12 Week Year for Writers

The Back to School Crunch - Making Time to Write When Life Gets Busy

• Trevor Thrall • Episode 1

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The school year is right around the corner, and for many of us that means life is about to get crazier and there will be less time for writing. But it's not just the back to school crunch. No matter who you are or what you do, you have to cope with times when things just get really busy. And that means that every writer has to have an answer to the question: How do you get your writing done when life gets busy?  In this episode I share four strategies that have helped me navigate the busy times without losing my mind.

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SPEAKER_00:

Hi, I'm Trevor Thrall. Welcome to the Get Your Writing Done podcast. The school year is right around the corner, and for many of us, that means that life is about to get even crazier and there's going to be even less time for our writing. And that raises an important question all writers have to face. How do you get your writing done when life gets busy? In this episode, I'll share four strategies that I think will help.

UNKNOWN:

Get Your Writing Done

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

So today's episode is about the back-to-school crunch and making time to write in a busy life. I'm a professor and I spend mid-May to mid-August every year blissfully free, no classes, no students, no meetings, plenty of time for writing. And then by mid-August, when I'm recording this, the students start to come out of the woodwork, especially the graduate students, wanting me to read stuff, wanting to meet. It's time to dust off my lectures and polish the syllabi. I have to go to faculty meetings. You know the story. And my writing time starts to approximate zero. And when my kids were little, they're not anymore, but the back-to-school crunch was even more intense because we were ferrying kids back and forth to school, to practices, music lessons what have you. I'm sure most of you can relate to that. But even if you don't have kids or you're post-kids phase, maybe you're in a pre-kids phase, most of us have periods of our year that are predictably crazy. Accountants have tax season. Maybe you're in marketing and every time there's a pitch for a new client, it's all hands on deck for several weeks. Basically, life is busy and all of us writers need to figure out strategies to make time to write even when things get crazy, or the writing just won't get done. And so I've spent several decades now in a profession where my number one responsibility is to get writing done. And so I've had to figure out ways to stay productive even when the school year hits, even when things get crazy. And I'm not gonna say that I'm the world's best or anything at this, but I definitely have some hard, I suppose, hard-learned, hard-won lessons. And so today's podcast, I just wanted to share some of those observations, maybe my mindset, my attitude, share an attitude about making time to write, and a few kind of strategies that I think might help if you are trying to find strategies for making time in your busy life. So first, I want to start with the first observation or, I guess, generic piece of advice is sort of a 30,000 foot piece of advice and the reason I start with this is because I meet so many people who write who are really hard on themselves when they don't get things done or when they don't get as much done as they'd like to or think they should and so here's the first thing that I advise and that is when you enter into the busy time of year Respect the catastrophe, right? Respect the fact that life is busier now, right? That has a meaning. And what it means is you need to not expect that you're going to get so much done. And my specific piece of advice when you sort of enter the busy phase is to really know your speed limit. And what do I mean by speed limit? Speed limit, pretty simply, just how fast you work under various conditions. So in the summertime, I have a lot of time every day. And so how much I can get done every day is pretty high. During the school year, I am a lot busier every week. I have way less time to write. And so my speed limit is much lower. So I have to respect the fact that I can get less done when I'm doing a busy part of the year than other times. Now, I admit right up front, this was not me as a young person. When I was first professoring, I had ambitious writing goals and I did not care what time of year it was. My plans were ambitious regardless. And in fact, I think fall is sort of an exciting, sort of invigorating time for a lot of us. The snap of fall is in the air and you start thinking about how much you could get done this year. It's gonna be a big year. I think probably I got even more unrealistic when the school year started than at other times when I was younger. And so I would make plans that I just couldn't do. Routinely, I wouldn't get done anywhere near half of what I had in my plans, and then of course I would feel terrible about it, I'd beat myself up about it, and then I'd go right back and I'd make another ridiculously unrealistic plan, in part because I was trying to make up for the last one where I didn't get all my stuff done that I wanted. But eventually, through enough pain and blood and