Mercifully finite

Winter only feels like forever. (Image by Jan Haerer)

Because I am a huge nerd, I like to time my tasks using a stopwatch.

Well, it’s not just because I’m a huge nerd. It’s also because I struggle with executive functioning and I have a terrible sense of time.

In order to be able to gain any mastery over my days, I’ve had to accommodate these weaknesses, so I use external tools to compensate for my poor internal clock.

With a knowledge of how things take, I can create a plan that has some chance of matching reality. That bolsters my confidence and allows me to plan projects of higher complexity.

An additional benefit is that my resistance to certain types of tasks and projects is lowered. The time required for a given activity is not really “forever,” even if it seems that way. The time it takes is, in reality, mercifully finite. When I grasp this on an intellectual level, I will come around emotionally, too.

For example, I’ve recently learned that it takes three to four hours to fully clean and tidy my house if I’ve deferred much of my daily maintenance chores (like laundry and general picking up) to the weekend.

I didn’t realize this until I timed myself. I figured it took ten to twelve hours because the house never got tidy until Sunday night even if I spent what felt like the whole weekend on it. But it turns out that un-timed Casey takes a lot of breaks, gets distracted, works more slowly, and agonizes over the whole process. It was taking me twelve hours to do four hours of work.

I’ve noticed something similar when it comes to writing my blog posts. The actual time spent writing is only about 35 minutes. The rest of the time is spent drifting, daydreaming, and dawdling.

That’s fine — I usually block out ninety minutes for writing so that I have a buffer. However, the knowledge of how long the work takes is helpful on a few levels.

First, I can put effort into staying more focused if I would like to be more efficient.

But even if I don’t stay focused — if I lollygag and dilly-dally — I know that I will finish. I can even determine approximately when I will finish, given that even my most miserable writing experience will be complete in less than two hours. I know that if I just keep slogging, it will be over eventually — and eventually isn’t “someday,” but probably less than an hour from now. That is strangely motivating.

Having tackled the nebulosity of writing and household routines, I can then turn to even more nebulous activities, like writing an entire book or designing a course. Such projects can be measured in weeks or months, but it’s also useful to consider the number of hours. The hours are the part that I’m actually going to endure, distributed across those weeks and months. If I get a handle on them, I simply have to live through them, doing the predetermined tasks. When I get to the end, I will have accomplished the thing. And there will be an end.

For many years, I resisted assigning times to things, believing that it made me flexible and adaptable. As a piano and guitar teacher, I was used to human growth and development unfolding on its own timetable. Everything in its own time. Now I realize that my students might have also benefited from working toward specific milestones to help them focus and build momentum.

As for my own work, I can create success criteria that allow me to not only define when a given phase of a project is complete, but also to make it complete-able within a given time frame. For example, I can decide that a book is going to have fourteen chapters. Thus, I’ll have finished draft one when I’ve written those. It doesn’t have to stretch on for all eternity. It can be finite.

Keeping things vague can be soothing. It reduces pressure. But it also reduces the likelihood of the getting things done. I may not want to spend four hours cleaning my house, and I may not want to acknowledge that it will take four hours to do it. But if I want the clean house more than the blissful ignorance of “it will be done when it’s done,” I can make the time estimate and then make the time. Then, all that’s left is to do it. And once I get going, it’s not so bad.