Film Courage: One of your many books Ken is WRITE TIME?
And in the forward you say that the world can be divided into two people, productive
people and non-productive people.
And you say that productive people have a love affair with time.
I’ve love to know what makes someone on the right side of time and what make someone
where time in their enemy?
Dr, Ken Atchity, Producer/Author: Well that’s a very good question put in a very intelligent
way that makes it hard to get a handle on it because time is…time doesn’t really
exist.
Time is a human construct, we created time.
Squirrels and chipmunks don’t have much idea of time.
They know that the sun rises and the sun goes down and they know that it rains but they
don’t think the way that we do and they don’t keep track of their birthdays for
example, only humans do that.
And it’s unfortunate because you’re only as old as you think you are.
And that’s the way a squirrel looks at it and nobody is arguing with the squirrel about
it but humans know better.
Some people look at time as the enemy and some people look at it as a friend.
There is an old Spanish saying that is “There is more time than life,” which I always
thought was a wonderful way of looking at it because that is what a productive person
would say “there is more time than life.”
And another Spanish or Italian saying says that “Life is short, but wide.”
And that’s another way of productively looking at it.
Like people say “How can you do as much stuff as you do?”
Well that’s because that’s what I do.
I don’t do anything else.
And I used to give classes on time management and do a lot of studies on it, in fact WRITE
TIME is filled with time management theories.
And one of the things I noticed about people was they had no idea where there time went.
And they go “I don’t know where you find all the time.”
And I would say “I don’t know where you lose it.”
I mean we all have the same amount of time and they go “How much time do we have by
the way?
How much time is in a week?”
And 2 out of 10 people can ask the question right off the top of their heads because they’ve
never really multiplied 25 by 7 and realized exactly how many hours there are in a week.
Everybody has the same amount of time.
So what I would do in a time management class at UCLA or elsewhere is I would say let’s
chart your time this week.
I just want you to make a chart of what you do with your time and let’s come in and
talk about it next week when we come back together.
And they would come back in and that was before I asked them how many hours there were in
a week I would wait for the third week to ask that question.
And some people would come in with 98 hour weeks and some people would come in with 62
hour weeks and nobody seem to agree in general how many hours there were in a week because
the hours they gave me didn’t add up, they didn’t make sense.
They’d say “I sleep six hours a day.”
But it turned out in the third week of analysis that instead of 6 hours a day they were actually
sleeping 10 hours.
They just were telling themselves they were sleeping 6 hours a day.
How much time do you spend talking on the telephone?
Most people thought they maybe spent 15 minutes a day, when in fact it might be an hour a
day.
And watching television (of course).
Some people said they were only watching an hour a day when they were actually watching
three hours a day.
But a productive person knows exactly how long it takes to do something.
Like when I write a screenplay or a book, I can tell you how many hours it takes to
do it and so I know that I can get it done in a certain amount of time.
Agatha Christie apparently wrote as many as 10 books a year.
She had to use four or five pen names because she just kept writing.
When you think about it writing is a function of how fast you type.
Because I always say (in my writing book including that one) if you’re making a rule not to
sit down to write if you don’t know what you’re going to write then you’ll never
waste any time and you’ll never have writer’s block.
So simply don’t sit down until you know what you’re going to write.
It’s just a matter of how fast can you type.
So it’s better to be walking along the beach thinking about the structure of your story
then it is to be wasting a lot of time sitting in front of the computer typing stuff and
throwing it away and all that stuff.
Just figure it all out in your head.
“Well what if I forget it?”
Well guess what?
If you forget it that’s probably good.
You are forgetting forgettable things?
You won’t forget it when it starts getting really good.
Because then it will do what Faulkner said, it will start haunting you and you won’t
be able to forget it and then you’ll just write it down.
William Saroyan was asked once how long it took him to write the Human Comedy because
somebody had told the journalist it had took him three days and he said “No, it took
me all my life to write it.
It just took me a few days to type it out.”
So if you’re productive you’ve already figured out that there are certain things
that are completely unproductive such as sitting in front of a blank screen trying to figure
out what to put down next and other ways to do things that make you productive.
And productive people don’t waste their time.
As I said when it comes to waiting, you don’t wait, you just do something else.
You what I call “rotate” from one thing to another so you still have new energy constantly
because you’re switching to new activities.
And when you switch to the new activity you have new energy just because of that.
But you’re also pulling energy from the previous activity, it’s kind of pulling
you back and wanting you to do more on it.
But that’s good instead of listening to it and going back and doing more on the previous
activity.
It’s better to have that kind of little anxiety going on there because then the next
time that activity gets a chance at your time it will be ready and it will be more productive
during that time compartment.
So I think that’s the difference between productive and unproductive people have never
figured out how to use time, they don’t even know how to measure time.
And they confuse things.
There are two function in life or two entities that we deal with.
One is time and the other is work.
And one of them is eternal and timeless and endless and the other one is not.
But people get it wrong.
The one that is timeless and endless and eternal is work not time unless you’re God, you
know?
But if you’re not God, then guess what?
You have a limited amount of time and the only problem is you don’t know what the
limit is but that doesn’t matter because you just have to operate anyway.
But what is infinite is work because good work produces more work and so does bad work.
So no matter what kind of work you’re doing it keeps going and you cannot manage it therefore
because it’s a given that you can’t manage an infinite thing but you can manage something
that is finite and that’s time.
So managing time is what we have to do.
So let’s say that if you’re writing a book and you know that you type 7 pages an
hour at least then you give yourself one 1 hour every day to write your book.
Well at the end of 100 days you’ve got how many pages?
700 pages right?
So it’s not complicated to figure it out.
But you’ve got to manage the right thing, manage your time.
Because the work will happen only if you give it time to attend to it and what happens to
the people who procrastinate because they think they’re trying to manager the work
and they don’t know that they can’t manage the work.
Like I’m going to get this work done if it takes me all summer and then nothing happens
(they don’t do it).
That isn’t what you should do.
You should say “I’m going to work from seven to eight every morning without fail
for five days a week rather than seven days a week” because your brain revolts when
you make it stop something that it’s actually enjoying.
So if you make it stop after the fifth day it’s very upset and it spends the whole
weekend thinking about the project and it’s really raring to go on Monday when you start
again.
Whereas if you keep it going, it will get worn out and it will get bored eventually
because that’s what brains do.
So there are two kinds of productive people.
The unproductive ones, let’s now talk about.
I mean they have their own thing going and I hope they are enjoying life.
But productive people are divided into two kinds and those are the happy ones and the
unhappy ones.
The unhappy ones are the ones that never figured out the psychology of creativity and so they
are constantly surprised by it and upset by it.
And that’s why you have Virginia Wolf and Hemingway and Sylvia Plath offing themselves
at the end because they’ve never figured it out.
They’ve never figured out at the end of a project they are going to get depressed
and they are going to go into postpartum depression that they may never come out of.
But if you’re on the other side of tings (the happy productive person) you’ve figured
that out all already.
So what do you do?
Before you end a project, you end another project and then you can’t wait to get into
the new project so you don’t mind finishing the first project so you’ve eliminated postpartum
depression and that’s simply because you’ve figured out how your creative mind works which
is what WRITER’S TIME is all about and that’s what I mean by happy productive versus unhappy
productive people.
You don’t have to be miserable and suicidal to be a writer.
You can be perfectly happy by knowing your system and not letting it do it to you.