Feel Better/Write More: The Joys of Time Tracking for Writers

I can be a bit of a numbers nut. I keep stats for script submissions, writing income, and lots of other things. But one of the most important things I track is my time. I’ve been writing seriously for more than 25 years, and I have a busy life, with a house and kids and a spouse. I’m involved in many different groups and productions, which entails lots of meetings and rehearsals.  Which all impede on the one thing I need in order to write:

Time.

If I don’t actively make time for my writing, it doesn’t get done. But I’ve discovered that one of the most important habits for building discipline, and for not beating myself up too much when I feel like I don’t get enough writing done, is tracking my time.

Lots of writers feel constantly frustrated, because they don’t get as much written as they want to. But my first question to those writers is: how much time do you actually spend writing? Most of them don’t know. Which means, maybe they’re wasting time, or maybe they don’t have as much time to write as they think they do. The one thing I do know is that complaining won’t get that next script or novel written. Writers need to be realistic about what they actually should be accomplishing.

If you only spend 2 hours a week writing, that’s not nothing. That’s 100 hours a year. Which is enough to write some short stuff, or maybe a draft of a full-length play (or more).  But, remember it’s going to take you a year to get that written. And you’re not going to write two novels, or a whole bunch of new plays plus rewrites.

My goals this year is to spend 400 hours of ass-in-the chair writing time.  (I count journal writing, because that’s writing practice. More about that in another post.). That should be enough time to create the projects that are important to me. I will probably spend another 800-1,000 hours on other parts of my writing life.  I also track time spent reading for work (not recreational reading and not project research), meeting/rehearsal/teaching time, marketing/admin time, and time I spend on theater ecosystem/volunteer work (like the New England New Play Alliance).

I also track my various side jobs/projects, which are sometimes farming or fixing up my old house.  It helps me to know how much balance I’ve got in my life.

Isn’t it a pain in the ass to do so much tracking?  The answer is a definite No. I use a simple excel spreadsheet that I open it at the start of every work day, and I close it at the end of the day. Whenever I move on to a major new task, I just open the window, and enter my starting time and expected end time.  When I finish that task, I update the end time.

 (I really do more than just write in my journal.)

There are a few reasons why this habit is especially effective:

• It makes me focus on one task for a certain block of time. Shifting back and forth between projects, minute-to-minute is not a productive way to work.
• By entering the end point when I start, it creates a sense of self accountability—the mere process of writing down that I’m going to work for one hour on my play puts me on the hook. I’ve made a commitment to sit at the desk and work on that manuscript. Going back and having to enter a lesser number is demoralizing, so I’d rather just do the work. I find that if I’m modest about my initial goal, I will often work past my expected end-time—so if I pledge to write for one hour, once I get going I can’t stop, and suddenly it’s two hours.  
• I can see whether I'm really doing my job.
• It allows me to set specific goals, that are useful whether I'm outlining, drafting, or revising. Many writers set productivity goals around pages or words per day, which works great for writing first drafts. But what about early stages, when you just need to think and outline and node? What about revisions? Tracking time is a more universal measure of your writing efforts.

Some of you might say this is too much trouble. I can only suggest that you give it a chance and try to make it a habit.

Others might say that having a time sheet feels too much like I’m doing a “job” and that's icky.  The tricky thing about working for yourself as an artist is that you have no one to answer to.  The external rewards for the work are often very far off, if they come at all. No one is there to make you do this, and no one really wants to hear you complain. You have to be your own boss/producer/editor/publisher/taskmaster.

The other advantage of tracking is that you start to get a sense of how long it actually takes you do stuff. And how long you are capable of working on a given project at a time. My wife will tell you that I am notoriously bad at estimating how long it will take me to do a household project—say replacing a light fixture. Should be simple—half an hour! Two hours later, I’m just finishing up.

That’s okay when you’re puttering around the house. But what about if someone wants to commission you to write a play? Do you have enough time to complete the commission?  How much should you charge?  You need to know how long it takes you to write something.

And you also need to have a sense for how long you can write at a time. Is two hours your upper limit?  I find that 3-4 hours of solid writing time is pretty tiring, so I plan for creative work in the mornings, and then admin/marketing after lunch. If you work a day job or have small kids, you shouldn't arrange your schedule to give you one 8-hour block of writing time every week or month, when you can't write for longer than 3 hours.

I hope some of you will give this a try, and let me know if it works. Also, if you'd like a blank writing timesheet, I'm happy to e-mail you a blank copy of my excel template.

