Important note: you’ll know if you’ve worked with me that I strongly recommend you do not use your phone as a timer. Instead, get an analogue, countdown timer, like this one, that ticks down silently, makes a ding at the end of the period, shows at a glance how much time is left, and is incapable of receiving messages or notifications of any kind.
1. Awareness of time. When you work with a timer, you don’t end up sitting down and then looking up two hours later, late for your meeting and wondering where the time has gone and why you have so little to show for it. Instead, you are aware of time passing, how much has gone and how much you have left before you need to stop.
2. Opportunity to regroup. Sometimes when we sit down to work on something, we find ourselves chasing thoughts down rabbit holes that lead us far away from what we actually mean to be doing, or we end up deep in the weeds with one small point we’re struggling to make, having lost any awareness of the big picture. Without a timer, this can go on for an entire writing session. With a timer, you have a ding! And that ding provides the opportunity to pause, stand up, stretch, and ask yourself: do I really want to be doing this right now? And if I don’t, what do I want to do instead?
3. Commitment. With the act of turning the dial, you are committing keeping your focus on your writing project for the duration of the time you’ve set. If things aren’t going well, you can look at the timer and say, “I only need to keep at this for another 10 minutes, and then I can do something else.” If you keep track of your writing blocks, you might tell yourself, “This won’t count if I do something else partway through.” A timer creates accountability.
4. Tracking. It might be useful for you to keep track of the number of writing blocks you complete in a week or month, as a way of learning what is typical or reasonable for you, what your patterns are, etc.
5. Setting goals. Once you have a sense of what might be reasonable, you can start setting goals for yourself — how many writing blocks you intend to accomplish in a particular week or month. You might find you become more creative about how you get your writing done — a free 30 minutes becomes an opportunity to fit in a 20-minute writing block.
6. Focus. People often find they are more focused and efficient when they are working with a short chunk of time. It’s like packing for a trip and choosing the smaller suitcase instead of the large one — you are more careful about how you fill it. Limits can inspire efficiency.
7. Health. Getting up and walking around for five minutes every half-hour helps regulate blood pressure and control blood sugar levels, to the point that it can counteract the negative effects of a sedentary lifestyle.* Taking a few minutes to look out the window, stretch, water a plant, pet your dog, actually taste your tea, etc invites pleasure. It is good to remember you have a body, that you are not just a brain on a stick.
8. Agency. Sometimes it can feel the writing is dragging you around after it — that it’s in charge, and you have to go where it wants you to go. But you are actually the boss. The built-in pauses that working with a timer creates allow you to remember that, and to make active decisions about what you do (and don’t) want to do next.
9. Separation of tasks. Writing involves more than just writing. There can be reading, researching, fact-checking, data-crunching, drafting, revising, proofreading, adding references, corresponding, etc etc. With a timer, you can be very intentional about which aspect of the project you are devoting your time to. You can say to yourself, “Right now, I will x, I will not y.”
10. Windows of time. With practice writing with a timer, you develop the superpower of being able to make use of odd windows of time to get writing done. Instead of sticking to the old story of, “Oh, I can’t possibly write unless I have several uninterrupted hours available,” you become the person who can write between meetings, during your daughter’s dance class, in the 45 minutes that suddenly appear when an appointment is cancelled, etc. (This works especially well when you also have a practice of leaving notes for yourself at the end of each writing session.)
11. Flow. You are allowed to ignore your timer. If it dings and you are in the middle of exactly where you want to be, you can carry on. Sometimes the whole point of the timer is just to get started, safe in the understanding that when it dings you can stop. But just because you are allowed to stop doesn’t mean you have to.