Coffee With David

Good evening. Please ignore the piles of sand and the shovel in my hand. Grab a cup of coffee and have a seat and I will finish burying some time thieves that have robbed me blind this weekend.

While my Thanksgiving was spectacular, this weekend has not been near as productive as I had planned it to be. In fact, it went to hell in a hand basket from a writing point of view. It was my plan to have 60 to 75 pages, not counting blog pages, written this weekend. At the time of writing this posting I achieved 0 pages.

Since I can only write part time, my writing time is very precious to me. I guard it as a bear would its cubs. Still, I find it amazing at how many things and people in my life demand that I sacrifice this precious time for them. Often these time-thieves, much like any other thief, have no care or thought as to how precious their object of theft is to the owner. Instead their only focus is themselves.

I know how self-centered I sound in this posting. But, like anyone who has had any kind of theft against them, I am mad. It is Sunday, the last day of a four day holiday for me. I knew Thanksgiving I would not have time to write. I also knew on Saturday that I would lose two or three hours due to a family tradition I call “the grave crawl” (this is where I end up traveling from one family members grave site to another all over St. Louis to put Christmas wreaths on tombs. It is an event I hate, especially when I have had more than my fill of death over the last several years without the chance to fully grieve or get away from it, but I do it out of family duty). This event ended up being a six hour event.

We all have plans and often those plans go up in smoke shortly after we start working them. I will be blogging on time management and writing in a future blog on my Fiction Blog. Maybe because I have seen so many die over the last couple of decades (in fact in 2006 I had over 25 people I knew die), I believe that we only have a small amount of time in this life and every moment is precious. It should not be wasted, but enjoyed. Be that enjoyment pursuing our goals or holding a beautiful woman in my arms, or spending it with family and friends in moments of mutual enjoyment, or helping those same people. And yes, sometimes the theft of time is critical to the fulfillment of the moment in our lives. Still . . ..

I want to ask you, my readers, what time-thieves do you have and how do you deal with them?

Here are a few of mine:
1. Internet
2. Television
3. Unplanned events
4. When I was in school: Unimportant or made up busy work/homework assignments

What about you? What are yours?