Where Does the Time Go?

On keeping track of things.

Hi everyone!

To my new subscribers, welcome! Thank you for joining our little community. You can always check out the archives to see if any past musings suit your fancy.

But time’s a ticking, so let’s get into it.

Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand, Six Hundred Minutes….

How do you measure a year? (In LO-OHHH-OH-OH-OH-OH-OH-OVVEE….)

Gen-X musical numbers aside, I’ve recently begun to take time more seriously. In my profession (and many others), time is money. The less time I take on an assignment, the higher the hourly rate, and the more room I have for other assignments, as well as other aspects of my life.

I’ve written about this before, mostly in the context of my chronic illnesses and how they affect my capacity.

The Final Steps

So if I want to make a living — not even a decent living, just a living — from my writing while also staying relatively healthy, I need to do so working fewer hours than most people. That means making the most of my time, and I can’t do that if I don’t know how long I spend on things.

[Brief pause as I suddenly remember to track my time writing this newsletter.]

So, yes. I’m tracking my time using a simple, free online tracker. Everything from each step of a journalism assignment to newsletter writing to critique groups and work I do for Amber Petty, a wonderful writer who now helps other writers get assignments with courses like her Pitching Hour.

I’ve only tracked two weeks, but I’ve already learned a lot. I’ve learned that I’m taking more time than I can afford for each assignment, even the ones that don’t pay very much. I’ve learned that I’m working more than I assumed I could — closer to 20 hours a week rather than the 10 I thought was all I could handle.

I’ve also learned when I tend to work. For instance, I talked about being a weekend worker in last week’s post, in line with rhythms I developed in graduate school and inspired by my love of watching sports. I also tend to have days where I focus on one big writing chunk, like Saturdays with my newsletter.

The Turn of the Leaves

But the best part about tracking my time has been realizing that I have a lot more time than I think. Even though I could — and have to — work faster, the reality is that 20 hours a week leaves me with 148 other hours to do other things. Giving myself a generous 9 hours of sleep a day, that’s still 76 hours.

Where does it all go? I haven’t started yet, but I’m considering tracking my non-work time as well. If I do, I’ll let you know what I find.

But I’m a bit wary. Last week felt easy. This week a little less so, in part because I was unusually busy and a curveball jolted me out of bed in the middle of the night to attend to it. (Everything’s fine, don’t worry!)

But so far this pattern feels familiar. I often have 2-3 great weeks of feeling like I’m doing All the Things, and then crashing hard. Two weeks where I barely have the energy to move, much less work. Endless YouTube viewing, that kind of thing.

(credit: alkimrey and Hyperbole and a Half)

It’s not exactly fatigue. I’m not too tired to get out of bed. But it is as though a sloth has suddenly possession of my body, and I’m not-moving at its glacial pace. I watch YouTube because I essentially lack the brainpower to process my own thoughts. The few that do manage to get through are usually of the “I should be doing….” variety.

I’m essentially in Sleep Mode. Quietly humming but not running any operations.

Will this happen to me next week? Or the week after? Have my two 20-hour weeks proved too much for me to handle?

Well, we’re about to fuck around and find out. I’ll keep you posted.

The Second Sleep

Whenever I track time like this, I think about how unnatural our modern division of day and night are. (And how much I viscerally hate the idea of blocks of time carved out on iCal and Google Calendar. I know it helps a lot of people, but those graphics are the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard to my eyes.) Thanks to electricity, we can stay up much later than our lightbulb-less predecessors. Or, more accurately, they could stay up — they just couldn’t do much of anything without light.

I honestly can’t fathom what true night is like. Even our darkest nights are polluted: out of 148,326,000 square kilometers of land on the Earth’s surface, we can only experience the dark skies of our ancestors on 160,000 square kilometers of them. That’s 0.1 percent. Light has ruined our ability to experience

On the first night of my sophomore year of high school, a storm knocked out our electricity. An ever (and over!) diligent student, I was determined to do my homework anyway. For 10th-grade English (the American lit year), our first assignment was excerpts from Of Plymouth Plantation by Mayflower passenger and future Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford. I set up a bunch of candles on the glass-topped desk in my mother’s office (it felt safer than my crowded desk with no protective surface), opened my giant purple-covered anthology, and tried to read by candlelight.

Bradford was a tedious read for a fifteen year-old, even one who loved literature.¹ But I felt rather cool reading by the same type of light this boring-ass Puritan pilgrim had access to while writing it. It was a challenge, because even lighting multiple candles couldn’t reach the level of brightness of my regular desk lamp — or even a cheesy flashlight. But I managed, and it might have made the experience a little more interesting, given how uninspired I was by the actual text.

Modern light also fucks with our sleep. If you can barely see, you’re just going to head to bed. What else are you going to do? The darkness is even its own kind of lullaby — as long as you’re not envisioning monsters lurking just outside your door.

