Am I the only one (I know I’m not!) who feels like the “to do” list continues to grow longer and longer – new tasks added each and every day – while day after day very few tasks are ever really and truly finished?

What can I say? It’s frustrating. Really it is.

Is it possible that I have more on my plate than I did last year? I don’t think so… But it definitely feels that way. *Sigh.*

photo credit: Robbert van der Steeg

Every so often I come back to reviewing my priorities and asking myself how I can put my waking hours to best use. Is there a way to wisely parse out time and energy to those areas I consider my first priorities? How can I balance teaching which, by it’s very nature, gets the lion’s share of time, with my before-and-after-day-job as a writer?

A recent post by Corey on Simple Mom, “How to Find More Time During the Day” got me thinking again. He asks the question:

photo credit: Michel Filion

” What if we replaced time focus with energy? Instead of looking at the day as a block of time, look at it as a finite amount of energy.

Then ask yourself, where do you spend your energy?

The answer to this question will tell you where your priorities lie.”

When I look at it this way, it’s clear that the bulk of both my time and energy goes into teaching.  And truth be told, most of *that* time and energy involves paperwork, district obligations, even things as mundane, but necessary, as cleaning up the mess I’ve left behind after a full day of teaching.

Very little time goes into actual lesson planning. A sad but true statement, which might be explained by the fact that I’ve been able to internalize so much of the “how-to’s” of teaching, that I’m now able to get by using the on-the-job-expertise I’ve acquired over the years.

I know I’m not alone in this.  Most of my colleagues are like me.  We all spend more time on the incidentals surrounding running a classroom than the actual hard-core lesson planning time that a new or pre-service teacher spends.

And yet… there’s always more that I *could* do (maybe *should* be doing??) that I choose not to do simply because of the amount of time required.

And while it’s true that I have an obligation to devote a huge and important chunk of each day to my students, it’s also true that a HUGE part of me wants to shift that energy to my writing.

Is there a way to do this?  Perhaps that’s the question so many of us who work full-time and try to write on the side will always struggle with.

The best I can come up with is to write first thing in the morning, early, before the sun has come up, before I must get ready for work.  And yet sometimes, like this past week when I’ve been working on report cards and putting in late hours, it seems those early hours are impossible to manage.

At these moments, I must be reminded, again, to extend myself a little grace.  Lower my expectations.  Remember that all weeks are not this week.  And once those report cards are truly finished and conferences are over, I’ll be back at the keyboard, working on the middle grade revision and that cat/mouse picture book I still need to puzzle out.

Our instructor’s partial response was that becoming serious about writing often means throwing out the tv, getting rid of journal writing and/or morning pages, and accepting the fact that we’re just going to have to sleep less than we’d like.

But, I said to myself, I don’t watch t.v. I don’t keep a journal. I don’t do morning pages.  And as happened this particular day – not all that atypical of every other day for the past, say, 10 years -  I had awoken at 3:30 am, arrived at work by 7am,  returned home over 12 hours later at 7:30 that evening, was back out again at 9:30 pm and home for the night at 10:45 pm.

By the time I had collected my thoughts, settled into bed, read a few pages of the latest book on my nightstand, and finally drifted off for the night, it was close to midnight.

Let’s just say that less sleep is not a realistic option.

What to do?  I resolved to dig deeper.  Think more seriously. Where was the breakdown?

And so, I went back to my instructor’s comments.  Or more accurately, the one comment that applied to ME.  The part I didn’t really want to admit to myself.  And though his suggestion was more of a catchall “quit doing research instead of writing,”  I realized that there was a piece of truth in those words that I best pay attention to: quit “playing at writing” and REALLY WRITE.

Even as I type this, I realize that I actually accomplish a lot of REAL WRITING during a typical week.  So in some respects, I have to give myself a break.  But, truth be told, I waste a lot of time, too.  Sure, I’m sitting at my desk.  And while many of the things on my “to do” list ARE getting done, I really could be more strategic. Set incremental deadlines for the writing goals that are of my own making.  Those goals I really *do* want to hit, but that often get pushed aside because they’re ones no one pushes me to reach.

As often serendipitously happens with such things, a writing friend mentioned this week that she was at a critical juncture in her writing career and she was jealously guarding her time. Bravo! I thought.  That’s exactly what I need to do. Another good friend, Stephanie P.,  has apparently had some of the same thoughts.  Her post today about the no’s and yeses of writing, gets to the issue of taking ourselves and our writing seriously.

So I’m back to the strategy I used while completing my MFA at Vermont College.  I’ve printed out a calendar, set realistic writing goals for the next week, and penciled them in.  Another small step forward.