Less 15 minutes
My writing time has gone from an hour to forty-five minutes. There is always something going on: I'm late because I had to make lunch or eat breakfast and do the workout; the thingy didn't work; there was road construction. It doesn't really matter what it is. If you look at it from the outside and argued that there is a plan being carried out, but the goal isn’t to write, you might not be far from the truth.
15 fewer minutes
Then there is this blog. It calms me down to start writing about writing, even though in the world of writing dissertations, that does not count. By now we are at thirty minutes.
If I had a therapist, they would probably say, "Isn't that all part of it?" and "What would it feel like to tell yourself it's okay to blog a little to get started?"
And I would probably resist and dig in my heels and try to be even more productive by working harder.
Here's a complaint: Why can't I just work like everyone else does and get it over with? How come everyone else seems to just start the hour on time, make a goal, complete the goal, get a draft, and move on? And I'm talking about even in writing groups I join; I always feel like I'm the only one who starts flustered, distracted, totally ungrounded, disconnected, forgetting where I am starting, forgetting where I stored my last draft, finding 3 versions of the same paragraph I wrote six months ago, and so on.
15 fewer minutes
The next fifteen minutes is spent figuring out where I am in the writing. Hopefully I left myself a note, or perhaps what I wrote the last time is readable enough for me to figure it out. [Note: I love it when I muse on something and carry it out immediately during a writing session].
15 minutes of writing
This leaves me with fifteen minutes to frantically write and meet a goal of say... 250 words [Note: Today was 269, baby]. The quality of those words is always questionable, but that's what I can do. I wonder if, instead of feeling like a complete failure, I looked at it like this:
1. I could have not written anything.
2. This is just where I'm at. If I want to be somewhere else, I can do something else.
3. This is the math: it takes me an hour to write for fifteen minutes. I can write for more time as long as I stack it on top of that writing time, but if I don't change anything else, this is what I can expect.
4. It takes me forty-five minutes to get over comparing myself to others, feeling lost, feeling unproductive, feeling guilty for every moment this infernal dissertation has been hanging around my neck and the loss of connection and so on… until finally I can appreciate what this process is giving me.
5. Like this blog. I ejoy doing this immediately and don’t need a warmup, perhaps because I remember that I know how to put words on a page. I also like feeling more emotionally regulated.
6. There is a book called, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day. Even though it's the smallest amount, I'm still doing a thing.
Let's write now...
