If you fall into the latter camp, how can you manage your time and energy to deal with the unpredictability?

That’s the core of a reader question I received this week from Sarah, who works as an on-call midwife. As Sarah writes, “It’s impossible to know when babies will come and how long it will take to support someone in labor.” In Sarah’s case, this was complicated by the fact that she has two different on-call jobs. She takes on two private clients a month for her doula business, and then works at a birth center 2-4 days or nights a week for 12 hour shifts. “I would love any tips for being productive with a schedule that vacillates widely each week,” she writes. “Some weeks I barely work and other weeks it’s long days. Even when I don’t have many hours called-in I can feel really busy because it’s so unpredictable. I don’t feel like I use my time not called-in well because I feel like I can’t plan for it. Help!”

When people’s lives resist easy routines, it can be challenging to make space for anything else. Is it possible to exercise, or do a hobby, or even basic life maintenance tasks, if your schedule varies?

I think the answer is yes, but doing so requires thinking about time a little differently than people who have more set hours. Instead, it helps to think of available time in terms of probabilities, and ranked priorities.

First, on the probability front: while on some level Sarah’s jobs can require her to come in at any point, this doesn’t mean she will be working all 168 hours of every week. If she has already assisted with births for a few private clients in recent days and the next one isn’t due for a month, most likely she will not be called in the next few days. She could be, but most likely not.

With an established business like the birthing center, I imagine there are a general number of shifts she has agreed to work. She might work more to cover colleagues (and they cover for her if a private client is in labor) but again, it won’t be entirely random. (When I asked, Sarah also mentioned that this was a lever she could exert some control over — stating how many shifts she’d generally like to be called for in a given time period. So if she asked for three in a week, and had worked three, she might feel more confident making plans. She might still wind up coming in, but at least there would be a discussion).

In any case, it always helps to track time. Labors can take varying amounts of time but not infinitely varying amounts of time. I’m sure Sarah already knows the time distribution curve for first or subsequent labors!* By tracking time for several weeks, even people with variable schedules can sometimes see patterns. For instance, for this essay from a few years back I interviewed a minister who tracked her time and figured out how long a funeral and the associated pastoral care would most likely take. Births and deaths are both big and meaningful events, and yet people who deal with either frequently can in fact estimate them and build them into their time models. Knowing the probabilities for time can help with a sense of control.

Then we move on to the ranked priorities. After an overnight labor or an overnight shift, I am sure that the top non-work priority is sleep! But beyond that, it helps to make a short list of tasks you’d like to do in a day. Very short. We’re talking three or so. Maybe five if you feel fairly confident (based on the probability model) that the day won’t be interrupted. When you’ve got a short slot you feel won’t be taken away, you can map out the next day or two, and brainstorm ideas to assign to future days. Then, when time is available, you don’t dither around deciding what to do. You start on the list. If you get interrupted, fine. Pick up where you left off the next time you can. If we’re talking three things in 24 hours most likely you will get to them. And when you are done with the list you are done! You know you’ve been productive and done the things you wanted to do, so you can relax and feel good about yourself.

This was always my strategy during the newborn days, which also feature a lot of being on call in a different sense. I would create a list of three things beyond life maintenance I wanted to do. Examples: Write a blog post. Go for a walk. Call to make an appointment somewhere. Three things in 24 hours is manageable. And if they’re well chosen, you also feel like you’re making progress. Three things a day is 21 things a week (five a day is 35!) That’s more than 1000 (or 1750!) in a year. If they matter, that’s a lot. Rather than worrying about the universe of things that aren’t being done, make a set short list of things you will do, and then always do those. When expectations match reality, we feel content.

I’d love to hear from people with jobs that require being on-call or have variable schedules on how they manage their non-work time to feel productive.

*Personal observation: fourth and fifth births tend to be fast.

photo: Babies — cute but unpredictable! Strange to look at this photo of my little guy from early last year. He is a big boy now! 

By Laura Vanderkam

Some warm morning, nearly 200 years ago, the poet John Keats was lying outside enjoying the breeze:

“My idle days?  Ripe was the drowsy hour;

The blissful cloud of summer-indolence

Benumb’d my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;

Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower.”

It’s a lovely image — one captured in his famous Ode on Indolence poem, a delightful little bit of verse that showed up in my inbox when I told one of my more literary friends that I was writing a book on time management. I think it was meant ironically, especially when I mentioned that I’d be keeping logs of my hours, writing down what I was doing as often as I remembered, much like a lawyer billing her time.

Who wants to do that? Why would you think about managing your time when you could be drowsing on the grass?

It’s a good question. After two years of talking about this topic, I’ve realized that time management gets a bad reputation. We view it as the discipline of scheduling every minute, and analyzing those minutes to see if we’re being productive. Many of us viscerally don’t like the idea because, like Keats, we find lying in the grass doing nothing to be quite pleasurable. We also recognize that these fallow times are when our best ideas can come to us. We complain of being starved for time these days because few of us do lie in the grass letting the ideas in our brains sprout as they will. Therefore, we like to assign blame to society, capitalism, the monster under the bed, whatever for this state of affairs.

But this argument is problematic for a few reasons. For starters, we do have plenty of time for indolence. The easiest place to find it? The 18-22 (or 35, if you believe Nielsen) hours per week the average American spends watching TV. Keats lived before the electronic age, an age in which a spot of boredom could not be immediately ameliorated with 500 channels piping in everything from sex to murder to home repair, or email if there’s nothing on. We may claim to like indolence, but we certainly don’t choose it when it’s an option.

Second, Keats, who died tragically young at age 25, never spent time raising children. Some people would argue that having a family inevitably depresses one’s creative tendencies, whether you feel the need to support the family financially (as society often asks of men) or care for the children (as society often asks of women).

I don’t necessarily think this is the case, or at least I hope not! (And certainly people like mom-of-three J.K. Rowling might have something to say about that). But the reality is that if you want to enjoy hours of indolence as a parent, you’re going to have to understand your schedule very well, and then schedule them in. You are going to have to create space for indolence, because otherwise it will simply get buried under the joys and needs of small children, under the demands and triumphs of making a living, or it will steal away in the arms of (as Keats writes in his poem) “Love, Ambition and that demon Poesy.”

How do you create this space? For me, it’s a two step approach. This week, I’m keeping a log of my time. I find that by understanding exactly how I spend the 168 hours we all have each week, I can start to see where I do have space for daydreaming. And then, I can start to honor this time rather than just checking email, picking up the toy flotsam (loved that phrase from The Happiness Project) that floats through our living areas or reading the Pottery Barn catalog. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron talks of setting artist’s dates, and there’s something to this. I carved out an hour this morning to run outside (which I find relaxing). Some weekday afternoons, I block out an hour to sit in a coffee shop and jot down thoughts. If my husband takes the kids on a Saturday afternoon, I resist the urge to clean the house, and instead work on cleaning out the cobwebs in my head. I don’t think these activities are an unproductive use of my time, because I log my time and I know I’m spending plenty of hours interacting with my kids and working on more concrete projects.

But it is because I know where my time is going that I’m able to have lethargic, joyfully indolent hours. An “Ode to a Time Log” may not sound as enticing as an ode on indolence, but there is great freedom in logging time in our distracted age. Being aware of our time helps to create “evenings steep’d in honied indolence” to quote Keats, and time to lie “cool-bedded in the flowery grass.”

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