The first shock came when I realised how little time I devoted to
actual writing-related activity. I have a part time ‘day’ job that allows me to
put food into the mouths of my family and keep a reasonable roof over our
heads. In common with 98% of writers, I have yet to reach the stage where my
writing can support rather than supplement. The day job, including attendance
and travel time, takes up about 25 hours per week.
Here’s the table of results I gathered:
Hours Per cent
68 days 1632
100%
Sleep (about 7 hours per night) 476 29%
Domestic (eating, shopping, home maintenance, personal stuff,) 336 21%
Office (attendance & travel to day job) 239 15%
Relaxation (TV, music, films etc) 189 12%
Marketing (FB, Blog, Twitter, Pinterest,) 89 5%
Emails (everything that’s not Twitter or Pinterest) 74 5%
Fitness (walks, bike rides, rests) 66 4%
Reading (novels, magazines & other books) 52 3%
Editing (editing, formatting,
submissions) 38 2%
Artist (morning pages, photography, drawing) 37 2%
Technical (computer updates, security, internet research) 20 1%
Writing (short stories, blog
posts, reviews) 16 1%
We go through life making certain assumptions. I style myself a ‘writer’;
it’s how I visualise myself, how I aim to lead my life. It came as a shock to
discover how little time I’d spent in actually writing. A salutary lesson, and
one I’ve taken to heart already. I’d persuaded myself I spent much of my time
in front of the keyboard and screen actually placing words in documents to
produce new writing. If I tell you that the time chart revealed that I spent no
more than 5%, that’s FIVE per cent, of my available writing time in actually
writing, I think you’ll understand my shock and dismay.
This is the modified version of the table as it relates to writing
activity:
Marketing (FB, Blog, Twitter, Pinterest,) 89 27%
Emails (everything that’s not Twitter or Pinterest) 74 23%
Reading (novels, mags & other books) 52 16%
Editing (editing, formatting,
submissions) 38 12%
Artist (morning pages, photography, drawing) 37 11%
Technical (comp updates, security, int research) 20 6%
Writing (short stories, blog
posts, reviews) 16 5%
Total time for writing activities (34 hours per week) 326 20%
(sorry the tables aren't aligned - Blogger uses different code from MS Word and I'm damned if I know how to correct this!)
(sorry the tables aren't aligned - Blogger uses different code from MS Word and I'm damned if I know how to correct this!)
So, my total working week involves 59 hours; hardly
that of a sluggard, I think.
I was completing Julia Cameron’s course, The Artist’s Way, at the start of the measuring period; in fact the
course was a material influence on my decision to carry out the assessment. So,
thank you, Julia! She suggests a series of writing exercises, called ‘morning
pages’ and also says all creatives should make an artist’s date with themselves
for at least 2 hours per week, which is why those activitiesare included in the
table.
I don’t need to explain the rest; it’s patently obvious. But it seems I
had fallen into that trap so much lauded on the internet by various groups,
organisations and ‘experts’: A writer must develop an ‘Author Platform’ on the
web in order to become visible.
Most of my valuable writing time had been spent in building that
platform, using social media such as Twitter
(3,570 followers), Facebook
Author page (244 ‘likes’), Facebook itself (1,524 friends), Goodreads (1,491
friends), LinkedIn
(1,926 connections), and, more recently,
Pinterest (278 followers). The
activity to sustain a presence on these sites is time-consuming and some,
especially Pinterest, can be addictive (be warned!). Had this time resulted in
substantial book sales? The simple answer is, ‘NO’. Add to this, my other
activities on such sites as Digg, a site under
significant re-development, StumbleUpon (242
connections), and Klout a system
intended to measure influence on the web, but one I find confusing and not at all
user friendly, and where I have a score of 50 (the average is 20,
apparently). I’m also involved in Foursquare (12 friends) and Tripadvisor (970
friends). Enough said!
So, to the outcome. It’s always been my aim to write something new
every day. Not always easy, as I have to rise at 06:30 Monday to Wednesday in
order to get to the day job on time, and mornings are by far my most creatively
productive times. I suffered from ME for 8 years and am still in the recovery
phase, so I need to rest after physical activity, and that includes attendance
at the office. So, I’m occasionally restricted. But that’s no excuse for not
writing as a priority. What’s happened is that priorities have become distorted
by activity undertaken to build a presence on the web.
The solution?
I’ve developed a new time chart, measuring only those activities to do
with writing, so that I can keep a constant eye on where my time goes. I’ve
decided, and this post is an example, to make writing my first activity every
day that I enter my study. So far today I haven’t looked at my emails and my
only activity online has been to obtain links for this post. Will the
discipline, combined with a new awareness, allow me to spend more time on those
writing activities that really matter: creating, editing, submitting and
reading? Only time will tell. And I’ll let you know in a couple of months how I’m
getting on. I invite you to undertake a similar assessment and see whether you’re
using your available time to best advantage. It might surprise, shock or
delight you; who knows?
Those uninterested in the technical aspects of the exercise can stop
here. For those who want to emulate the process, however, please read on:
I’d set up my time chart on MS Excel, with columns for date, activity
name, activity code, start time, end time and, using a simple formula, time
spent. This allowed me to modify the spread sheet so that I could create totals
for each of the specific tasks I’d nominated. I had headings to cover Domestic,
Office, Marketing, Email, Fitness, Reading, Editing, Artist, Technical and Writing.
These were ‘group’ headings that allowed me to include all those various jobs
we undertake in our daily lives. I’ve attached a sample below to indicate what
this actually looked like. If you decide to do something similar, and I strongly
advise you to do so, this might act as a guide for you.
I’m no expert with MS Excel, so it took me a little time to understand
how I could use formulae to work out how much total time had been spent on each
of the specified tasks. But the Help menu actually came to the rescue on this
occasion (it appears that, when trying to total ‘time’ the straightforward ∑
autosum function won’t work, it merely returns a value that states a time of day.
To arrive at the total time, you use ∑autosum and then right click on the cell
where the total will be created, select ‘format cells’ then ‘custom’ from the
drop down ‘number’ list and pick ‘[h]:mm:ss’ from the list presented. I hope that helps!
Dissecting and evaluating the data was a little tedious, but worth the
effort, I think. And here’s the promised sample of my original spread
sheet. Good luck.
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