Or rather, "Writing Killed the Fanatical Reader." Since the publication of Cluck, and the work required for the sequel, I've barely had time to read anything. Even worse, I have a commitment to read books for an online reviewer, and I'm terribly far behind.
So today's topic is: Managing Your Time, with an emphasis on the "for You."
We all have the same problems. We need to accomplish several things every day in order to survive. We need to: eat enough to fuel our metabolism; and sleep for at least a few hours. For some of us, the amount of time we need to sleep is longer than others (I prefer at least six hours, and dream of a day when I can pack in 8 or even nine hours of restful sleep ... although I can't dream too much because I only have six hours to do it in, and I like to leave some room for more interesting dreams about robots, zombies, robot zombies, and maybe a sex dream. No zombies in the sex dreams, though. The right kind of robot, maybe, but no zombies).
Anyway, on top of those physical "in order to survive" requirements, there are those imposed upon us because of our participation in a civilized society. We must: earn money to pay for food, and to a mortgage so that we have a place to sleep; we must earn money to pay for a car to drive to work so that we can earn the afore-mentioned money for the afore-mentioned purchase of food; we must earn money to buy liquor because the afore-mentioned job, required to earn the afore-mentioned money, will cause us undue stress, sending us to the bottle like lambs to a teat.
The way I figure it: if you're lucky enough to get 7 hours of sleep, plus 1 hour for eating (not a lot spread over three meals) ... that's 8 hours, or one third of your day. 8 glorious hours of work, plus an hour a day driving to and from work ... that's nine hours, right? Wrong, because the "eight hour work day" is actually a nine hour work day, wasting an hour in the middle for "lunch" although no one ever gets to eat lunch for an hour because we have to do some stupid errand, or (worse) work through lunch to make some sort of deadline. So, we're an hour past 2/3 of the day ... leaving seven whole hours.
What do you do in seven hours?
I try to:
- write a little bit of my book
- read a little bit of someone else's book
- promote my book
- check my email
- update this blog
- talk to my loving (and very tolerant) wife
- breath
Now, I live on a farm, so I lose another two hours or so to chores, but even so, five hours should be enough, right? ... right?
If only the time were unbroken and sequential, maybe, but as it is there's barely time to get to the "wife" part. I'd much rather that the money part didn't matter, and I could skip the workday and the book promotion, leaving time to spend with my farm-family and my absolutely beautiful wife, with enough let over to write purely for the enjoyment of writing, but only after lots of kissing and hugging (and whatnot).
What would you do?
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