How Long Things Take

I remember a stopwatch in my childhood. I think it belonged to my father, though I'm not actually sure. I got ahold of it one day and started timing how long it took me to do things I normally did. I was shocked to find most of my daily activities took a number of seconds, maybe a minute or two. That knowledge was heavy.

If you think about all the tasks of everyday life in terms of individual actions that take merely seconds each, the day seems to stretch on forever in a ridiculously overwhelming fashion. It takes so many seconds to type each sentence in this blog post, to get a glass of water, to put away the dishes from lunch in the dishwasher. 

Knowing that, too, can be a little intimidating. If it really only takes a few seconds to do things, what the hell am I doing all day?

I thought about that sort of thing last night when I really wanted myself to work on PARKER CLEAVES but I was really tired from a full weekend and doing some work for my job already. I set the stopwatch on my phone for fifteen minutes. I wrote until it went off. I haven't read it over yet. I don't know if it's good. Doesn't have to be -- it's a rough draft. It just has to exist so I can fix it. Thinking about all the little fifteen-minuteses, though, is as overwhelming as the first full day of a new job or a new baby -- wondering how you're ever going to get through so many seconds to the end of the day. That's what writing the rough draft feels like to me. 

I could accomplish so much more if I spent more time realizing how little time it actually takes to do almost anything.