I find myself in a more flexible few months of my career. In this phase, I’m trying experiments with my time. How does a Monday work out if I start the day with activities that give me joy? One such activity is writing.
This Monday morning, I decided to flip my day around. What will Monday feel like if I start the day by writing down some ideas which have been floating around in my mind for a while? I decided to set no time limit for the creative phase this Monday morning and to just see where it goes.
I have a hypothesis I want to test. I hypothesise my day may be productive and less of a typical “jet lag” Monday if I start with an activity I really want to do, rather than with the items on the long to-do list remaining from Friday.
What does Monday feel like? The verdict is still out. I’ll share my conclusion in a while (and will do some writing on this tonight). I think the experiment may need a few repeats.
On writing, though: it is an activity that needs time. Blocks of time need to be made available for writing. It needs to be prioritised and built into a day. And then it needs to be repeated.
Over and over. This is my preconception of how to structure writing time. Others may need less discipline and structuring.
An academic writer I admire, Lant Pritchett, recently had the following to say about making time for writing in an interview with Shruti Rajagopalan who hosts the podcast Ideas of India:
“My writing process is that I get up and write, meaning, what I do first—because the world conspires against research. Research is a very tender flower and the weeds around it, the pressing will always crowd out the important. Part of my writing process is that I’m an incredible procrastinator because what I do is I procrastinate everything I ought to be doing in order to write. And then use, in some sense, the fact that I can do things quickly. I enjoy writing. I enjoy the research part of it.”
But no writing day or experience is likely to be the same. Some days the writing may flow, others the going may be slow. This too is part of the writing journey and needs to be accepted as not to detract from the experience.
Author and poet Mark Nepo writes the following about the effort involved in writing in the book “Drinking from the river of light: the life of expression”:
“I now experience the writing journey as a climb through different forms of terrain. One day, we’re led through an open meadow in the light, the next through a patch of landslide where the path is covered with old stones, each with a story. This takes longer, as each stone has to be overturned and listened to for its story. I’ve learned to keep moving at the pace of the path, no matter how it unfolds”.
This year I’m aiming to do less procrastination of writing, and more procrastination of other items on the to-do list. I’m following the path. Let’s see how it works out for me 😉.
