The Importance of Being Off Task

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Inspiration, On writing.

Feather on a Beach

In this blog1, I muse about how we can squeeze out as much time as possible to explore our creative work, even with day jobs, spouses, children, other hobbies, and (most importantly) our impediments from within: self-doubt and procrastination. So, why I am here to promote the benefits of sometimes being off task when I’ve talked so much about waking up early and having a plan? Well, because we contain multitudes and contradictions. In no way is there a tidy little routine or prescription to unlock your creativity. As much as it works for me to begin every week with a routine and a plan for my time, I also need to know when to let go of all that and allow myself to generously waste it.

I started thinking about writing this a couple of weeks ago when I spent all of the time I had for writing one morning and afternoon playing. I looked up a few things I’d been meaning to look up that were writing-adjacent. I wrote a letter to a writing friend. I listened to a couple of songs and browsed a couple of playlists. I got lost in nostalgia for a good ten minutes, at least. At the end of the day, I looked at what I had written on my weekly plan for what I’m going to work on every day and shrugged. So what?

It’s fitting that I am finally setting this down in words on a day, when snow on the roads earned us a three-hour late start, extending my creative morning and shrinking my work day to a haiku. I had time to create and time to sit and eat the stack of pancakes Chris made and read an essay I’d been longing to talk with a friend about.

If we squeeze our hearts too tightly around our project goals, we forget the real reason for this work: to connect with other humans through our art. We must nurture our own human spirit, who sometimes needs us to release the pressure and let them want what they want, and who sometimes needs a routine to follow.

Some days we need to skip class, as I wrote about here on another late start last year. In order to know when to let up on the reins of ambition, it helps to practice mindfulness, the art of noticing, not reacting and of being in the present moment. When we do this, wasting time feels right. We don’t fall into the feared ruts and lose the momentum of the habit we have cultivated with such love and attention. We are able to begin again2, over and over. Breaks become part of the routine, not something we feel guilty about.

I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.

1

Ever since moving over to Substack, I have hesitated when typing this word, even though that is the word I’ve been using since I started Make Time back in the early 2000s over on WordPress. It seems like here I’m supposed to say ‘stack’ or ‘Substack’. I think blog is more universal and less proprietary, and I have had enough of the technology machine’s proprietary nonsense.

2

In a flow class this morning, my yoga teacher quoted her teacher, who believed that those two words had the power to transform. As I was searching for the right words here, those two fit perfectly into this idea.

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.