Around eighty
years ago the economist John Maynard Keynes, anticipating further technological
innovations on top of those which astonished the 19th century, predicted that in a
couple of generations people would only have to work a fifteen-hour week.
As we know this
hasn’t come to pass and various reasons are put forward for why he got it wrong, for example: JMK did
not anticipate how much stuff we would all ‘need’, including many more
technological innovations he could never have dreamt of; telling everyone
how busy you are has become a matter of one-upmanship; and we spend a lot of
time thinking about how much we have to do.
I read all this
in an article called ‘No Time’ in a copy of The
New Yorker bought recently in the airport before my flight home from the
USA.
Elsewhere
(sorry, can’t remember where) I read that every second we make decisions about
how to spend our time. So if we say ‘I haven’t got time to … write a novel, get
some exercise … ’ or whatever it happens to be, that isn’t true. We have the
time but choose to spend it in other ways.
I proved that
point when I chose not to catch up with current thinking/look intellectual by reading
my copy of The New Yorker on the
plane as I’d intended; instead, with a plastic glass of red to hand, I slumped in
front of Blue Jasmine.
Writers are
notorious for procrastinating and in the 21st century they can spend hours
being distracted by emails, social media and the highways and byways of the
internet.
We are told in a
new book, John Buchan and The Thirty-Nine Steps: An Exploration, that John Buchan
planned his time to the nth degree. One evening he told his family he would
finish writing his biography of Montrose at 11am the following day and he did,
just as the clock was striking. He began his next at 11.15.
Now maybe JB
didn’t have to worry about what to make for dinner, nor did he have to update
his Facebook page or worry about his Amazon ratings, and he didn’t have the
option of slumping in front of a movie. But as well as being the author of
around 35 novels and 50 non-fiction titles, including single-handedly
completing the 24 volumes of Nelson’s History of the War, he was in the course
of his 65 years a lawyer, diplomat, WW1 propagandist, publisher, MP and
Governor General of Canada.
No one could
accuse him of procrastinating.
My favourite
multi-tasker though is Queen Margaret of Scotland (1045-93) as described by author
Eileen Dunlop:
‘She managed to fit in the most
extraordinary amount of activity – the management of two households, the choice
of clothes and furnishings; the supervision of building work; the opus anglicanum [needlework]; charitable
works; hours on horseback; visits to shrines and hermitages; discussing
theology; spending time with the king and overseeing the upbringing of her
growing family, while almost constantly pregnant.’
Writing is not mentioned but I'm quite sure if she'd been asked to dash off a serial or two for a medieval woman's magazine she'd have fitted that in as well.
And that, if you take out the word medieval, is what I should be doing right now.
