March 13, 2012
Last night I participated in a time management workshop for artists.* The last exercise was to fill in the blanks on a weekly planner, hour by hour, day by day for a week.
I started with what I knew for sure:
- Good Morning America five mornings a week (Monday through Friday) followed by social media (time for e-mails, Facebook, Linked-In, etc.).-
- The Bachelor Monday evenings and Castle.
- Modern Family Wednesday evenings.
- The Mentalist Thursday evenings, sometimes.
- American Idol when I remember and Dancing with the Stars.
- Evening news beginning as early as 5 p.m. and continuing through 6:30.
- Later in the evening Nightline, more news, and Jimmy Kimmel.
- Reading or crossword puzzles before bedtime, bedtime as late as 12:30 p.m. or 1 or 2 a.m.
- Boyfriend allotted 8-16 hours on some weekends.
- 8 hours one day a week for shopping with my sister
- Sunday afternoons for girlfriends or mentoring/consulting.
- 8-16 hours a week for literary editing (when I have a contract)
- 30 hours a week for job hunting. Squeezed into that 30 hours workshops, such as Time Management for Creative People, blogging, etc. to help me become self-employed (i.e. earning a liveable income as writer/teacher/mentor/literary editor) by July (these 30 hours overlap with the morning social media hours, so basically 20 hours or less)!
- 15-20 hours a week for cooking and eating!
- 7 hours some weeks for housecleaning
- -etc., etc., etc.
My “S.M.A.R.T.” goal created for the Time Management for Creative People workshop was to have a draft of my memoir, Love Imagined, to my editor by July and to my publisher by September, yes, of this year, 2012. I wonder, what do I give up to find time to write? We were told not to borrow time from evening sleep time.
It will have to be the news, which is probably good. Perhaps I will not start and end so many days in a funk!
*Time Management for Creative People sponsored by Springboard for the Arts (http://www.springboardforthearts.org/about-us) and Hennepin County Libraries (http://www.hclib.org/pub/events/)
Sherry Quan Lee