tears, I realized that no matter how much I put in my plan, during the school year, I had a hard limit of about what I will call you one major chunk per month. That's about all I could ever finish. No matter what I thought I was going to get done, I could get one major thing done on a project each month and a few minor things, you know, sort of not major, minor. These are technical terms. I describe them in the book. But, you know, A major chunk would be something like if I had the notes and the data already, I could write a chapter, a draft, or something like that. Or I could do the data analysis. Or maybe I could collect the data, depending on things. So roughly a major chunk. And it just kind of worked out. The kind of stuff I do, that's just about the pace I could do. And then while I'm doing that, I could do some other things. Like I could noodle on notes. Or I could do other small things. But basically, for anything that took sort of sustained time, uninterrupted time where you need three or four hours in a row sort of a thing in order to make progress. I only have enough time during the school year to do one major chunk a month. And the big aha for me was when I finally stopped getting down on myself about that and I started using my speed limit as my ultimate planning tool. So As I adapted and finally adopted the 12-week year, I realized that my previous approach had been kind of ridiculous. It was a laundry list of to-dos, unrealistic set of expectations. There was no way I was going to get to them all. I didn't have them prioritized very well and so on. Instead, what I started doing was saying, look, I know I can get exactly this many things done a month. There are going to be roughly four months in a semester, three or four, whatever. I'm going to get three or four things done this semester. And then I can also plan a few minor things. And so I started realizing that if I did that, I could actually execute the plan and then I would be happy at the end of the semester instead of being unhappy because I got seven things done and I had 50 on my plan. Instead, I got seven out of seven things done from my plan and I felt great about it. But, you know, so and I will say the peace of mind that I got of, you know, feeling good about the progress I was making during during a busy time was probably the best part of it all. Because it's very easy to stress. When you're in a job that depends on your writing, it's easy to stress about getting it done. And so, for me, that was a huge win. But I also got some other wins from respecting my own speed limits, from respecting the fact that I was doing work in a busy time. And that was, first, that I was more efficient. Because I didn't put so much on my plate, I didn't sort of zigzag between projects dart around like a hamster, oh, try to get this done, try to get that done. If you're trying to make progress on multiple fronts at once, it's usually going to be frustrating. And I wrote a whole chapter in the book about managing multiple projects because it's such a bad idea. And I did learn that the hard way, still sort of learning that the hard way. And so instead, by focusing on just the few most important things and as much as you can one project at a time, you really get better traction on that project. And so you're more efficient, you're more productive, you will get more done that way, even during busy times than trying a different approach. And you're also gonna get the benefit of not only just the sort of generic peace of mind, but also you're gonna make progress on that project and that buoys you, right? And it helps propel you forward. So, you know, cause it's easy during busy times to feel like you're going so slow on things that you feel like you're never gonna finish. And that's demoralizing, nobody likes that feeling. And so making progress, you know, in a predictable, consistent way, which is much more possible when you know your speed limit and you plan accordingly, right? Set realistic expectations, plan accordingly. I think, you know, that for me has been a key strategy for surviving the busy times. Now, I'll talk about in a different episode probably the, you know, hey, I'm going to throw it on the pile for summer and then I'll have a really unrealistic summer plan. I also had to learn that. It was kind of a backlash. but we'll talk about that another time. All right, so first key is, is to respect the busy, know your speed limit, set realistic plans and expectations. The second big strategy is to make time for your writing during the busy period by scheduling it. And, you know, that sounds duh, you know, really obvious, but for me, again, it wasn't because I, you know, my graduate school years were, you know, All I had to do was write, so I never had to think about making time to write. And during the summers, professors' schedules are super flexible, so you can always find more time to write. That's not very hard. Something comes up, you just write later or switch from morning to afternoon or whatever. Not a big problem. But when you're busy, you need to be even more diligent about making sure that your writing is on the schedule and on the calendar. Otherwise, it won't happen. you know that, right? And so the trick, and it doesn't matter if you're only able to schedule an hour a week, one session a week, whatever it might be, that's