Narration on this post is made possible by my ADHD Homestead Patreon supporters ????
Friends, my life has been a bit of a mess lately. My current novel manuscript will finally set sail for the copy editor on Monday. That is, as my grandmother used to say, barring anything unforeseen.
Well. As an adult human with a house and a child and a telephone, among other things, I cannot bar the unforeseen from my deep dark writing cave. The unforeseen can and has happened over the past couple months. And yet, I’ve still spent well over a hundred hours doing some really satisfying work on this manuscript.
This has required a feat of boundary-keeping I didn’t know I had in me. My loyal readers will also note I am an adult human with ADHD. I have limited bandwidth. My focus and cognitive abilities can be fickle. I still haven’t grasped the depth of my inability to estimate how long a task will take. To revise a one-hundred-thousand-word manuscript three times over, on a deadline, required me to set some serious boundaries around distractions and non-writing obligations.
My ADHD has forced me to develop a lot of strategies for staying productive and, quite frankly, sane. However, most people tell me these strategies sound helpful for everyone. Spoiler alert: it’s because they are.
Strategies for fitting a writing or revising marathon into my life vary by season, but these four biggies saved me in this one:
Even if I think I have time, I tell people “I can do this, but not until after [my deadline].”
Example: a friend reminded me I am the social coordinator for our neighborhood babysitting co-op. Apparently I have been the social coordinator since 2019! Who knew? I suppose I did, at some point.
It was fair for this friend to request I set up a get-together to rouse the co-op from pandemic dormancy. It also wouldn’t take long. All I had to do was poll the group for availability, set a date, and create a Facebook event. Easy, right?
Except I (sort of) know my inability to comprehend how much time this would actually take. The request came two weeks out from a big April 1 deadline. I was revising my manuscript to incorporate developmental editing feedback. Everything was taking ten times longer than I expected. Every non-writing “yes” felt like a risk at that point.
It felt silly to defer such a little task, but I did it. I told my friend “I’m happy to coordinate this, but I can’t devote any attention to it until April 4 [the Monday after my Friday deadline]. If that’s okay I’ll put a reminder on my calendar to put something out to the group that week.”
Bam. This made me feel wise and powerful. I am not always good with boundaries. I say yes too easily. This success inspired me to give similar responses to others. Even the small stuff adds up, and clearing my plate of everything unnecessary left me the space I needed to write.
I archive email newsletters I enjoy without reading them ????
I subscribe to a number of excellent email newsletters. Someday I will write a post solely about these newsletters, and why you should read them.
However, like The New Yorker, I simply cannot read every issue. I’ve always felt like a slow reader. Regardless of how true this actually is, reading anything takes a nonzero amount of time and reading email is something I usually do during my work day.
Not in March I did not. Not in April, either. As much as it has pained me, I’ve tried my best to archive as many email newsletters, Reddit and Twitter digests, and other non-personal email unread.
I’m missing things. Things I would’ve liked to read. I hate this. It’s hard. But it’s the best way I’ve found to stay on top of my email inbox and carve out more writing time when I’m on a deadline.
I’ve learned when I naturally do my best writing work, and I protect that time.
When I left my job-job in 2013, I had to create my own work structure for the first time since my early teens. Through self-observation I learned I naturally gravitate toward writing after lunch.
This routine still works well for me. If I start shortly after lunch, I can wrap up my writing time before I pick my kiddo up from school in the afternoon.
If I start shortly after lunch. In non-deadline times, it’s easy to tell myself I should “catch up” on other work. “It’s just one day,” I tell myself. And yet this is how we writers end up with no time to write.
On these recent deadlines I tried to remain strict about wrapping up other work by lunchtime and reserving the afternoon for writing. On this week in late February, I did a good job:
Time of day matters because we all have natural rhythms. I know some authors who write after their kids go to bed at night, and some who set an alarm for 5:00 a.m. to write first thing. I’ve tried both and neither feel right. The work comes harder, and therefore takes longer. It’s more efficient to learn when I work best and concentrate my time there.
Not everyone can do this, I know, but I’m a big believer in working with your brain and your natural inclinations whenever possible. It’s an ADHD thing. Working against our brains is way harder if we’re lucky, but often downright impossible. But even if you can work against your brain, why do it if you don’t have to?
In times of deadline strife, start with the deadline work first thing.
I must confess, I recently experienced several episodes of abject fear I would fail to meet a deadline. Deadlines, ironically, are my superpower. I may not know how long anything takes, but damn if I can’t figure out a way to make it take exactly the length of time I have. This is not always healthy, but it’s part of my identity as a Reliable Person Who Meets Deadlines.
In these times of fear and worry, I tossed my “ideal work time” concept and started my day with writing. Aside from initial getting-situated tasks and scheduled things, I got down to writing first thing and returned to it after lunch.
Did this cause emails to go unread? Non-essential projects to be neglected? It sure did. That’s actually the point. If I start the day with other stuff, I feel obligated to move those projects forward an inch or two. I respond to an email I could’ve deferred. Maybe I decide I have time to set up that social event I mentioned earlier. In other words, I let other tasks creep in even if they could’ve waited. This means less writing time.
If anything truly couldn’t wait, I fit it in later in the day, maybe even after school pickup when my focus really goes out the window. In this way I set aside almost the entire work day for writing. This is unsustainable, but it doesn’t need to be sustainable because I can clean up the mess after my deadline.
A deadline isn’t forever
For me, it’s important to remember how cyclical writing work is. I recently had a week between two deadlines when I actually couldn’t work on my manuscript. I had to wait for feedback. Instead of getting into a new draft, I used this time to catch up on my email inbox and schedule a guy to give me a quote for painting my back fence. In a “normal” time, I have to think about balance and sustainability, but those rules go out the window under a high-stress deadline–and that’s okay.
My ideal work week is about thirty hours. The week of my biggest recent deadline, I spent almost twenty four hours writing, or seventy five percent of my total work time. This is obviously ridiculous and exhausting and a mess but also okay because hey, it’s one week. Just don’t make them all like that.
Leave a Reply