Just for kicks, I’m going to see how many hours I spent on various writing projects (I’ve been tracking writing time since 2010.  (I have a series of annual blog posts where I write about the numbers.)   

Here's how my overall time has been spent over the past few years:

2016: 1,223 hours (416 writing/28 reading/438 rehearsing/274admin/67 New Play Alliance+873 home renovation
2015:  1,035 hours (262 writing/52 reading/295 rehearsing/303 admin/123 New Play Alliance) + 561 on moving and house renovations
2014:  1,426 hours (452 writing/109 reading/342 rehearsing/396 marketing/127 New Play Alliance) + 130 hours farming.
 2013:  996 hours (394 writing/308 rehearsing/294 marketing)  + 902 hours farming
2012:  896 hours.  (386 writing/278 rehearsing and meeting/231 marketing)   + 734 hours farming
2011: 818 hours.  (I didn't break out rehearsals from desk writing time in 2011).

I just put together a big spreadsheet of hours for each of my projects over the past 7 years.

(Click here to see the PDF.)

Here are numbers for a few specific projects:

Full-length Plays:  (this is writing time only, not rehearsal time in workshop/rehearsal)

Chore Monkeys:    95 hours

Blood on the Snow: 145

Distant Neighbors: 151

Drift:  77 hours 

Fire on Earth: 150  (it was more, but my data stops at 2010)

Flight:  180  (this includes workshop time)

Lost in Lexicon: 96

None but the Best: 134

Short plays generally take me 3-7 hours to write.

Novels:

Steering to Freedom:  680 hours

Moving:  91 (revisions only)

The Secret of Spirit Lake:  125 (revisions only)

Keep in mind, this is time at the desk time, not the additional noodling and walking around the neighborhood time that goes into a project. Short plays look like they don't take very long to write, but I'll often think about them for many hours before I sit down and actually write them.

Thoughts after compiling all this info:

• It reminded me that I work on a LOT of projects. At least 38 projects over the past 7 years, of all lengths.
• I made a grid of all projects, over the years. It's interesting how many years it takes to craft a full-length play. Typically, I put time into them over a 3-4 year span.
• History and research intensive projects take a long time. Steering to Freedom is a Civil War novel, and at 680 hours, it took about 2 solid years worth of my writing time. (I worked on it over a span of more than 6 years).
• Keep in mind that even if a full-length play takes a 150 hours, I'm lucky to get 15 hours per week on a single project. So that's 10 weeks worth of work. And I am typically working on 2-3 projects at once. Which is why it sometimes feels like it takes a long time to finish a piece.

Let me know if you try any of these tracking techniques. Or if you do, what kind of numbers you find. How long does it take you to write play?  A novel?

Balancing Act

Balance.  That's the trick in any writer's life--how do I balance the need and urge to write and attempt to have some sort of career, with the rest of life?  Now that I've begun farming, that balancing act has gotten a little trickier.  In some ways, adding farming to my life makes sense precisely because it provides a counterpoint to hours spent at a desk staring at a computer screen, or in a dark theatre at rehearsal.  Most of my farming time is spent outside, engaged in physical labor, all while solving some very specific physical puzzles--how do I grow the most vegetables possible, in a specific plot of land, in the amount of time afforded by daylight and my energy and budget.  And even more important, it helps me more fully experience the world and meet new people (so I have more to write about).

But in adding this new avocation to my life, the question arose--would it crowd out writing and theatre?  In my ideal life, I would love to spend half of my year on farming and half of it writing.  Theoretically, farming has the potential to work this way, as long as I decide not to extend my growing season with greenhouses and other techniques.  I can get crops in the ground in April and stop farming in October, and spend the rest of the time on art.

This arrangement is not likely to pay a living wage.  Of course, neither writing plays or farming full time is likely to make that happen.  Theoretically splitting my time between writing and farming will slow my writing career.  I might write less and get less of my work published and produced.  That's a tradeoff I'd have to consciously choose, much as I knew that becoming a father would make me write less, but also lead to a more fulfilling life (I'm glad I made the choice I did).

I'm a numbers guy, as many of you know.  For a while, I've been trying to track the time I spend writing and marketing my work.  This year, I tracked my time even more closely than ever, trying to understand how this writing/farming split might work.  As the end of the year nears, here's how I've spent my time:

Writing (actual writing and research):  386 hours  (my goal was 400.  Just missed it!)