great, right? If that's all you have time for, if that's the crazy part of your life you're in, no problem, do it, right? If you can sneak a couple in, great, do that. It doesn't matter, you know, exactly what the number is. What matters is that you are prioritizing your writing, even during the busy period, by saying, this is when and this is where I'm gonna to write. And that's, and that is, you know, really, I think the sort of the double keys there is number one, you need to find a when that's going to work during the busy period. Because, you know, very likely, if it's like it is, for me, for you, the same times aren't going to work, right? So you're going to need to find a different time during the day during the week to write because you're busier than usual. So if you need to, you know, write hide away at lunch if you need to work earlier in the morning if you need to carve out a time later at night or whatever and the key to the to the when is really it's got to be a time that you know you can defend and i'm going to talk about defending your time in just a minute but but it's got to be a time you know you're going to be able to get your work done without people getting in your way and and screwing up your writing session so you gotta have your when and that's very closely attached to your where um you also have to have a place that you're going to be be able to be productive. And for me, during the school year, that is not on campus usually. On campus, I also have strategies to defend my space by covering over the window in my door with postcards so no one can see I'm there and turning off the light, making sure I'm very quiet. And so if someone knocks on the door during a writing session, I don't answer. They just keep knocking until they go away. So anyways, not on campus. Find a coffee shop where no one knows who you are. go to the basement, put a curtain up and put a sign up that says, if you come past this curtain, I will kill you. Whatever you need to do to find a place that you can be free. Number four is how to keep predators from destroying your writing sessions. And the devious part about this, of course, is that these predators are people like your loved ones, your significant other, your partner, your kids, your dog. Also, not so loved ones maybe, like your boss or your colleagues and other commitments that you've made in life. And so one of the things that I really strongly advise you to do when you are entering into a busy phase and you have even less time to write is that you make very clear with your significant others that you are not going to let them mess up your writing sessions, right? That you are going to protect these from all comers. So this usually requires making various promises compromises what have you right so you know if you need to tell your spouse hey you know my new schedule is a little crazy so I'm gonna take you know seven to eight in the morning in the basement and I don't you know I'm gonna try to really have no interruptions because it's hard for me to you know whatever like that do that if you need to tell your boss that you know what you told me I need to get this report done by whenever that means you guys are too bothersome I'm gonna have to go to you know the conference room on another another floor, and I'm gonna write for two hours every day after lunch there, and don't bother me. Whatever those sorts of things are that you need to do to let people know, look, I've got a writing schedule and it's important. And how exactly you do that, that's part of the magic that you're gonna need to figure out for your own situation, but I definitely have had to do that with my life, with my various work that I've had, and you're gonna be much happier if you know that you've got writing sessions that you can keep clean, as I think of it. And the second thing you need to do to defend your time is to kill distractions. And I know we're all at sort of different places on the distractibility curve. And sometimes I feel like I'm talking mostly to younger people when I talk about social media and the internet and so on. But wherever you are on this, we all know that dealing with your phone, dealing with your email, your smartwatch, All those things are just, you know, ginormous attention sucks. And, you know, you need to do whatever you can to minimize the impact of those things on your writing sessions, right? This is when you're busy. You only have maybe a couple hours a week to write. You don't have time to waste. So you really can't be looking at eBay or Twitter or Facebook or whatever book or TikTok, right? You need to put the phone on, you know, shut it down. If you need a social media blocker or one of those website blockers that doesn't let you go online install if you are a person who likes the pomodoro timer method or something like that to keep you focused do it if you need to schedule co-writing sessions like online with people who will help kind of keep you accountable to focusing absolutely do that right whatever you need to do to help you be focused and you know for me and and sort of part of the 12 week year system One of the things for me that really helps is this concept of buffer blocks. So if you're about to go into a writing session and you're someone who worries about missing something important for work or you sort of have a social