The next couple of blogs will be a series on ‘Time’, and the stories we tell ourselves about time. We wrap ourselves in these stories so we don’t have to face doing the difficult intellectual work of writing, but the key here is to recognise they are just that. Just stories. Not fact, not true, just things we tell ourselves (and for some, have heavily internalised as a defence mechanism to criticism).

Today I am going to start with the greatest lament of struggling writers everywhere - I can’t find time to write. Wrong. The whole premise is wrong. We don’t find time. We don’t create time. We don’t make time. We don’t lose time (it is not behind the sofa) and we don’t manage time. It is not an unruly toddler that has to be corralled.

Your whole attitude to time has gone astray right from the get-go here. We must see time instead as something we schedule. That is all we can do. Time unspools before us - we don’t create it, or find it. We can choose what we do with our time though, because we have agency - still, in these difficult times - we still have agency to schedule our time. Most working professionals do in fact possess this same agency. Of course, we have fixed slots for teaching, determined by the gods of timetabling, but after that, we decide what we do with our time and when we do it. Your synchronous teaching slots might account for 2-14 hours a week depending on you contract, position and location. That’s still a pretty small amount of a 40 hour working week.

We don’t find time. If you are working from a position of finding time, you have already lost. This is not hide and seek. Time requires us to schedule our behaviour into slots where we match task to be completed to a fixed time slot. We all know many academic tasks - especially teaching related ones - will take as long as you give them, so decide ahead of time, how long you are prepared to give to X task. Let your time allocation model be your guide. Be honest. And here is the rub - so often we are NOT honest. We don’t know how long something has taken us to do because we never set out with a particular goal in mind, and we have never timed ourselves doing it.

Let’s start with a benign example. You have to grade 100 1500 word essays. You are allowed in your time allocation model 10 minutes per essay. You set yourself a target of 30 essays this week, which requires 5 hours of marking on this calculation. That is what you must give it. Use a timer, move on, get quicker at this skill. Use rubrics, autofill comments on Turnitin, whatever strategy you need. You can give excellent feedback in that time, but it takes practice and some investment in working out how to create efficiencies that will pay you back forever. Schedule the time you require and stop when that time runs out. You should not sit for 5 hours grading - no-one should. This task should be spread out, hour to hour amongst your working week(s), to be fitted in around other tasks.

Then, move onto your next task.

That is where people go astray. They ignore the clock, the calendar, and simply continue until they run out of steam. They won’t assess how long that task took them - in fact it took them 5 hours to mark 5 essays instead of 30. That is clearly wrong. You are not paid to spend 1 hour per 1500 word student essay, and no amount of hiding inside some justification about quality will save you here. This was not a good use of your time, because you are paid to do many other things. This is exactly why agency scares people. You choose to spend your time this way. It is not that you could not find time to write. You chose to spend 5 hours grading 5 essays. You chose it.

The key to scheduling your time is to obey the schedule, and of course, put writing in the schedule to begin with. If you show me your schedule, I can find you 5 writing slots a week, guaranteed. I’ve worked with hundreds of clients and I can absolutely guarantee you that. I don’t know how long they will last, but I do know, after a couple of weeks of coaching, your schedule will look radically different than it does right now, if you let me help you populate it. The first thing I ask clients to do is show me their schedule. Some are reluctant, some are a little sheepish, some don’t even have what I consider to be a proper schedule (classes written down on a bit of paper diary is not a schedule, it is a list of your classes). A few are wildly overcommitted, in life and in work, and their obligations have to be trimmed to match what they are paid to do; some clients have only a loose understanding of what is reasonable at any given career stage. Some have massive inefficiencies in their practice that can be streamlined to enable more writing slots to be scheduled.

I don’t think this is revolutionary but experience tells me this should be said explicitly. It is no good having a schedule if you ignore it at the first opportunity - the first time someone asks you for something, interrupts you, or an email pops in, or indeed, if you delight in writing a complementary essay of feedback on the student’s essay.

People resist scheduling for all kinds of reasons, but mainly, they resist it because then - when they scheduled 5 hours to write that week (a mere 1 hour per day) and they did not do it - they can have plausible deniability as the movies say. I just didn’t have the time: oh but you did, and it is RIGHT THERE IN YOUR SCHEDULE. You chose not to. And that recognition is the first step to unwiring these writing myths - the greatest of all being ‘I can’t find time to write’, facilitated by the second greatest myth which is ‘I have no control over my schedule’.