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 faster still – every hour spent planning needs to make another hour two or three times more productive.

30,000 words of PhD work means a much slower pace, per hour. Except that 232 words per hour pace needs research to support it. Needs time to polish and refine ideas. Needs raw hours where I do nothing but think, make connections, explore ideas. Get on with the task of doing.

How much short fiction is a 129 hours worth? How many words can be written and polished? How much time can be devoted to beta-reading, editing, managing submissions?

Then come the little things: the cold that wipes you out for two days; the unexpected meetings. Marking that takes longer than expected, or the day when you get stuck.The trick is looking at all that time and assuming you’ll have far less. Plotting out the disruptions you can predict and assuming there will be more than a handful that seem to come out of nowhere.

It’s easy to sit at the beginning of the quarter and think: look at all this time. I can do so much. To assume that you’ll work at peak productivity, using every hour to its fullest. In truth, when I compare the list to what I want to get done, I’ll either need to work more hours or cut back on expectations. Find more hours, or aim to do less.

All too often, writers choose to find more hours. It’s the danger of a job where there’s no hard edges to your work day, where the hours you work don’t matter, because you’re only paid for finished work. There’s the tendency to load up, do more, work harder.

It’s not a bad choice, compared to doing less, but it shouldn’t be made automatically. It definitely shouldn’t be made without looking at how many hours are actually there to work with.

So I map out the next thirteen weeks. Figuring out what I can cut and set aside. Figuring out which days I can afford to work longer. Trying to find the balance.