In his book Four Thousand Weeks Oliver Burkeman points out how ridiculously short our average life span is. He explains how pretty much every method to manage that amount of time is bound to fail. The reason? Our lives are limited and the amount of stuff that needs to be done isn’t. Time management is premised on the false idea that if we were only efficient enough, we could reach a moment when we’ve answered every email, returned every call and completed every task. Like a mirage, the illusion of free time hovers just over the horizon, driving us forward.
Burkeman points out that our efforts at time management are little more than a futile attempt at battling our own finitude. Since we think of time as something external to us, we make every effort to “use it well,” to avoid wasting it. For writers “using time well” is a continuous battle. When progress is measured in words on the page, every use of time that doesn’t generate those words seems wasted. Going for a walk when I’m a few thousand words behind my goal feels like an unaffordable luxury. No matter how often I tell myself that the mental efforts of sorting out plots and nailing down character traits are necessary work that will result in better words on the page at a later point, the word count at the end of the week remains to true measure of progress.
My personal relationship with time is colored by my innate laziness. When I was ten, my parents had to make a decision as to my future schooling. Back then, the German education system was very stratified. After four years of elementary school, parents had to decide which track their kids should pursue, blue-collar, white-collar or university. Thankfully my parents decided that all their kids should pursue the university track. When my father spoke with my fourth grade teacher about my transfer, he was baffled, saying, “Aber da wird doch etwas verlangt.” Loosely translated, he said, “But they expect something there.”
I didn’t know about his comment until much later. By then it was somewhat of an inside joke because that teacher had seen something in me that I only became aware of much later, my desire to get by with the least amount of effort. I managed okay for a while until eleventh grade when we got different teachers and my carefully constructed tricks to avoid work failed miserably. I flunked several major subjects and had to repeat the grade.
Throughout my professional career, the idea that I was coasting along rather than putting in solid efforts remained a niggling thought in the back of my head. Would that article have been better if I had done more research? Would class discussion have been better if I had prepared more conscientiously rather than winging it? Would the conference paper have been better if I hadn’t waited until the last minute to cobble it together? These notions weren’t my version of the “imposter syndrome,” that I was a fraud. I knew I did my job as well as the next person. But I had a genuine sense that amazing insights were just over the horizon, attainable with more effort.
Since I began writing crime fiction, I’ve tried to change that pattern. Every weekday, my phone dings at 8:15 am to remind me that I have fifteen minutes to get by butt in the chair. On the surface it’s worked. I’ve published six novels in the past six years. They’re okay and one of them even won an award. Nevertheless, that voice is still there, telling me that I could write outstanding novels with just a bit more effort. I’m not alone in this. Patricia Highsmith wrote in her April 3, 1948, diary entry, “It [the writing] flows. Yet each day that goes by—where is the writing I wish to do? I feel it in me. Shall I be like those people without number who feel a destiny to write magnificent works one day?”
This is why Burkeman’s suggestions on how to deal with time and finitude resonated with me. He suggests that patience is a remedy for overcoming. His three principles of patience are concise: Develop a taste for having problems, embrace radical incrementalism, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.
As I digested these suggestions, I realized that I was doing well on the second principle. Getting my butt in the chair every weekday for several hours was the kind incrementalism necessary to tackle long projects. The first one is a little problematic. I don’t like to have problems, I don’t like being called upon for this or that task or obligation. I like my problems abstract, something I can deal with in my head, I’m a writer after all.
The last principle provided the real insight. Writing outstanding fiction isn’t a matter of adding loads of effort (although effort is certainly part of the equation). Writing unoriginal crime stories is the process of approaching originality. With each novel I am adding to the foundation upon which amazing ideas may eventually emerge. Will I live long enough to see that happen? Most likely not. Besides, the universe couldn’t care less if I wrote another novel. Still, striving to meet an abstract standard I will likely fall short of achieving isn’t a good way to spend the short time I have. Instead, living what Burkeman calls “a modestly meaningful life” means embracing patience in my concrete, finite life.