Rehearsals, Meetings & Productions of my work:  274 hours

Marketing (including submissions, networking, admin, blogging):  231 hours


For an entire writing career time of about 891 hours.



And for farming (including field work, planning, marketing, classes, etc.):  734 hours

Driving to our farm (which is about 45-60 minutes from home):  191 hours


For writing I did not track commuting time (but perhaps I should), but I went to about 100 meetings, mostly in town, and that would still add up to another 100 hours, by bike, T, and car.


So if I were to include commuting and travel time, I spent about 1,000 hours on my writing stuff, and about 925 on farming.  (All of these are under-reported a bit, especially marketing, e-mail, and web time.)

Oddly enough, last year, when I tracked actual writing time and rehearsal time together, I spent about 600 hours on both, and an additional 217 hours on marketing.   That means that this year, even though I added farming to the mix, I actually ended up writing a little bit more than I did before.  Which gets back to the old addage of, "if you want something done, ask a busy person."  Sometimes, if you want to do more, you just need to do more.  Obviously, there are a limited number of hours in the day, so I did cut things out, and I had a lot of help and forbearance from my family. 

The good news is that looking at these numbers makes me feel like I actually have a chance at finding this writing farm/balance that I'm searching for.  In 2013, I'll be farming twice as much land, but am hoping not to spend much more time doing it (I'm getting faster at doing stuff as I gain skills).

Do any of you track your writing time?  If so, how many hours to you spend actually writing?  Do you have time goals for the week, month, year?  I hope you'll comment and share.

Time, Time, Time (tricks I use, part 1)

In some ways, time (as opposed to energy or inspiration) is my biggest stumbling block when it comes to getting enough writing done.  "Enough" is subjective, of course.  In my case, "enough" means writing often and generating a number of pages where it feels like I have some chance of finishing something that can be produced or published.  The rest of life, outside of writing, often conspires (often with my consent) to keep me busy with meetings, projects, and other comings and goings. My writing time is while my kids are in school, 8am-2pm, but that day can disappear pretty quickly. 

People sometimes ask how I manage to get as much written as I do (this year I did major rewrites of two novels, a total rewrite of a full-length play, finished a draft of a new full-length play, and wrote some new short plays).  And then we commiserate about lack of time.  But the truth is, writing comes from sitting your ass in the chair and working.  There's no big secret.  That's how the pages and scenes start to add up.  They might stink, but at least they exist.

It's easy to complain about not getting enough done.  I do it.  Other writers complain to me that they just don't get as much written as they'd like.  There are various tricks I use to make sure I have a little less room for complaining and a little room for actual writing.

The first question to ask is:  how much time do you actually spend writing?  And I'll be a little loose with my definition of writing, in that I don't mean that it only counts if you're actually hitting the keyboard, but I do mean how much time do you spend working on a project at your desk, without checking e-mail, or surfing the internet or Facebook or Twitter?

Since I'm a numbers guy, this year I actually started keeping track.  Using a spreadsheet that I got from one of freelance gigs, I started entering my start and stop time for every writing session.  The times I recorded were for project time, and also journaling and research, not e-mails or internet time (though some research can be done online).

When I started using the time sheet, I discovered a useful trick.  I'd put in my start time as soon as I sat down at my desk and opened up all the various software or notebooks I wanted to use.  But I also wrote down my stop time right I when I started.    So if I planned to write for two hours and sat down at 8, I'd enter 10 as a stop time.  Simple.  But what I found was that the mere act of committing to paper (or bits, really) a concrete stop time, ensured I would sit there at least until 10, and not get up and wander around and get distracted.  Because I'd committed, it'd be painful to go back and edit the entry to show less time.  In fact, I found that not only did I almost always stay until my intended finish time, but I often went over by 15-30 minutes.  Once I'd set my ass in the chair for long enough, I'd generated momentum.

I'd wondered if this would be like a typical workout regiment, and start to evaporate after a few months, but for me, this has continued to work all year.

The nice thing about having a record of my writing time, is that I feel less guilty at the end of a month, and don't have much writing to show for it, because I can look at the spreadsheet, and say, "Hey, what were you expecting?  You didn't have many hours where you were available to actually write something."   Or I might realize that I've allowed myself to become distracted over the past week or so, and if I want to stop feeling ill (I feel a little sick when I don't write), then maybe I'd better cut those distractions out and actually spend some ass in the seat time at my desk.

