Lately, I have come to feel that I am always running out of time. I may start the day with a to-do list in my mind, and the best of intentions, but deadlines abound: what do you need to get done, or have ready, before you leave home, start work, or before you go to bed? What free time does a working day leave you, and how much drive you possess to use that time productively as well? Or should you wait until the weekend, and will you have the energy to do anything about it then?
This predicament nearly derailed my attempts to put something out this week. For the record, and in case I ever change it, I put out a social media message every Friday to say what I will be writing about for the coming weekend - this is a practice I picked up from old 1950s drive-in films, particularly Ed Wood films like “Glen or Glenda” and “Plan 9 from Outer Space”, where the poster would be created first to generate the interest, and hopefully funding, to make the film. This time, I realised that at no point during the preceding week, I had given any thought, or put aside any time to think, what I could possibly be writing about next.
When I first thought of squaring the circle, of addressing the problem by making it the subject, I initially dismissed the idea as a pathology that needed to be worked out in its own time, and not as a discussion to be reasoned with towards a conclusion. For me, it boils down to a feedback loop: an anxiety over not being productive enough with my own free time, and the linear nature of time itself, where every moment is a moment you won’t have again, which creates anxiety. In terms of addressing it, this will again be something to ringfence time to properly address it – ironically, that might also be the answer.
Two resources have been sent my way to address these from different angles: “Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing” by Robert Boice, a book with comprehensive diagnostic tools to assess productivity problems, and to build and maintain – I got a laugh from randomly opening at a page where someone had told Boice, “My God, you’re asking us to change our whole lifestyles!”, only to be told that they were the ones in control. The other was an article by Oliver Burkeman titled “The unproductivity challenge”, attempting to address the “completionist urge” by setting aside time to do nothing at all: “You’ll be claiming your right to exist, and to enjoy existing, regardless of your productivity.”
I may not be able to shake off the feeling that everything I have written here is a placeholder where a better idea for an article would have been, but this is the problem when you have an obligation to yourself to produce something new each week.