Film Courage: Ken, I have a quote here from the late author Phillip Roth.
And the quote is “The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
Dr. Ken Atchity, Author/Producer: It’s worse than good intentions right?
And was that a question?
Film Courage: It’s a statement and a question I guess?
Do you have any ideas on this?
I know it’s kind of just a thing I’m throwing out here.
Ken: Well I think unfinished works are the kind of characteristic debris of the writer’s
life.
Of any visionary’s life I mean the discards that Leonardo DaVinci had in his studio were
prodigious and you just have a lot of ideas and you can’t do them all.
And one of the methods that I’ve developed over the years is to actually set aside a
new idea and give it a two week rest and check in with it in 2 weeks to see if you even remember
the idea.
And the key to doing that as a writer is not to write it down.
See it’s like a basic rule that I have is that if you have an idea and as a writer your
immediate goal is to write it down (get it down) because that’s what writers do, if
you can train your brain not to do that you are going to have much better product in the
long run because you are not writing every single thing down including every bad thing.
So by not writing it down when you revisit it in 2 weeks from now, if you don’t remember
it, that’s great.
That means one lousy idea went away as opposed to trying to do something with every single
idea that you have.
So I think that’s part of what creative people learn is how to manage their own minds
and because I was an accountant’s son I long ago analyzed the creative process, the
creative mind and decided that they weren’t just crazy (the way a lot of people think).
There actually is a method to creativity and in fact it spreads across every discipline
whether you are a physicist or a mathematician or an inventor or a writer or an artist, the
creative process has the same steps and the same general pattern.
So if you can understand the process you aren’t nearly as neurotic as if you don’t understand
it.
One of my goals was to not be crazy.
Salvador Dali said (one of my favorite things about this is) he said the different between
this and madman is that I am not mad.
And I love that because it’s exactly what I am talking about, it’s understanding the
method in your madness as Shakespeare put it.
If you can understand that then you don’t have to be unhappy or neurotic in order to
be a productive writer.
Film Courage: Speaking of which (writing things down), do you make lists?
Ken: I do make lists but kind of limited.
I mean what I have instead is a very complicated method of time management that involves a
charge that I make regularly and the chart has room for some lists but most of what I
do is doing the same things in compartments of time that I believe are the right compartments
for what I do.
Film Courage: I know in our last interview which was about a year (or a year and a half
ago) we talked about one of your books and we discussed time management and that creative
people who get things done are very aware of time.
So then I began to monitor myself.
Am I really as aware of time as I should be?
Maybe I am not aware enough and so it becomes this new thing where (you were talking about
this before) that most people who are productive, they know exactly how much time something
takes them.
And this was interesting because I thought I was aware of time but then when I started
listening to that I realized no I’m actually not because I don’t know how much time [something
takes me] and it ends up where I’m not giving myself enough of it.
Can someone be too aware of time where it becomes a hindrance?
Ken: Yes I think it’s possible in today’s world with all of the watches and technology
and devices for keeping track of time.
And then a very separate subject but it’s very connected with creativity because time
is all we have.
I mean there are two things in life you can manage, one is work and one is time.
And one of them is infinite and the other one is finite.
So without even talking further about it, you think about that a realize that by definition
you cannot manage an infinite thing right?
An infinite element.
An infinite element cannot be managed, but a finite one can.
But for some reason along the way as we grow up in the world we think that the wrong one
is infinite and we think it’s time.
And it’s not true.
The only one that is time is infinite for is God.
For the rest of us, it’s all too finite.
But what is infinite is work.
Work is completely infinite because good work produces more work.
You know as my son once told me, Dad you’ll never catch up.
I was telling him “I really hope I can catch up this weekend.”
And he goes “You are never going to catch up.”
And he’s right because work is infinite.
If it’s good work, it generates more work.
If it’s bad work, it generates more work.
So no matter how you look at it work is infinite.
You can’t manage work.
You can only manage time.
And you can manage time if you know how to compartmentalize it in a productive way that
works with your particular mind.
What I mean by that is I think that the first step in managing time other than keeping track
of your time like you were talking about, when I gave classes on that and when I’m
consulting with individuals about their time management, we start by having them make a
weekly charge of their time.
You ask people how many hours are there in a week and they don’t even know because
that just never occurred to them.
But there is a finite number of hours in every week and what I want to know first is what
do you do with those hours?
Exactly how many hours do you spend sleeping, eating, walking, exercising, talking on the
phone, texting, emailing and working on the things you are supposed to work on.
And doing errands and doing all of the other things that you don’t really want to do
but you kind of have to do to be human.
So once you know that the next step is to figure out attention span.
Because when I was a professor I would come and say they were failing history and they
didn’t get it because they were spending six hours a day studying history.
And I’d go “Wait a minute, six hours a day?”
“Yes, because I’m failing in it.”
And I’d go “Well, it’s very possible that you’re spending too much time, not
too little time.”
Because what happens during those six hours is probably not the most productive way of
studying history and we would rearrange their patterns so that they would actually study
history only one hour a day but do it in an interrupted way.
And here’s what you do during that hour, etc.
And so what we’re trying to figure out is what is your attention span for an individual
subject.
So if we know that this person can pay attention to history for one hour and after that her
mind starts wandering, then it’s a complete waste of time literally to spend more than
one hour studying history at a time.
That’s what I call a compartment of time.
If it comes to your writing, how much time can you write being fully focused and not
thinking about the outside world, etc.
And that’s the compartment where your attention span is at its max, because if you’re doing
anything where your attention span is not at its max you are basically wasting your
time and your energy and both of those things have negative, kind of depressive effect on
your motivation, they are not good.
So you really want to figure out your attention span and then you want to arrange your life
in compartments of time that have to do with attention span.
And when it comes to being conscious of time one of my rules has been from the very beginning
the first time I started thinking of these things when I was like 19 is that I stopped
wearing a watch.
Because I realized that the only way I was going to be productive with my own interest
and activities is if I lived in my own time and did not live in everybody else’s time.
And everywhere you look there is a clock on the wall, there’s Big Ben on the horizon,
there’s television monitor’s with countdowns on them.
There is everything out there reminding you of the world’s time.
And the world’s time is not your time.
You don’t have all the time in the world, you have your own time.
So I discovered a method year’s ago which is simply the stop watch method.
Which is instead of using clocks you use a stop watch.
And you tell yourself (for example) I’m going to write for an hour and a half today
no matter what and I’m going to monitor that on a stop watch.
And I will turn the stop watch on when I am actually writing.
And when I am not writing like if the phone rings and I have to take it or if the house
burns down and I have to deal with that, then I will turn off the stop watch until that
particular interruption is over with.
And then I’ll go back until I get my hour and a half on the stop watch.
And it doesn’t matter whether you are doing it at 3:00 p.m. or 3:00 a.m. or 8:00 p.m.,
etc.
As long as you get that hour and a half on the stop watch you are in good shape.
So sometimes I have three or four stop watches around depending on what project I’m applying
them to and of course I’ve got my computer stop watch.
And I rarely look at the time except if there’s an appointment or something I have to be aware
of because I’m really focused on my time which is the stop watches time and that’s
what I need to be focused on if want to be in that unique category of people who create
things (in my case, manage people who create things).