scant time and secrecy), and rather than having a “day job” as a plumber (implication of onerous, meaningless labor), what if we say Philip Glass daylights in plumbing? Doesn’t that sound like the sort of clear, bright, deliberate life choice a resourceful adult, with time on their side, might make?
TRUST YOUR SYSTEM
“I capture and organize 100 percent of my ‘stuff’ in and with objective tools at hand, not in my mind. And that applies to everything—little or big, personal or professional, urgent or not. Everything.”
—DAVID ALLEN
This is probably the single greatest insight of productivity guru Allen’s popular Getting Things Done system (known to its adherents as GTD): the idea that you cannot keep your tasks inside your head. You need a system, a container to keep them in.
It doesn’t really matter if that container is physical (a wire in-box or paper to-do list or bullet journal, say) or virtual (the Notes app on your phone or the Tasks function in Outlook or a dedicated program like OneNote or Evernote). What matters is that you trust it.
You must find the practical system that works best for you, the container you can trust, and then you must put all the things you need to do into that container. The minute you think of something that needs doing—pow! Into the container it goes!
This is how you stop worrying about stuff. All those things you haven’t gotten around to doing yet—you don’t have to keep fretting about them in your mind, reminding yourself to do them, because you trust that they are safely captured in your container.
Then, of course, you also do have to check the container periodically so you can do the things you’ve stored in there.
But if all the myriad stuff you need to get done is caught in one place, then that makes it super easy to grab tasks—either the most urgent ones, or the ones that fit the amount to time you happen to have at the moment—and do them. Bam!
PUT YOUR BIG GOALS ON YOUR TO-DO LIST
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
—ANNIE DILLARD
If we only ever put the little piddly nitpicky stuff we’re in danger of forgetting onto our to-do lists—order toddler socks, pay water bill, ask Juan in Accounting about that expense report, hard-boil eggs, sign up the kids for summer camps, email the site administrator about the fundraising program, weed clothes closet, buy more paper towels, shop for anniversary gift, work on next month’s client presentation, phone-bank for mayoral candidate, replace lightbulb—then those things will, quite truly and literally, take up all our available time.