Anyway, today was novel day. I was excited to dive into my manuscript and…it was also the day that a lot of other stuff seemed to be happening at the house. Let’s just say the doorbell rang several times, stuff needed to be tracked down, various things needed to be delivered to the right places, and then it turned out that a child had forgotten a school laptop at home and desperately needed it by 10:30 a.m.

So…a lot going on. As I’ve written numerous times on this blog, sometimes I fantasize about a cabin in the woods where I would work uninterrupted. But I will take a writing retreat this summer to finish my edits; this current round is about getting the manuscript into a state where it is close enough to finished that an immersion in it is helpful. Everything did quiet down reasonably after 10:30 a.m. or so and I was able to work through the chapters. Later in the book it’s a lighter lift — as I’d more figured out characters by that point in the original writing, and I am keeping most of the later plot points from earlier iterations. The biggest change today was probably deleting a whole section. That I could do even with the leaf blowers going.

I do wait for reasonable conditions (see: the open day) but if I waited for perfect conditions I’d never get anything done. As I do want to write this story, waiting for perfect isn’t an option. Maybe someone reading the novel will think “hmm, it really feels like she was writing that section with a leaf blower going outside.” But we shall see!

by Elisabeth Frost

After wanting to start a blog for well over a decade, I hit publish at 4:25 pm one Saturday afternoon in 2021. Since then, I’ve hit publish 424 more times. Because that’s the way we create habits in life – do something once and then repeat.

So how did I go from wanting to do something – for years! – to actually doing it? Enter Laura and, more specifically, her rules from Tranquility by Tuesday.

Early in 2021, I was part of Laura’s time-study group trialing her nine rules aimed at “calming the chaos.” Because even with the universal limitation of a 24-hour day, we all have additional, unique constraints that bring some form of chaos – kids, pets, a long commute. It’s the stories we tell ourselves about those constraints that can make a big difference in how we structure our lives.

My stories?

I Don’t Have Time to Write. I’ll Never Stick with It, So Why Bother Starting? Or, the runaway bestseller: It’s So Much Easier to Just Scroll On My Phone and Read Other People’s Blogs.

I had lots of stories in my head, and none on paper.

Following Laura’s rules challenged me to rethink this narrative. First, I have a lot more time than I think – turns out, 168 hours each week. Second, now I had permission to claim as a habit anything I did three times a week; with regard to my writing aspirations, this released me from the notion that I had to write every day for it to count. Third? I needed to put down my phone and actually write.

For the duration of the study, I committed to writing something three times a week. I could have copied out the phone book (I didn’t) – what mattered to me was forming the habit of regular writing.

When the time study was completed, the e-mails from Laura stopped. No one was there to ask me if I had remembered to Move by 3 pm; I didn’t get reminders to plan in One big adventure, one little adventure or to write Three times a week.

In lieu of direct oversight, have I stuck with the rules perfectly? Not even close. I often forget to Plan on Fridays. I sometimes pick away at tasks inefficiently throughout the day instead of Batching the little things. During one low point, I ate onion rings and chocolate in response to catastrophizing about how long it had been since I had gone running – instead of getting up off the couch and, you know, actually going for a run (the epitome of Effortless before effortful?).

But…

I now write more than Three times a week. Last summer my family’s big adventure was a 3-week-long road trip. Laura gives equal airtime to little adventures, too. It was with this rule in mind that I invited a friend to go out for ice cream one beautiful evening…without kids. It was delicious and a highlight of my summer. Her Move by 3 pm rule was the subconscious nudge I needed to maintain a daily outdoor walking streak in 2022.

Even without perfect adherence, applying these rules have made me feel better about how I use my time. They’ve made me more mindful of my autonomy to choose well. While it’s tempting to consider a complete life overhaul, what I really needed and wanted was the inspiration to finally launch a little writing space online, say yes to a second Broadway show (a big adventure!)…and commit to a 10:30 pm bedtime (this last one is harder than it sounds).

Early in Tranquility by Tuesday Laura writes: “I believe the big pieces in your life are probably good. I don’t want to change those. I want to change how you spend an average Tuesday.”