media withdrawal thing, whatever it might be, do this. Schedule a little buffer on each side of your writing session and check all your stuff that you need to check right before you go into your writing session and then be comfortable that that's going to rest for an hour or whatever your amount of time is. time is, right? It will keep. And then right after you're done, you know, tell yourself, look, as soon as I finish my writing session, I'll pat myself on the back, then I'm going to go check my stuff again to make sure everything's okay. And if you get in the habit of buffering, right, keep the distractions out, keep them in the buffer zones, keep them out of your writing session. I think, you know, if you can build up that discipline, it will really help. And it may be that you want to start with shorter writing sessions and buffer on both sides and slowly build those writing sessions in length until you are happy with how much distraction-free time you're able to put in to your writing. So I think defending your time is one of the things during the busy times that you need to be especially good at. I think you always have to be good at, you have to be especially good during the busy times. And then the last sort of general piece of advice is about what I think of as clawing back time from the beast. And by beast, I guess I probably mostly mean your work. um, your day job, but I, but also just the beast that is life, right? That, that the rest of your life really never feels, um, shy about asking for more of your time. Um, you know, uh, so I say sometimes the best defense is a good offense. Let's go find some of their time and take it back for our writing. And so I have two, this is a two parter. And the first one is you might to use a sports phrase. Um, I think of it, well, Well, I'll use two phrases. One is I think of it as playing small ball. Another way you might think of it is gathering nuts and berries. And what I mean is finding small chunks of time in which you can be productive and move towards your writing goals. And so, you know, if your week is anything like mine, you have a lot of kind of weird interstitial downtime. So maybe you have a commute, for example. That's an obvious one. For some people, lunch Time between meetings. You've got two meetings at work and one ends and it ended a little early so you've got 15 or 20 minutes before the next one and you're not even in your office now so it's like, what do you do? Or you had to travel somewhere else in the city for a meeting, you got a half an hour car ride, taxi or Uber back, whatever. Most lives have these weird little chunks and if you're on the job, especially, your day is, I'm guessing, full of these things. So my advice is to start clawing those nuts and berries, those small chunks of time, and put them to good use. I think most people, most of the time, don't put them to, I would say, productive use. I'm not saying they're not valuable always, but not necessarily productive. So what do we usually do during those times? We look at our email for the thousandth time. We check Twitter or Facebook again. We look at Airbnb. to think about where we might go on vacation, whatever it might be. I do that a lot. Whatever it might be, but if you think about it, this is your busy time and you don't have enough time for your writing or as much as you'd like. One way to get some more is to claw back those little nuts and berry times. Now, you can't use a nuts and berry time to do anything or everything. That's not gonna cut it if you're doing a task that really kind of takes two to four hours of uninterrupted deep think and write sort of time. Like, you know, writing a chapter in your novel or your book or whatever, or, you know, analyzing data or stuff like that that's required for your writing, that's gonna be hard to do into a 12 minute chunk. You're not even gonna get started, right? But, you know, again, all writers, it seems to me, no matter what genre, maybe poets are different, I'm not sure, but we all have non-writing tasks that are required to get our writing done. Could be, you know, background research of different kinds, reading different things. Could be learning a little bit more, you know, if you want to write a book about, you know, medieval, you know, druids and something like that. We need to read some stuff on druids, you know, if you're writing a fantasy novel or something like that. So you get some research to do. Or maybe there's other kinds of learning you could be doing about how to market your book or whatever, right? And so... I think this might be one of my small minor superpowers because I've gotten really, really good at making use of the nuts and berries time. For different periods of time, I've had longish commutes. I definitely have faculty meetings where I can do things during the faculty meeting. Don't tell anyone. You don't need your whole brain for the faculty meeting. I could be doing some other stuff too. But I have a lot of this interstitial time. And I've discovered that I There are a wide range of things I can do during those times that move my projects forward. I can respond to emails. I can help my graduate students solve problems. I can read things other people have written, even though I don't have time to write it myself. I can offer good kind of course correction to other people's work