We now know that people used to have two sleeping periods, or biphasic sleep patterns. They would fall asleep around, say, 9 p.m. and then wake up in the middle of the night — maybe around midnight, maybe around 2 a.m. — and piddle around for a bit. Maybe they’d go check on their animals. Maybe they’re sitting up talking, combing some wool or peeling rushes for lights. And, after a few hours, they’d go back to bed again.

Nowadays, of course, we call that insomnia and do everything we can to prevent it.

The Hours

In my historical novel-in-progress, The Ordinaries, life at the Benedictine priory at Durham Cathedral is ruled by the hours, also know as the Divine Office. Every day, monks and nuns across Roman Catholic Christendom prayed as much as eight times a day at regular times:

• Matins (nighttime)

• Lauds (early morning, still dark)

• Prime (first hour of daylight)

• Terce (third hour of daylight)

• Sext (noon — often High Mass)

• Nones (ninth hour)

• Vespers (sunset)

• Compline (end of the day)

According to Geoffrey Moorhouse’s The Last Divine Office, which focuses on Durham priory at the turn of the English Reformation, the monks had whittled this down to about five hours: Matins, Prime, Sext, Nones, and Compline. In between were meals and work, whether it was manual labor like gardening or brain work like copying and illustrating manuscripts. And, of course, sleep.

As the excellent and hilarious Dr. Eleanor Janega observes, all of this prayer doesn’t leave much time for unbroken sleep. And that’s kind of the point:

The really stringent schedule was supposed to suck and you were meant to be tired all the time. I mean look at it. Are you not exhausted? This tiredness was intentional and was related to the other stuff about monastic life that was meant to be deliberately uncomfortable.

But how did you know when to pray? That’s where clocks come in.

For people in most walks of life, you didn’t really need timepieces. You rose with the sun, you followed the rhythms of the animals and plants you tended. You went to bed when you couldn’t see to do anything anymore. You ate when you could take a break in your labor and when you knew you couldn’t go any longer without food. You ate fewer meals because you needed hearty servings to fuel all the manual work you did and didn’t have time for snack breaks.

But the monastic orders needed to know when to pray, and they took time very seriously. And it was therefore a 13th-century monastery where the mechanical, or automated clock, first appeared in Western history. (At least, according to my beloved BBC documentary series, Tudor Monastery Farm.)

Have Thouself Ye Olde Merry Tudor Christmas

(For the bit on time, go to 18:48.)

Time Compressed, Time Counted

Durham Cathedral has Castell’s Clock, named for the prior who commissioned the elaborate wooden case below during his term from 1494-1519. (Historians surmise that the mechanical clock parts were already made and used.)

(credit: Durham Cathedral)

The clock only has one hand — a reminder that it was less important what the actual hour and minute were than how much time there was between each liturgical hour. To that end, the clock face only had 48 marks, rather than the usual 60.

It’s a massive and beautiful piece, and it’s a reminder how valuable timekeeping was for monks. I mention it a couple of times in my current novel draft but don’t give it that much due.

Writing this post, however, I’m beginning to rethink that. After all, my novel is currently divided not into chapters but the hours. And it takes place over three absolutely tumultuous days in 1539, where time will be stretched and compressed to its breaking point. I wonder if the clock might provide a bit of stability for my characters. I can picture them glancing at that clock face every so often, seeking out the movement of that hand as proof that the world really is turning as usual even as nothing seems certain or real anymore.

What do you think? And how do you keep track of time?

Recommendations

Tracking your time. It’s just data you can use to test whether your assumptions about where your time goes are true.

Learning about pet custody. Aka, my first byline in The Washington Post! It’s no Woodward and Bernstein Watergate scandal, but I learned a lot about the growing trend of shared custody for pets when couples split. (You do have to enter your email, but it’s otherwise a free link.)

This Week’s Dose of K-Pop: TXT (투모로우바이투게더), “Blue Hour”

I usually try not to put the same group back-to-back, but TXT’s “Blue Hour” was just the perfect fit for this week’s theme. They often have hilariously long and complex Korean song titles, and this one is no different: “5시 53분의 하늘에서 발견한 너와 나,” which roughly translates to “You and I found the sky at 5:53.” That’s the hour of sunset in Korea in October, and the song lyrics refer to trying to preserve the magic of a moment with a loved one before its time runs out — before the sun sets on the day and the relationship.

While that all sounds quite melancholy, the song focuses on the joy of “Blue Hour,” with a jangly pop melody that’s sure to put anyone in a good mood. I love the theme park motif in the video, which plays well on the ongoing theme in TXT’s music of growing up and moving away from childish things.

Enjoy!

Love y’all,
Sara

1. Here’s the first sentence: “It is well knowne unto the godly and judicious, how ever since
the first breaking out of the lighte of the gospell in our Honourable Nation of
England, (which was the first of nations whom the Lord adorned ther with,
affter that grosse darknes of popery which had covered and overspred the
Christian worled,) what warrs and opposissions ever since, Satan hath raised,
maintained, and continued against the Saincts, from time to time, in one sorte
or other.”