In this, the second part of my three-part series on Time, we look at the non-negotiable pieces of our lives we devote time to, and we visit three artists’ thoughts on how to cut through the inertia and get your work done. Revisit Part 1 of the series, The Pervasive Belief in Time Scarcity, by clicking here.

Part 2: Getting It Done

The Truth behind “I don’t have time for that.”

I have started calling myself out (well, inwardly, er, out to myself) when I say “I don’t have time for that.” Because the thing is, I will find time for all the things that are non-negotiable for me or things that are thrust so aggressively upon me, I can’t dodge them. So when Life presents me with an obligation, invitation, proposal, quagmire, and I find myself saying “I don’t have time” I have started to try to take a really hard look at what I’m saying, to really dig into the root.

Do I really not have time for it? Or do I just not want to make time for it? Or maybe it’s something deeper—maybe there’s a sense of inertia about a task that’s actually really important to me but I keep putting it off for tomorrow, tomorrow. Maybe my endless excuses are mummifying some real fear about the proposal or Universe’s invitation. Or maybe it is just that I don’t want to, which is also a perfectly fine reason. Phoebe handled this deftly in this memorable Friends moment.

Things that are paying our bills and things that arrest us so dramatically we can’t look away or “be otherwise indisposed” typically find their way into the calendars of our daily lives. I think of my family and friends with children—they are always taking care of them, they always have time for them.

This honesty of vision, of looking at life and realizing what you allow in and what you actually devote time to, can be an awakening.

When we draft a pie chart representing our daily spend in Time of all the things we’re treating as non-negotiable, versus the things that we feel deeply should be non-negotiable but don’t seem to make it onto the daily pie chart—this is a moment to really question things and dig in. Why isn’t it on the daily pie chart? Why is it suspiciously absent and how can we get it on there?

The Way of Three Artists on How to Handle Time and Art

Poet Katie Peterson: Any Means Necessary

My friend, former colleague and hero Lara Ehrlich, author of the story collection Animal Wife, is also the one-woman mastermind behind the podcast series Writer Mother Monster. In the series, she interviews successful female writers who are also mothers. The question of finding time and energy for writing and children is an important one in the show.

As I was driving through the Whites a few months ago, I tuned in to one of the episodes—her interview with poet Katie Peterson. When asked how she balanced motherhood and writing Peterson replied:

You don’t balance them. You unravel. You do it by any means necessary.

While the seeker of tactical how-tos might have heard that and been disgruntled, I heard it and thought—that sounds like the most honest answer you can have. We can fuss and plan and manage time and complain but at the end of the day, do the thing by whatever means necessary.

Musician and Maverick Jack White: ThisThingCalledaDeadline

One of the most liberating tools to use time to your advantage is that amazing and powerful and pesky as hell thing called a deadline. I was literally set free by Jack White when I watched this interview with him and bandmate Meg about using deadlines and other assorted constraints to force creativity, and use working within boxes to force creative output. He says:

Book only four or five days in the studio and force yourself to record an album in that time. Deadlines and things make you creative, but opportunity and telling yourself you’ve got all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette you want, anything you want, that just kills creativity.

The idea that imposing constraints on yourself—whether it’s a color palette, a set of tools, a budget or a (gasp) deadline—can actually make you more creative and make you more productive—that notion felt important and essential to impose on myself. That’s still a work in progress, but I return to this principle over and over and am currently trying to instill that in my daily writing work.

Writer Cheryl Strayed: From the Ground Level

Cheryl Strayed wrote beautifully on the need to put all your BS aside and do the work. Her beautiful essay, Write Like a Motherf*cker, written during her time as an advice columnist for The Rumpus is an uncushioned mandate to get over your limitations and your woes and your fretting and get your work done. With her signature tough love, she writes:

We get the work done on the ground level. And the kindest thing I can do for you is to tell you to get your ass on the floor. I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to. The only way you’ll find out if you “have it in you” is to get to work and see if you do.

My takeaway from the three of these wise people’s words is this: Don’t be so precious about your art. Whether it’s giving yourself a deadline, getting scrappy and resourceful and hiding in the closet or crawling onto the floor, we’ve got to work with the time we have and we’ve got to work by any means necessary. We’ve got to do our work, put it out there, brush the dust off and move on.

None of these artists recommended the new time management app or some sort of mystical, magical process. They recommended getting out of your own way and just doing it.

As a bonus artist talking Time, work and systems, I highly recommend Tim Ferris’s interview with Jerry Seinfeld. It’s wide ranging but they cover his extremely predictable and powerful system of working.

In the next and final part of this series on Time, we’ll take an expansive look at time, winding from an email I received from my cousin years ago as she approached a milestone birthday to the idea of seasons of life to the notion that time’s not real.

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