Well, yesterday was an average Tuesday. I wrote. I walked the kids to school in the morning. I batched administrative tasks at work. My light was out before 10:30 pm.

And today? I’m guest posting for Laura Vanderkam. I’d say Three times a week is a habit provided some pretty fun results…

Your turn. What goal or habit change – big or little – currently feels overwhelming? How could you break that down into more manageable chunks or, perhaps, reframe entirely? What was your best adventure – big or little – from 2022? What’s your ideal bedtime…and do you stick to it?

Photos: Elisabeth’s usual writing spot; Elisabeth Frost

For instance, I have read almost all the works of Shakespeare. I actually have read everything except two very short works in my anthology (I just finished The Tempest this week), but my reading calendar has me reading The Two Noble Kinsmen, which current scholarship says Shakespeare co-wrote. I also read Edward III a few weeks ago, which was not in my anthology, but seems to now be put in the Shakespeare camp. Anyway, that project is pretty much done.

Our Best of Both Worlds goal-setting workshop for the Patreon community happened on December 14, 2021. (This year’s is today, at noon, eastern if you want to join by then…). During that workshop, I decided to do my year-long writing project (basically, a very short morning pages thing I always do) with a specific theme in mind. I would do 365 entries describing a single day in the life of a character. I elected to model this on my day of December 14, 2021. It happened to be a very long and full day, if not particularly life-changing, but I thought it would be interesting to see if I could pace myself through writing 365 100-200 word vignettes on normal life.

And I have! We are closing in on sleep right now on this day, which was almost exactly a year ago, some 348 entires in. I am at 49,577 words, so it will wind up being about 51,000 words or so. This is, technically, a book length manuscript.

I’m a little wary of going through and re-reading it, because it is probably not that great. But who knows. Maybe it’s interesting. The point was more to develop the writing discipline of doing this. Something always comes to me. I have never thought that I have nothing to say. It is also a reminder to me that 100-200 words is easy. It inspires no resistance. But 100-200 words a day over a year is a book. Small things done repeatedly truly do add up. That is true with reading through Shakespeare at the rate of three pages a day, and it is true of writing things.

In any case, if you are looking for a resolution for 2023…maybe you could consider a writing project along these lines! Just write 100-200 words a day on something. The point is not to do much each time. It is to just keep going. Time will pass anyway. We may as well make the journey mindfully.

In other news: I was a guest on Modern Mrs. Darcy’s What Should I Read Next? podcast! This was so cool as it is one of my favorite podcasts. We talk about reading projects and how to tackle ambitious works (like Shakespeare or War and Peace…)

Tranquility by Tuesday is also making a few end-of-year lists. The Globe and Mail listed it as one of the best management books of the year (requires subscription). The Next Big Idea Club listed it as one of the top productivity books of the year. If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, would you do so? Thank you!

Photo: Not currently looking like this…more of an icy rain with a tiny bit of accumulation, much to my kids’ disappointment. Dec 14, 2021 was actually unseasonably warm — a detail I remember thanks to my analyzing and recounting every second of that day! 

But I did want to do some more free writing. So I elected to do a modified version of NaNoWriMo, where I’d write 1000 words every work day in November. I would write about characters and scenarios in an existing novel draft of mine (The Norwegian Secret to Enjoying Winter, for the few folks who read a draft of that). I would work out a few things and think through motivations, with the goal of eventually editing that novel manuscript.

There are 20 workdays in November (weekdays minus Thanksgiving and the Friday after) and I just hit 20,000 words. I didn’t mind the exercise much. I simply put writing 1000 words on my task list each day and I did it. I was reminded that I did like my characters and the general world I created. I do want to revisit it and turn something that exists into something better.

