I remember when I was at UC Davis working on my bachelors (was that really almost 20 years ago????) I took an English class. I took many English classes but this was the first I took at Davis after transferring from the community college.

I remember being very excited to be in the class. It was required writing course but it was a class geared towards those who wanted to become teachers. I suppose the details of that aren’t the reason I am typing this now, but the short version of the story was I had career goals of working in academics somewhere. I guess I saw myself as one of those grizzled old college professors who taught the class everyone wanted to take.

Anyway the first writing assignment on the syllabus was to write a five page essay titled What I Will be Doing Instead of Writing this Semester. I thought it was brilliant.

Essentially the assignment was to write about all the ways I knew, or strongly suspected, I would be procrastinating on my homework. Of course these would apply to all classes but naturally this professor was only interested in those methods of procrastination I would be employing in avoidance of her writing assignments.

I have no idea where that essay I wrote ended up but I recalled the assignment this morning as I was wandering around my house wondering what to do with myself.

Today’s morning scheduled unexpectedly opened up for several hours and I was, until I picked up my laptop anyway, trying to figure out what to do with all these hours I suddenly had nothing slotted into.

I was already sick of scrolling through my instagram feed and I had already read the newspaper. I do have a new Stephan King book to read (his latest highly recommend) but for some reason I was just pacing around my house making my dogs (and probably my wife) nervous.

Then a thought occurred to me. I have long complained that I do not have enough time to do all the writing and research I want to do. I have several projects already in the cooker and seem to be coming up with new fiction ideas and research questions every day. Not to mention I have still not started editing the manuscript for my book or found a literary agent to do whatever it is literary agents do.

and why is it that I have not completed any of these writing projects?

Time of course, I simply do not have enough time, or perhaps the time, to work on them.

The thought which occurred to me was this–I regularly chastise myself for not writing enough, even though I claim by all means that I actually want to do so, because I have to work to support my family and my retirement goals, yet when I do have some unallocated time I usually find myself doing something completely unrelated to my writing. Worse than that these things I find myself engaged in usually have no productive value at all.

Now I fully recognize that as an American I am addicted to productivity. If anything could be given the title of the American Cultural Myth it would be that a person can actively engage in productive meaningful tasks 100% of the time. Of course that depends on how one defines productivity (most of the people I see in my practice seem shocked when I tell them that rest and recovery are active processes which are required for a healthy mind and body) but it also assumes that the purpose of one’s life is to maximize productivity and that seems more than a bit off the mark to me.

As that old song by The Byrds (which they stole almost completely from a bible verse) there is a time for everything under heaven, and one should really consider not beating one’s self up just because he finds himself (or herself) curled up on the couch with the latest book of los espookies (Stephan King is a national treasure) instead of writing pitch letters, or editing chapters in a book.

But it does beg the question, what do you do instead of writing?