and so on. And so what I figured out, as I figured out this strategy, and I'll share this because it may not be everyone who can take advantage of this, but maybe this will this would be useful to you or help inspire you to think about how you might use nuts and berries time but but it actually helped transform the very way i do my work at at the university because what i learned was nuts and berries time is not enough for me you know i can't use it to write a draft of a chapter i can't do that 10 minutes at a time or 20 minutes at a time i need to sit down and have a morning right but but again i i can collaborate very effectively in bits and pieces like that. And so what I figured out when I came to the university where I work now, George Mason, I started working with PhD students. And I realized that if I, you know, give good guidance at the beginning of a project to a PhD student, and I co-author something with them, they can do a lot of this groundwork that takes sort of more unbroken time, of which they have more than I do. And then I can lend sort of high value collaboration and guidance and leadership, but I can do that sort of without even needing to plan it necessarily because I can find this time all over my schedule to make a quick response or what have you. And I end up getting more done than I normally did before on my own because now I can work with many graduate students at a time on a project or on a couple projects, and I don't have to carve out as much time during the busiest times of my year in the school year to try to work on projects and get them done. transformed the way I do my work. And I now pretty much write everything with graduate students. It has other benefits, but a big one is that I actually can get things done during the school year on projects that I wouldn't really be able to do anything on if it were just me working by myself. And so, nuts and berries time can be really productive, not for the main task, perhaps, but for all sorts of the ancillary tasks that are required for you to do your thing when it comes to sitting down and writing whatever it is writing. Okay. And then the second clawback time from the beast strategy I will share is an advanced topic. So I want to start with a warning. Use this tool sparingly. I was listening to a... No, not listening. I was reading a Twitter thread the other day. A CEO, who shall remain nameless, tweeted out that a good idea for ambitious young people would be to work on the touched off a heated discussion on Twitter about the wisdom of that statement. Or storm, or whatever you call it on Twitter when people blow up and get mad at each other. And I thought, you know, that's a really good and important debate to have. But I think, obviously on the one hand, if you want to get ahead, working more makes some kind of sense. But I think we're all worried about burnout. We're all worried about staying human, especially over the last year and a half and plus of the pandemic. We've all, I think, who are working, all of us have suffered, had to, you know, have towed the line or moved past it. You know, working too much from home, especially, is so easy. So I share this last stratagem advisedly. But sometimes what I and my wife and I call the hour of power can be a useful strategy. And what the hour of power is, maybe pretty obviously, is just if you're having a period where you've gotten so busy that your normal writing schedule has just gotten obliterated, despite your best efforts at defense, your best efforts to claw time from the beast, maybe your writing schedule some week just got overrun and you didn't have time to get anything done. And you're starting to, you know, maybe feel the heat a little bit because you need to make progress. Maybe you have a deadline. Maybe you owe something to a publisher. Maybe you promised a co-author to get your side of something done. Maybe you just had a goal in your head. I need to get this manuscript done by time X and it's coming up and I'm not there yet. If you're having that sort of scenario during a busy phase, one solution that I adopted was the hour of power. And This was something I did more when our kids were little because my wife and I were just crazy busy back then. But once in a while, I would just have a crazy week and I'd be like, you know what? If I don't get something done on this, I'm going to really get behind. And so I'd say to my wife, you know what? Tonight, I'm so crazy. I'm going to need an hour of power tonight if it's okay. And this was always a negotiation, of course, but she'd be like, okay, fine. And so after dinner, we're going to get the kids dinner and all that. And then I would go up to a study uh and i would hide for an hour or so and i would just try to you know focus nothing else going on maybe a little music um i would just go hide up in in a room a little music um and just you know dive right in and and usually because those times i was i was feeling pretty urgent um i wouldn't have any trouble focusing and i would i would manage to get a little bit of traction and uh I never did an hour of power more than a couple times a week. But, you know, these things are all malleable, right? Your strategy might vary. I know people who sneak off on a weekday morning because, you know, their house is sleepy. No one's really in the mood to go do anything