Now I just need to figure out when and how I will do that. I honestly want to take a few weeks away from everything else in life and plow through it but that is going to be hard to pull off! We shall see. But a year from now I would like to have a draft that I am happy with. And then maybe in future years I’ll create an entirely new novel…

I’ve spent a lot of time these past few weeks pondering whether I intend to participate this year or not. My current thinking is that I will construct my own challenge, likely writing 1000 words each weekday in my “free writing file” — figuring out ideas I might incorporate in an existing novel draft. I do not think I will be able to carve out a full 90-120 minutes per day, so best not to set that as a goal. An hour is more doable. I could see doing an hour today, but not two hours, and my life will not be different in a week. Future Laura will likely feel the same.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time thinking about what my yearlong projects will be for 2023. The leading contender for a reading project is all the works of Jane Austen (I’m looking for projects that are doable in a few pages a day — to limit resistance — and worth doing, meaning the author’s works have stood the test of time, and that I haven’t read all of them). My current leading contender for a year-long writing project is to write 2 lines in a sonnet every day, thus producing 52 14-line sonnets in a year (longtime readers know that the “collection of sonnets” idea has appeared on versions of my list of 100 dreams). That would also meet my criteria of being doable in a few minutes — to limit resistance — and worth doing.

In any case, it’s a lot of hemming and hawing. Why? Because once I decide to do something, I want to see it through. I really dislike canceling or quitting things. I doubt anyone likes doing so but for myself, I dislike it enough that I’d prefer to quit on the front end — that is, think long and hard about whether I truly want to do something. That’s true for big projects, though it’s true for everyday stuff as well. If I’m going to take something on, I’d like to have a plan, I’d like to have thought through the challenges, and I want to anticipate how I will deal with them.

If I have those three things in place, then it’s not too hard to sustain something, even for a full year. If I don’t, then it will be. And I’ll probably be kicking myself.

Are you taking on NaNoWriMo? What about any 2023 year-long projects?

In other news: I was a guest on The Art of Manliness podcast! This was so cool — I know it has a huge following. If you’re coming here because you heard me there, welcome! I blog a few times a week on productivity topics and daily life. We have a great and positive comment section.

I was also a guest on the lovely Caroline Dowd-Higgins’ podcast, Your Working Life. It is always a treat to talk to Caroline, and the episode is fairly short, so please give it a listen if you’ve got a few minutes!

Photo: Random fall color, fallen to the ground

So it’s basically two years from the start of the research to the launch. And that’s after I’d already solidified the canonical nine rules. This was a longer project than, say, meeting my husband, getting engaged, and getting married (that one ran from February 2003 to September 2004…).

I’ve learned or rediscovered a few things about logistics and planning along the way.

Practice is good. The Tranquility by Tuesday project involved collecting data on people’s time satisfaction and time use, then teaching them nine time management rules over nine weeks. Each week, people would learn a rule, answer questions about how they planned to implement it, then answer questions a week later about how it went. We used Mailchimp lists to send the emails to people and then SurveyMonkey to collect the data.

Doing this entire process twice (first with a smaller group, then a much bigger group) added time to the project, but doing a pilot phase first was incredibly helpful. First, I saw that we would get results with the way we were structuring the study. Second, I could see what questions were clear, and what people were clearly confused by. This made the larger project run far more smoothly.

Much of writing is the raw material. Lots of raw material means that themes emerge and the stories are already there. I undertook the TBT project in the hopes of getting quantitative results, but the sheer volume of qualitative answers people filled out on the survey forms was just amazing. When I went to start writing, I already had a novel’s worth of observations on what is difficult when it comes to time, and what people have tried, and how the rules fit into life and what challenges they faced (and often overcame).

This made writing the first draft feel almost too easy! There was a lot of editing afterwards, but to me, creating a first draft is always the hardest part. In this case it felt more like creating a quilt out of lots of existing colorful blocks than trying to create something out of nothing.

Pace requires space. I already knew each rule would be a chapter, and presumably there would be an introduction and a conclusion. So that was 11 units of writing to be done. I gave myself a time line that generally required writing one chapter each week.

Within each week, the rough schedule was to write the draft on Monday and Tuesday, and then edit it on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday was open because (per Rule #5) it is my back-up slot, in case something pulled me away from the writing/editing earlier in the week.

