by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
![](http://killzoneblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/salvador-dalis-persistence-memory-300x217.jpeg)
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Oil on canvas
We’ve had some discussions about time recently. Brother Gilstrap opined about making time for the things that count. Garry laid out a grid of 100 10-minute blocks. Heck, Kay has a whole cozy series centered around time.
Just thinking about time takes time! The trick is not to go crazy about it.
Reminds me of some Dad Jokes:
Why did the woman put a clock under her desk? She wanted to work overtime.
Why shouldn’t you tell secrets when a clock is around? Because time will tell.
What does a wall clock do after it stops ticking? It hangs around.
Ba-dump-bump.
All seriousness aside, I’ve been a lifelong learner about what we call “time management.” There are tons of books out there on the subject, my favorite being the classic How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life by Alan Lakein.
To me, it all boils down to deciding what you want to do and then prioritizing the list.
I’ve used the A-B-C method. You look at your list and mark all the “must do” tasks with an A, the “want to do” tasks with B, and the “can wait” tasks with C.
Then you prioritize each letter with a number. Thus, A-1 becomes the first thing you tackle, followed by A-2 and so on. If you have time, you start on the Bs. Usually you don’t do anything with the Cs, until they move up to a B or an A.
I find taking a few minutes each morning to write a fresh list extremely helpful.
The other day I was thinking about time again because, well, the sands of time run on and our allotment gets a little less each day. Yet the things I want to do seem to keep expanding. The bucket for my list is a twelve-pound drum.
Pondering the possibilities can be overwhelming. I am reminded of the Donald Fagin song lyric: But tell me what’s to be done, Lord/’bout the weather in my head?
It’s like the static and program bits you hear as you keep changing the channels on a radio.
And that’s when an idea hit me. I needed to find the right station.
So I formed KDRI.
That stands for four columns: Know, Do, Read, Ideas.
Under K, I began to list the things I want know more about. It includes subjects like Alexander the Great, The Mongol Empire, George Orwell, Vikings, and secrets of the grill masters.
The Do list is all my tasks, with writing as top priority. I list here my WIP, my WIP-to-come, Substack posts, blog posts, and miscellaneous other projects. Then there are things I want to do and places I want to go.
Read is for the books and long articles I want to get to. A few of the titles on my TBR list are: Musk by Walter Isaacson, the autobiography of Jim Murray, Jerry West by Roland Lazenby, Nicholas Nickleby, The Raymond Chandler Papers, and The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories.
Ideas is for my creativity time, capturing ideas for later sorting The best way to get good ideas is to come up with lots of ideas, assess, and throw the weak ones out. Mostly these are story ideas that I’ll look at for further development.
Each day I look at the columns and write my priority list, as described above. (And I do mean writing, with a pen on a piece of paper. There’s something empowering about doing so.)
I include exercise time, eating time, a power nap, and leave some time for discretionary goofing around. I start early and go till about 4 p.m. The rest of the day is wife time: dinner, maybe a movie, maybe play a game, or just talk. Of course, that’s subject to change if we have friends over, go out, or life tosses in one of its many intrusions.
Sunday is a day of rest. I usually try to catch up on my reading.
I’m mindful of not getting too obsessive over this. As Sue said in her comment on John’s post, “Balance is key. I learned that lesson the hard way.”
But I also know that a few minutes of planning can pay off in productive dividends.
So next time the static is getting you down, try tuning in to KDRI. It’s free!
What are some things you have in your KDRI columns?