By The Numbers
I plan my year thirteen weeks a time, marking out the quarter and setting goals based upon pre-existing commitments and what needs to be done. It seems like an endless expanse of hours, when you sit down to start logging everything you’d like to do, but the speed with which time vanishes is startling to watch. Thirteen weeks, five work days a week. Four hundred and eighty-seven hours. Except one day a week will be lost to admin, teaching, and similar activities. That’s ninety eight hours gone. The four days a week that are left get divided between three major projects: thesis; novel draft; story drafts. One hundred and twenty-nine hours a piece, spread across thirteen weeks. To finish the first novel draft in that time assumes I’ll write 620 words, on average, across the 129 hours allocated to the task. To get a finished draft means working faster, packing in more words. To devote time to planning means working