I need more time. Sadly, I’m limited to 24 hours in a day, experienced at the rate of one minute per minute, as everyone else. (This government-mandated assault on my circadian rhythm aside. Spring forward, the fleshy part of my upper thigh!)
So, if I can’t get more time by breaking the laws of physics, how do I get more crammed into the time I have? Ah, there’s the clarification: I don’t need more time, I need more brain.Â
Well, that one’s easier. First, as soon as I finish this, I’m off to attempt sleep. Because as paradoxical as it feels, getting enough sleep and scheduling downtime – rest – does produce more brain than grinding through. (It still feels like rest should be in the category of “four-letter-words”, but it is necessary.)
Then there’s proper nutrition. As Doc Nik wisely says: “If you don’t need supplements, they’re snake oil. If you do, they’re magic.” Consider your circumstances and act accordingly. I try to do so with mine.
Attention paid to the following two has a sneaky added benefit, for most humans, of a much stronger immune system… so as time consuming as it is to do so, it helps prevent losing weeks to illnesses. I know, it’s really difficult to see the benefit of the disasters you didn’t have… but an attitude of gratitude never hurts.
Then there are hacks like forcing your body to relax and your seized fascia to move… as I told the massage therapist who was convincing my right shoulder that it really wanted to operate to original design specs, physical therapy and massage are names for different ranges of the same spectrum. (And yoga is a self-inflicted form of physical therapy’s bodyweight exercises and stretches, wrapped in fancy exotic names so we’ll swallow it whole without having to admit we’re broken.)
But as I’m getting better and the brain’s coming back online, I found I still wasn’t coming up with a solution to the need to rewrite the fight scene. So, time for the emergency hack: force myself to stop taking up the spare cycles with other things, so it’s free to concentrate on fiction.
So I deleted all social media off my phone.
In the next week, I finally started reading fiction again (I did leave the kindle app), then picked up a podcast I’d stopped over a month ago, and then…
Chopped 200 words, edited the rest, and rewrote the last half of the chapter to try to fill in several of the missing pieces, then switch POV’s and wrote another chapter to fill in the rest from the other character’s POV. The solution wasn’t to try to skip too much trying to rush the plot, as I’d done. It wasn’t to cram everything in one chapter, as I’d been trying to do. It was to flesh it out, make it twice as long, and punt a third piece down the road to form a chunk of motivation the next time the character sees those people again… but in the meantime, they’re going to be busy while they’re out of sight.
Time spent on social media, even if it’s “just” a few minutes here and there, is time I can’t get back…. and it’s brain cycles not spent resting, or gathering ideas, or focusing on the problems that matter and I can affect.
So, just like resting works no matter how I don’t like it, turning off the search for the next dopamine hit, counterintuitive as it may seem, works too.
What else do you do, to get more time or brain?
Mad Genius Club 
5 responses to “Those pesky 24 hours”
When I lost all my (lifetime) excess weight subsequent to chemo and “seizing the momentum of weight loss”, I reveled in glorious “normal physical fitness” for the first time in my life, and that has stuck with me now into my 70s. I expect that to persist to the end now (barring disease or a broken bone) — quite unexpectedly.
And a good thing, too, since my genetic ticking time-bomb of mental impairment up one line (father, aunt, grandfather, grandmother, great-grandfather (with some related colorful suicides (in front of a train, walking off a grain elevator)) has finally begun to manifest as cognitive impairment. What the official diagnosticians and their long delays in confirmation don’t allow for is that some of us can watch it happen from the inside quite clearly, even if it takes a year to get basic medical confirmation. We can even make a morbid game out of it (how many work-arounds can you come up with for not maintaining a grasp on two memory items at once?). Happily, “muscle memory” remains apparently unaffected, and I’m now working on using my computer desktop (while I can still set such things up) as a place to train my hand for answers: e.g., “Where do I keep that file with the notes in it” — pointing to the reminder write-up icon stashed in a particular invariant location on the desktop”. (This really does work. I recommend the muscle memory hook. The problem isn’t the task itself, but where does it start.)
And the reason I indulge in this TMI (apologies), is to endorse the “get as much sleep as you possibly can” message above. It has an obvious and immediate impact on the clarity of your brain (and thus everything else), and in the absence of effective medical treatments for whatever ails you, it may be the only thing that can. Rearrange your daily task schedule to move brain demands to earlier in the day. Spend some time tracking your sleep, and explore various simple aids (melatonin helps for me).
For non-medical aids, find ways compatible with your own psychology to avoid anxiety at bedtime, or when trying to go back to sleep. For me, that means things like “do the long-delayed office rearrangements” or “write the damned will, already!” Take the time now, while you still can. It’s one less anxiety to bother you at night. We moved into our current tiny settler’s cabin more than 10 years ago, and I am finally re-rationalizing the arrangement of the place in which I spend most of my time (office) (it’s amazing how much tech gear becomes worthless over a decade and can be trashed). The anxiety about “uncompleted tasks” improves, and I get the added benefit of setting up the muscle memory “hook” for “now where do I keep the spare folders?” while I can.
Most of the time, I can get away with an early lunch instead of a breakfast, so that’s been helpful. The Focus Plant app (which basically locks you out of your phone apps for an agreed upon time) is kind of fun.
Knowing your story tends to cut down on the guesswork when you sit down to actually type on it, so mentally fiddling with it in spare moments when you can’t write and scribbling your conclusions into a notebook or something can be helpful. See this essay: https://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html
When I plan things (code, writing, etc) it’s wonderful and beautiful but it’s always a struggle when I have to make that wonderfulness concrete.
I hear you and have the same problem, but for me if I don’t go into a writing session with some idea of what it’s about (doesn’t have to be the whole story, just the bit I’m writing then) my brain just wanders off and I do something else.
Then there are spouses who think you have 48 hours every day…
I’ve noticed that as I’ve aged, sleep is more important. If I don’t get enough sleep, my brain doesn’t work on autopilot, and unless I’m very careful, I’ll say weird things.
I’m hoping you (Dorothy) can get enough sleep because I really enjoy your stories (and recently reread all of them) and want to read more! (OK, I’m not sure about the steamy romance WIP 😳)