I left my vacation weeks open during the summer and, during a longer stretch, built in an open week as well. This allowed me to get caught up on stuff that writing had displaced and also not to feel too rushed.

My first draft was due at the end of October, but this schedule allowed me to be done by the end of September. I then could edit the whole manuscript during October.

You can do a lot in bits of time. But deep work is good too. During my first draft writing stages, I tried to leave my mornings as open as possible. This allowed me to focus on the book first before I dealt with everything else.

Life often intervenes, however, especially when one has five kids and is managing a major home renovation. So once I had a full draft, in October, I took an editing retreat to Cape May so I could focus on the book as a whole. I rented a hotel room with a kitchen overlooking the beach (cheap, in the off season!) and spent that time working without figuring out when other people were coming or going.

It was good. I don’t need that often — I am incredibly not-precious when it comes to writing and “the writing life” (whatever that is). But I do need it sometimes.

Hopefully it paid off in a book that works. We shall see what people think!

I was booked to give a speech in Tampa at 8:50 a.m. on Thursday. I planned to fly from PHL to Tampa on the last direct flight on Wednesday (4:15 p.m.). The plane boarded on time, but then there was some issue with an armrest that had to be repaired. Then maintenance took a little longer and we were slightly delayed. Then we needed to be rerouted around storms that had moved in (possibly during our delay? It was unclear.). The route that air traffic control gave us required more fuel than we had. The pilots and air traffic control went back and forth on this several times. No route was agreed upon, so after almost two hours on the tarmac, we went back to the gate to get more fuel. Alas, at that point, one of our pilots timed out. We all had to deplane as theoretically the airline was finding a reserve, but that did not happen. About 30 minutes later they canceled the flight.

So, what to do? I wound up rebooking on the 7 a.m. flight that got in to Tampa at 9:30. This was, of course, after the original speech was to start, but the hosts agreed to move things around. My speech would now start at 10:15. Fortunately, the venue was only a short distance from the Tampa airport. I’d talk, get back in the car, and with any luck make my original flight home (12:05 p.m.!)

It did seem like much could go wrong in this scenario, what with being on the ground in Tampa for only 2.5 hours, but after the Wednesday disaster, Thursday was fairly charmed. I left my house in Pennsylvania at 5:30 a.m., and was back home in my house by 4 p.m. In between, I went all the way to Florida and back! And gave a speech. We finished at 11:05 a.m., I got in the car and made my flight with plenty of time to spare. Hurrah.

I’m doing Mommy Day #3 this weekend, which will be a bit more elaborate, so more to come on that…

My Medium column this week looked at How to Stop Wishing Time Away.

The Before Breakfast podcast covered several topics, including “Don’t be minute wise and hour foolish,” that “Your friends are my friends,” and why you should “Track time while off the clock.”

Photo: I have no actual photos of Tampa, so this early morning picture of the parking lot at PHL will have to do. I always snap a photo of my car’s location and what deck of the parking garage I’m on. I think I’ll remember but…I don’t. 

What I’ve wound up doing the last two weekends is splitting my long run into two parts. This past Saturday, for instance, I ran in my neighborhood from 7 a.m. to 8:25 a.m. I then took my 7-year-old to his 9 a.m. karate class. After getting him situated, I ran around that neighborhood for another 20 minutes. The weekend before I had run an hour with a friend in the morning, and then ran 30 minutes later in the morning with my 15-year-old.

Is it as good as running 90 minutes or 105 minutes consecutively? Possibly not. But in terms of training I assume it’s better than not adding on the second run.

I’ve been doing the same as I practice my new speech. With a new book out this fall, it’s time to switch up my material. Running through the whole speech requires 40 uninterrupted minutes when my voice isn’t tired. I’ve done that a few times, but I’ve increased the volume of my practicing by viewing the six chunks of the speech as separate entities. I practiced two before bed the other night (which was about all I could muster). I did another section in the car on the way to my audiobook recording yesterday. And so on.

