The Siren Call of Everyday Life

One of the greatest challenges writers face is being able to carve out time to write. Our lives and our attention get pulled in a hundred different ways, and before we know it, another day has slipped by with no writing. It's hard to resist the siren call of our everyday lives, with tasks that say to us: "I need your immediate attention."

As tempting as it would be to disappear for blocks of time, it just isn't reality for most of us. That's certainly true for me. Christmas is less than 2 weeks away. My son is home from college. I  have appointments and things I need to attend to.

Today was a case in point. I'm nearing completion of my term as associate editor for the journal Psychological Trauma. That means that I must finish reviewing my stack of articles before the end of the year. I spent about 4.5 hours doing just that. This task has to be completed online, and so as I worked, I received numerous emails from people I'm collaborating with on various research projects. Zhen has just finished analyzing data for our domperidone study. My friend Doug is looking at the family violence data in our Survey of Mothers' Sleep and Fatigue. I'm keeping track of the incoming articles for the next issue of Clinical Lactation. As much as I would like to check out from the world until my book is finished, the more  realize that it is impossible--and perhaps not even desirable.

So what should we do? Today, with a morning full of work on other projects, and only an hour and a half until I had to leave for an appointment, I decided to take my own advice: use those little blocks of time that are available throughout the day. When you are focused, it's amazing how much you can do. But without a conscious plan, it's incredibly easy to piss away the time and have nothing to show for it. Faced with this short amount of time, I started blocking out my chapters. I copied and formatted material from the first edition, added some of the new material I had written for other projects, and started to get a rough idea of where I would place sections of the book. I've been meaning to do this for months--and it felt great to finally do it.

I know I will face similar dilemmas on other days. And at some point, I really do need to stop writing and get caught up on email. But it's good to get going. And knowing that I would be blogging about what I did today kept me focused on the task at hand--and not finding something fun to read on my Kindle. :-)

More tomorrow. Thanks for listening.