So, since I started keeping track, in January, I've spent about 417 hours writing.  I don't know if that's good or bad, enough or not enough.  I wrote a lot this year (as I mentioned above) and a lot of the reason is that I spent hundreds of hours actually writing.  I don't have 52 available work weeks a year, but I'd guess that I do have about 40.  So that means I've spent an average of 10 hours per week doing actual writing.  Not even as much as a half time job, but I do a lot of other stuff, too.  And I put a lot of hours into things related to my writing, like meetings, readings, seeing plays, watching movies, reading books, sending out submissions, etc.  In my ideal life, I think I'd probably like to write about 20 hours per week, 4 hours of actual writing time per day, 40 weeks per year, for 800 hours.  For now, I don't know if that's quite within my reach.  I think for next year (we are almost at the season of resolutions, after all), I'd like to be a lot closer to 600 hours of writing time, though I'll be satisfied with anything over 400 hours again.


I recently read an interesting book, The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau, and in it, he mentions author Jim Collins, who wrote From Good to Great.  Collins carefully tracks his working time into three categories—creating and researching, teaching, and other.  His goal is to spend 50% on creating, 30% on teaching, and 20% on everything else.  He tracks all of this obsessively and turns down a lot of offers for speaking gigs, etc.   I like that way of breaking it down.  Something for me to consider.

How many hours per day/week/month/year do you write?  Do you keep track?

Just for kicks, I'll post a blank version of the time sheet that I use (though it's really easy to make your own, of course.  There's nothing remarkable about this, except that it fills in the day of the week by itself).  You can download it here.

Time Matters

Time and energy. To me, as a writer, those are the resources that I'm always trying to maximize (I suppose creativity and money fit in the list somewhere, too).

Once the kids got out of school at the end of June, I found a pretty good writing groove by waking up at 5am and working until they woke up. (Okay, not every day, and some mornings it was 5:30...) This usually got me 2+ hours of very concentrated writing time. I love writing first thing in the morning, because I don't have the cares of the day swirling in my mind yet. (By the end of the day, even by mid-morning, my brain is firing in a million different directions).

I had a pretty productive month revising my new novel, doing major rewrites of five or six chapters.

Now, starting yesterday, the kids are in camp for the next four weeks. I was pretty excited about this and the idea of a block of time every day for writing (no need to get up at 5am, right?).

The reality is that the chunk of time is a little smaller than I thought. My son has to catch his bus at 8, and then I take my daughter to art class, which lasts from 10-2, then it's time to pick up my son from the bus at 4. 10-2 is a nice four-hour block. Except for the walk to and from art class (deduct 15-20 minutes). And lunch (deduct 15-30 minutes--usually closer to 30, because I read tiny bits of the Sunday paper). This still leaves a good three-hour block, which is a luxury, I know.

But the tricky part is that a block of time with no kids around strongly attracts meetings, errands, chores, e-mails, house projects, etc. (Any parent will confirm this for you.) It's a common phenomenon for people to quit their day jobs to write, and then all of a sudden find they spend less time actually writing than they did before. (I'm sure this syndrome has a name.)

Luckily, I'm used to working at home, but this week has already shown me that I need to be more careful and protective of that small block of time. If I don't make a conscious effort to stay focused, especially starting so late in the day, I'm sunk. Just like for the 5am sessions, I need to clear off the desk, shut down the e-mail program, turn off the internet browser, and force myself not to check them for the duration (I rarely succeed at this for 3 1/2 hours, but I can make it for two hours).

By the time camp is over, I should have the system, schedule, and discipline in place (and then will need to start a new regimen).

((Big bonus for me--this weekend I have a getaway to the Cape with my playwrights' group at the house of a close friend. I try to go into these weekends with a strong plan for what I'm going to write/revise--otherwise those big gaping blocks of 4-5 hours of writing time are incredibly intimidating.))

tick tock, tick tock

I can feel summer vacation breathing down my neck. The kids only have three and a half more days of school, so writing time is about to get pretty scarce until August, when they have day camp. I'm actually pretty disciplined about finding the time to write, especially if I'm deep into a project (and I am now, smack in the middle of a major rewrite of my new novel). Usually that means getting up at 5am and writing for 90 minutes, not much time for screwing around. I might try also getting in one night per week, at the library or something. It's finding time for the other stuff, the marketing and networking, that gets tough during school vacation.

Even if I don't get much work done, hopefully we'll have fun (if I can keep the two of them from driving each other crazy, and me along with them. Ah, the joys of sibling rivalry. Such sympathy I have for my parents these days. )