Long, uninterrupted chunks of time are great when we can get them. Unfortunately, for various reasons, those chunks might not always be available. When that’s the case, it’s tempting to think that we can’t get anything done. But life is seldom either/or, and perfect doesn’t need to be the enemy of the good. It might be possible to get things done in little pieces. Little pieces, over time, add up.

The week of July 18 2016 came back to me pretty quickly as I looked at how I spent every half-hour of it. Highlights: It was the week I met and hired our previous nanny (who worked for us for 4.5 years). As she is still in our life regularly (we chatted about it this morning!), this is fun to see. I was up a *lot* with my high-energy toddler (then 18 months) who is now a high-energy and somewhat rebellious 7-year-old. During that week he decided to wake up one morning at 4:30 a.m. and not go back to sleep…this week he elected to make his stand on the hill of not bringing a white T-shirt to camp for some color war/tie dye thing they’re doing. Why????

I took him (the 18-month old who is now 7) to the Please Touch Museum for a morning, which is fascinating since I took my current 2-year-old there this past week as well. We drove to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware for an extended family week there — one of the few years we didn’t go to the Jersey shore for our summer beach trip. Apparently I went shopping on the boardwalk for an hour!

Then I went down a little mental rabbit hole…I can see my 2016 logs now from 2022. What if I could look at a week in 2022 from 2016? I guess my first big thought would have been “Who is this ‘H’ person who is everywhere on the log…?”

Anyway, I’m doing a recurring segment here called the TBT Scorecard. TBT is “Tranquility by Tuesday” — my book which will be out October 11. In the book, I share nine rules to help calm the chaos and make time for what matters. I had 150 people try them out for 9 weeks and their time satisfaction scores rose on my surveys to a high degree of statistical significance! I try to follow these rules in my own life because, hey, who couldn’t use more time satisfaction?

The week was chaotic as it often is. Childcare is still a patchwork, regular blog readers will recall the fiasco of my getting to my speech on Wednesday, and it was hot. So my planned big adventures for the weekend just sounded incredibly unpleasant. But some good stuff happened too. Here goes!

Rule #1: Give yourself a bedtime. I wasn’t asleep by 11 p.m. every night for sure. The time is definitely creeping later as I don’t have to set an alarm for 6:30 a.m. every morning (even if I am often up by then). But it was around 11:15 p.m. most nights. I’m usually at least close to my bed around 11!

Rule #2: Plan on Fridays. Yep. The upside of this is that I did a lot of preparation for this week’s video shoots (for the TBT In Real Life series). I have the logistics all ready, questions for everyone…I’m feeling slightly more confident about this week as a result, which is the point of this rule!

Rule #3: Move by 3 p.m. I ran in the morning 5 mornings this week. Tuesday morning was a regular run, and then Thursday and Friday I ran laps in the yard because I was the only adult around and felt I needed to stay close to the house (everyone was asleep). On Saturday morning I ran with my 15-year-old, who is home from camp! Here’s hoping he wants to do this more often, though the “morning” aspect may prevent it. For whatever reason, he was willing to get up at 7:45 a.m. on Saturday morning to beat the heat, and I am here for it. Sunday I did my “long” run (not that long since the heat had hit hard by 9 a.m.). On Monday I didn’t run but I walked all over the Please Touch Museum with my 2-year-old, so it’s not like I was sitting still. Wednesday featured four hours driving to and from northern New Jersey. So no walking by 3 p.m. that day. Oh well. I did walk around the neighborhood for 15 minutes at night when one of my older kids took the 2-year-old.

Rule #4: Three times a week is a habit. I have been focusing on running, piano, and family meals. I ran 5x (see above). I played the piano Monday night, Friday during the day when I had the house to myself, and for stints on Saturday and Sunday. The Sunday stint was cut short because I heard a loud snap right outside the window by the piano and noted that a giant tree branch had fallen. Luckily not toward the house! We had family dinner with the folks who were home Monday and Tuesday, and then with everyone on Saturday and Sunday (we were all home again!). I learned to use the gas grill, which turns out to be very simple, so that was exciting (we always had charcoal before, and that seemed like a lot of work). I have been trying to enforce sit-on-your-chair rules more with the dinners and I feel like there have been marginal improvements.

