The Timing’s The Thing

Where do you find the time?

How do you make time for that?

As someone pointed out, these are interesting questions because one cannot find any more time than there is in a given day. One cannot make more time either. There is a finite amount of time from minute to minute, hour to hour, and day to day. You get the idea.

What we have are choices. We get to choose how we use our time. I’m typing this as the television plays in the background and my two and a half year old gives me the side eye. (I’ll accept my award for Mother of the Year anytime now.) I honestly don’t know how long I have until he notices I’m tapping away at the computer and he wants to investigate. Did you think these posts got written in one sitting? I never plan on that happening.

I know I’m not you and I have no idea what it’s like to have a child with a disability or work full-time or more than one job or care for an ailing parent. You’re right, I don’t know what any of that is like. But I do know something about busy people. Busy people know exactly how much time they have. They can take a knife to their schedule and, with surgical precision, carve up the time they have to make things happen.

What kind of things? I don’t know. Anything really. Baking cookies for their kids’ class. Helping a friend with a project. Sitting down and writing their memoir. They know their constraints and they commit. And then they make things happen. If it works, they do it again. If not, they analyze what happened, readjust and learn. Then they do it again. And again. On repeat.

I struggle with time. We have a schedule but there are days, like today, where I would have paid to not have to drag myself to the gym. Did I? Pay? Or did I go to the gym? I went to the gym. It was something to do. I’m glad I did even though the regular instructor wasn’t there for the class I was going to take, but it worked out. What do you know? Change can be good.

As the keeper of the schedule, not only do I know what our time constraints are, but how to move around them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but I have to keep trying if I want to use the time that I have to my advantage. Writing takes time. I’m just trying to carve out a chunk of time to do it.

Seriously, though, this all reminds me of a joke. It works well in print, too, so here goes.

What is the secret to comedy? Timing.