yet. So they're like, well, you know what? I'm going to go do my hour or two or three or whatever it is at the coffee shop on a Saturday morning while everyone else is in their slippers and playing in Nintendo or whatever. But now, I say advisedly here because I think things become habits if they're done too often. And so what I want to encourage is that you consider this hour of power as a special tool. Now, if it turns out that you're always going to use Saturday and everyone in your life is cool with that and that's when your writing time is going to be, that's not what I'm talking about. That's great. But if your normal is not to do work at a certain time but you want to carve out a special exemption period to do an hour of power then be careful that you are always balancing your your life right between writing and everything else you have going on I mean the prep the the presupposition here is that this is a busy time for you and you are adding to your business by writing more and having this hour of power and so this is this is kind of a candle burning on both ends sort of a thing you don't want to do too much of this for too long because you will risk burnout and once you do that once you burn out the cost might be very large indeed so I say advisedly the hour of power can be very useful I will say that for me it helped me stay sane during times when I might have panicked a little bit about things getting stalled things not getting done on time if you know a few times just falling behind on things or having just too many things to do especially because you know for me during the school year you know there are so many urgent things that that you know I have to say okay is it more important to help this student who's failing you know and desperately needs help for the next hour or should I kick them out of my office so I can write on my article that maybe no one will ever read anyway but I need for my job it was hard for me to always say no to those things still is and so sometimes my schedule would just be the place where I had enough of that would happen that I would need to carve back claw back an hour or two a week just to keep moving forward forward so I didn't panic so I you know I offer that as another thought about how you might cope with the busy times okay so those are my thoughts just let's summarize briefly where we've been so all of us writers have busier times than others in our life it's hard enough all the time to get stuff done but there are times during the year maybe it's a school year maybe it's tax season whatever it is for you there are times when it's even harder and we need stress strategies to help us plow through those hard times, those busy times, but still get some writing done. And so my sort of four general strategies there, first is respect the crunch, right? Respect that time crunch and know your speed limits, right? Know what a reasonable pace for you is gonna be during this busy time and set your plans and expectations accordingly. Don't push so hard that you go crazy. So that's tip one. Tip number two is schedule your time. The only way anyone's gonna write during a busy time is if their calendar says write. So make sure your week, build a model week, put in all your other commitments, but make sure, even if it's just one slot, don't let that writing die. Get your writing on the schedule in a consistent place. In a place you know you'll be able to defend it, in a place you know you'll be comfortable and free enough from distractions and other people that you can get your stuff done. Tip number three is defend that time. Make the right promises and compromises with your significant others, your boss, your work, so that you can keep your writing sessions free and clear and that you don't end up losing them to other people wanting you to do other things. Your writing is the most important thing to you during your writing sessions, not the most important thing to other people. You need to defend those sessions. because they're important to you. And then the fourth tip was clawing back time from the beast. And I think if you think of your workday as a cup full of stones, there's a lot of space in there still. And you can fill up that space with writing related tasks, little chunks of helpful progress, not maybe the big stuff, but the little stuff that can help you move forward during what would otherwise be just, you know, pointless parts of the day where nothing else was happening of any value, right? And so that's kind of a way to get an extra boost. And then finally, the hour of power. If and when you need a little bit more to either get you over the top, get you finished, keep you from falling behind, once in a while it's okay to click on the afterburner and spend some time writing when you normally wouldn't. Again, with all the various promises and compromises that will require. And being careful and thoughtful that you don't burn out because gosh knows we don't need that so those are my strategies that I have kind of come up with over a few decades of doing this writing thing but you know what all everyone has their own strategies I would love to hear how you grapple with writing during the busy times love to hear what strategies you guys are using and so we'd love to see those in the comments and you know in the meantime till we talk again. Happy writing.