Time Management: Where DOES the Time Go, Anyway?

Have you noticed that time seems to be going extinct? It goes away so fast that it has now become almost impossible to find, at least in the wild. I’m sure there are time zoos that still have a few hours in captivity…but where has all the free time gone?

It’s Friday already. Have I done much work this week? How? This week was never here!

Well, actually, you could argue that I have managed to get a few things done: edited and rejiggered a client’s new introduction; done the bookkeeping and wrestled the current stack of paper off the desk and into the file drawers; written a new chapter and roughed out the plot outline for the second novel in the Cottrite Chronicles (yeah: haven’t sold the first book and am already writing the second…talk about living in a fantasy world); fired a now-former client who thinks $6/page for developmental editing is “too much” (result of my bad call: I mistook her for one of the Singaporean Ph.D. students who have been pounding at our doors and gave her the cut-rate starving-student rate for the first stuff we did for her, and so now she thinks we should work for less than minimum wage); ascertained that the magazine-writing course will probably make.

It’s what I haven’t done that worries. Videlicet:

• Written a report to the membership of the Scottsdale Business Association on the outcome of yesterday’s meeting (huge!)
• Written and e-mailed a new calendar of speakers for SBA members
• Sent out a new press release for an upcoming choir event
• Written and published a round-up for FaM, not in what seems like for-freaking-EVER
• Updated and posted new material to the waiting Canvas shell for the maga-writing course
• Ridden herd on the 102 course
• Inserted new material in client’s memoir and made that work; figured out what portions of the MS to delete to bring length down to something even remotely publishable
• Billed clients in, yes, for-freaking-EVER
• Done any serious work toward learning how to market e-books
• Deleted outdated ads on FaM as requested weeks ago by a certain well-known advertising agent 🙄
• Written a decent personal-finance or stress management post for FaM since the memory of person runneth not to the contrary
• Lined up new leads for SBA members
• Figured out how to generate 12(!!) of those this year
• Rewritten SBA New Member packet
• Taken SBA lead form to Kinko’s and figured out how to get them to reproduce the things
• Printed and put together a badge for new SBA member
• Begun working on jewelry to donate to this fall’s Silent Auction (these things take time to make and need to be started now)
• Started buying stuff for New Pup
• Sat down and figured out how exactly I’m going to afford New Pup
• Informed art director that there’s something missing in the mock-up of the map I sent him two or three weeks ago. Yes. That would be a large river that extends several hundred miles. Ahem. And…uhm…oh well.
• Traipsed to the optometrist’s and picked up the new Vision System — four new pairs of glasses.
• Purchased new battery for MacBook before it’s too damn late!!!

It’s interesting how many items have to do with “figuring out.” This is not a task that accommodates itself neatly to my favorite time-management device, The List. It’s not very practical to schedule x number of minutes or hours for sitting down and staring at the wall while thinking through this or that scheme or challenge. In effect, thinking time has to be crammed into the interstices around tasks that require physical action. Really, it’s only physical, get-it-done-now items that can, in any practical way, go on a to-do list.

Today the only things that will get done, I expect, are

• the SBA catch-up tasks;
• the remaining work on the client’s book;
• and picking up the glasses.

While I’m out to get the glasses, prob’ly I should traipse to the Apple store and pony up another pile of dough to replace the laptop’s batteries. Trouble is, just now four (count’em, 4) projects are in progress on this thing, and I don’t relish having to close down every file associated with them. That would be sixteen files now standing open, none of which has to do with the SBA stuff that needs to happen today.

This weekend the maga-writing course presumably will have to go online, assuming none of the new enrollees have dropped since I last looked at the roster, and I’ve GOT to get the billing done. If any time is left around those, maybe I can choke out a round-up (endless apologies to beloved bloggers such as 101 Centavos, Evan at My Journey to Millions, the spectacular Donna at Surviving and Thriving and her doughty daughter at I Pick Up Pennies, the globe-trotting NZ Muse, and the ever-entertaining Money Beagle, Planting Our Pennies, and Revanche at A Gai Shan Life…not forgotten!)

And so, to work…