A little way into the covid lockdown, I spent two weeks tracking how I use my time.

My reason for doing this was the realization that . . . I really didn’t know. Specifically, I didn’t know how hard I was working at my job of being a writer. On the one hand, part of me felt like the answer was “pretty hard;” on the other hand, my inner puritan — which is always ready to doubt whether it even counts as work if you enjoy what you’re doing — really likes to tell me I’m being a slacker. The only way to judge which one was right (if either) was to actually pay attention.

Of course, any such tracking runs immediately into the challenge of finding where the boundaries of my job lie. My sister has a story about her college philosophy professor who was late to class one day because he was busy thinking; while on the face of it that sentence sounds ridiculous, the truth of it is that some kinds of work can indeed take place entirely inside your skull. And that doesn’t look like work, does it? I’ve told my husband that if I’m lying across the bed staring at the ceiling, that means I’m working, and he believes me. But sometimes it’s hard for me to believe me. And often the signals of me working aren’t so obvious, because what’s going on is that I’m driving somewhere or I’m in the shower or I’m otherwise engaged in some non-work task . . . but my mind is bubbling away, combing the tangles out of a plot or composting different elements until an idea sprouts out of them.

How do I track that, when half the time I’m not even really conscious of it going on?

For this particular project, I didn’t really try. Instead I tracked more observable categories of activity, which were (in descending order of how much my brain wants to accept that they’re “work”):

* Main work. Which is to say, drafting or revising a draft, the stuff that comes to mind first when you think about What a Writer Does. I included writing Patreon essays in this category, along with going over copy-edits and other such publication tasks.

* Writing-related program activities. I borrowed this phrase from the late Jay Lake, to cover all those things that are actually part of the job but not, y’know, the writing part. Answering email, updating my website, submitting short fiction, anything administrative in nature.

* Continuing writing education. A phrase I borrowed from my sister, for whom “continuing legal education” is part of the job. If I want things to come out of my brain, I have to put things in. So, reading a book, be it fiction or nonfiction? That’s CWE. I can’t remember (this long after the fact) whether I counted all movies and TV as well, but I definitely counted documentaries, as I was in the middle of a spate of those at the time. I need both narrative and material out of which narratives could be made for a balanced creative diet — and no, it can’t just be material I already know I need, like research reading for a planned story. Those stories only get planned if I have the ideas for them in the first place, and rather a lot of my ideas come out of me saying “this looks interesting” and picking up a random book.

* Domestic labor. This was where Feminism Brain got to put a muzzle on Inner Puritan. Cooking and cleaning are work, damn it; they’re just work mostly done on an unpaid basis. So I tracked them, too, even though Inner Puritan kept making muffled, squawking noises in the background.

* Self-improvement. The most borderline category for “work” purposes. This mostly covered exercise (because when you have a sedentary job, the care and maintenance of your meat sack is pretty important), meditation, and Duolingo practice (Japanese, which does play into my work — come to that, so does the meditation).

Categories did overlap, of course, and I did my best not to double-count my time. When I watched a lecture on symbolism in Chinese art while riding the stationary bike, I put part of that time under CWE and part under self-improvement. The very fact of tracking no doubt altered my behavior (observer bias!), and I can’t swear my tracking was always precise, since sometimes I forgot to log when I had started or finished a thing. But I did my best.

What did I find?

* Main work. I did not do this every day (no, I’m not a “you must write every! single! day!” writer), and of the categories, it’s the one most likely to fluctuate depending on where I am in the book cycle. On the days I did write, I averaged about an hour and fifteen minutes; counting the days I didn’t write, it drops to forty-five. Those numbers would be a little lower if I hadn’t been sent some copy-edits in the last two days, since I had a compressed deadline for getting those done and therefore spent four or five hours each day hammering that task. But on the whole, the results feel about right: if you’d asked me beforehand how much time I thought it took me to do my writing each day, I would have said “maybe an hour or so, unless it’s going really badly.”

Viewed from the Inner Puritan angle, though, this number is shocking. “Really? This is the core of your job, and you only spend an hour on it per day — and not even every day?” But the thing is, it has to be that way. For starters, main work generates writing-related program activities, so the more of the former I do, the more the latter will try to eat my life. And even if I had an assistant to deal with all of the WRPA . . . creative output is not infinite. I can’t consistently spend more time working on a single project because I will outrun the pace at which I can think my way through it (remember, that “general cogitation” category wasn’t tracked here). And I can’t just flip a switch to work on something else instead; while it’s sometimes possible for me to draft a short story alongside a novel, I can’t always manage that, and I cannot draft more than one novel at a time. Patreon writing, yes, but other fiction simultaneously is tough, and trying for it consistently would have detrimental results. So there are limits to how hard I can push on this front.

* Writing-related program activities. These I did much more consistently (almost every day), and for more time — a little under two hours a day. On average, WRPA and main work were in a 2.5:1 ratio to each other, and that’s with the copy-edits spiking the latter number in the last two days. Saying in general that I spend three times as much of my day on administrative matters as I do on the core part of the job sounds about right. You start to understand why some writers hire assistants . . . though I’ll admit, I have a hard time envisioning myself letting things go into someone else’s hands like that.

* Continuing writing education. Virtually identical to the WRPA numbers. My notes on those numbers, though, show that when this covered me watching something on the TV, it was very often doubling up with some other task, usually WRPA. Like I said above, I didn’t double-count the time — half got logged for CWE, half for WRPA — but it’s still instructive to know. This number surprised me by how high it was, and boy howdy did the Inner Puritan want to jump on it, especially when I was not doing something else productive at the same time. But: I need this. It is, in fact, a key part of my job. I read a lot more in 2020, thanks to the start of the pandemic, and also I wrote far more short fiction than usual. They’re not unrelated.

* Domestic labor. Just under an hour each day on average. Mostly spent on cooking dinner, with some amount of cleaning in there. (I would make a very bad 1950s housewife.) I should note that this number is lower than it might otherwise be because certain tasks (washing dishes and doing laundry) are more my husband’s bailiwick: an important point, because even in supposedly egalitarian households, there’s still a tendency for women to take on more of the domestic labor. I do think I do more of it than he does, but I also have a job where I can perform the thinking portions of it while sweeping or whatever. And he does more of this work than many men, which is reflected in the lowness of this number.

* Self-improvement. 45 minutes a day on average, generally fluctuating between 60 (if I rode the stationary bike) and 15 (if I didn’t).

And when I took these numbers and crunched them all together . . .

It turns out that I worked about forty hours a week, if I leave self-improvement out of it. (With SI in, it was a bit over 45.)

So: I was neither working myself to the bone, nor being a total slacker. Neither of my bifurcated opinions at the start were quite correct. It starts looking more like the slacker end if you put some sarcastic tildes around CWE, because admittedly, that does heavily overlap with leisure. But that thing I said at the start, about how there are few if any clean boundaries on this job? That’s true not just when it comes to thinking time, but also reading/watching time. No lie, I got a story idea off playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses. If I don’t allow CWE to “count” in my sense of how I approach my job, I’ll start de-prioritizing it, which means I’ll do less of it, which means I’ll be starving my brain of inputs. I can’t let it be all I do (at least, not for extended periods of time); I do need to perform actual main work, and then the three-times-as-much WRPA that produces. But looking at the numbers, the balance feels okay.

. . . with one caveat. Which will be the subject of an upcoming post, because this one is already long. But if you want a hint, it involves a phrase that’s been conspicuously absent until now:

Time off.