Rule #5: Create a back-up slot. I try to leave Fridays fairly open in general. One corollary to creating a back-up slot is creating back-up plans. I can’t say I had great back-up weekend plans but I did get my Wednesday morning crash course in thinking through my options when the original transportation to the speech didn’t work out. I wound up driving (and the talk shifting 30 minutes later) but we also talked through the possibility of doing the talk virtually.

Rule #6: One big adventure, one little adventure. I’m not sure anything rose to the level of “big adventure” but I did several littler ones. The 2-year-old and I spent the morning at the Please Touch Museum on Monday. I saw my 10-year-old perform in Seussical (her camp play). We had a sitter Friday night in the hopes of doing a date night, and then realized that we needed to pick up the 15-year-old at camp Friday night instead of Saturday morning. My husband had been in London, so he flew to Boston on Friday instead of Philly, and then he took Uber to Providence and they took the train home. Since I had the sitter, I roamed the King of Prussia mall, thinking I would get a new outfit or two for the videos this week. I completely struck out. Like, nothing looked good to me. I am suddenly old and ornery about clothes, but I hadn’t been to KOP mall to shop in ages (since pre-pandemic, maybe?) so I guess that was an adventure. I took my daughter to a farmers market on Saturday AM and we had lunch based on what I bought (bread, a tomato spread, peaches). The tomatoes in the picture are from there, though we got our first tomatoes from our garden this weekend!

Rule #7: Take one night for you. I guess the Friday night mall trip would qualify? I took myself out for dinner, though it was just a burrito at the food court. If I’d known how badly I would strike out on clothes, maybe I would have made myself a solo reservation somewhere fancy instead.

Rule #8: Batch the little things. I created my Friday punch list as usual and worked through it. Given the driving situation (I’m doing most of the camp driving) my work hours are pretty curtailed, so I’m trying to preserve the bigger blocks of time for deeper work. I can fill out forms at night if need be.

Rule #9: Effortful before effortless. A mixed bag. I spent way too much time scrolling as usual. However, I read Much Ado About Nothing in the Shakespeare project. I’ve been reading The Economist at night rather than scrolling — we have several back issues sitting around that I never got through when they came so the stack is slowly dwindling. I went and sat in the hammock a few times during nap or after toddler bedtime or when he was gone; I even intentionally set a timer to make sure I stayed out there for at least 10 minutes without looking at my phone. And a summer-specific form of effortful fun: I’ve been taking some of the kids out to go chase fireflies at night. They’re pretty magnificent in the yard at twilight, so rather than all of us on our screens, we go out and run around.

In any case, the scripts are all 500-1000 words, with most of them hovering toward the lower end of that range. I wrote the first handful separately, but I’ve kept one word file of Before Breakfast episodes for all the fully edited scripts from then on. The running word count on that file recently crossed 600,000 words.

This is an interesting number. It is roughly the number of words in War and Peace. It is not quite as long as the King James Bible (which clocks in at a bit under 800,000 words) but it is a lot of words nonetheless.

One of the items on my current List of 100 Dreams is to write an epic novel. On some level this is a daunting goal. But I have apparently recorded something equivalent in length over the last three years. It’s just that instead of a sweeping multi-generational character saga, it comes in the form of bite-sized productivity advice.

There are lots of ways to view this realization, but one positive approach is to realize that if I do want to write that epic novel, I could use a similar method. Just write 500-600 words every weekday for three years. Or for two years (I don’t need to actually hit 600,000 words!). Producing scripts has not been onerous. I can often write or edit 2-3 during my 12-year-old’s 1-hour fencing class. Fiction is harder, for sure. The organizational work will be a lot more intense. But the process is still all habit, execution, and patience. Just like anything else. Time passes. Words add up. The question is what they add up to.

(In case anyone is wondering, blog posts also add up. WordPress says I’ve published 2750 posts over the years. If each clocked in at 300 words on average, and my guess is the average is higher, that’s over 800,000 words right there…)