Kitchen timers are the latest time-management trend. Fans of the Pomodoro Technique say to set the timer for 25 minutes, work with total focus, then take a five-minute break.

I like the idea, and I’ve tried variations on the timer technique. But when I’m on deadline, a timer adds to the stress, plus I chafe at having to sit still for long chunks. And the timer doesn’t change the coping habit that I’ve been refining over decades: encounter obstacle, get out of chair, walk to kitchen and look for food. Distract! Numb the anxiety! The timer has no power over this drive.

I’ve tried setting the timer so that it counts up instead of down. This method creates less stress and helps me educate myself about how long things actually take, which is a pleasant surprise when something goes faster than expected, but just as often an unpleasant surprise when it takes so very much longer. Unpleasant but useful to know. The counting-up method has potential but isn’t there yet.

Here’s what does work, I discovered.

Five-minute increments

Yep. Five minutes. Because that appears to be my upper limit for sitting with uncertainty, anxiety and frustration.

I tried this last week, on deadline. I was so tired I was having trouble focusing, but the project still needed major edits and was due within the next 24 hours.

I sat down to face the edits. Felt the familiar reaction: “Gahhh! Don’t know how to fix this!” Observed myself starting to get up, in search of food and escape. OK, I said, I need to be kind to myself—I’m sleep-deprived and I’ve got to get this done. Let me spend five minutes focused on the edits. Then I can forage if I need to.

About three minutes later, the foraging urge hit hard. I can focus for two more minutes, I said to myself, and believed it. I stayed with the project. A bit further in, the urge to jump up from the desk hit again. I checked my watch; seven minutes had passed since I started. OK, I’d stuck with the deal. I stood, stretched out my neck and arms, ate a piece of fruit. Was I ready to go back to work? Nope, too exhausted from lack of sleep the night before. OK, I thought, I’ll lie down and take a nap. If I have to complete this project in five-minute work sessions with half-hour breaks in between, so be it.

After resting for just 15 minutes, I felt refreshed enough to go back to my desk and work for another five minutes. Then I took a 20-minute break. After about three of these cycles, I’d built up some decent momentum and was able to work steadily for six hours. I finished the project and met my deadline.

Inefficient, you may say? It’s actually pretty efficient, compared to the usual stalling and struggling and worrying and munching.

The six-hour session that followed the ramp-up would be considered by some (like Robert Boice) to be a binge—not ideal. Later, I’ll look at how to take breaks during extended sessions without losing momentum. But first: Let’s make the five-minute increments a habit and see how that goes.

One of the things that frustrates me most about writing—or creating anything, really—is the way that you—I—never get it right the first time. Not-getting-it-right is built into the process: whatever I’m working on is continuously wrong, or gradually-and-marginally-less-wrong, until finally, near the very end, it’s right (enough), and therefore Done! NEXT!

I like being right. I hate being wrong. Creating means spending a lot of time hanging out in the not-right zone. Bleah!

It’s one of the main reasons I get immobilized. You can say all you want, “Go ahead, just write a terrible first draft” (and believe me, I always write lousy first drafts, and second and third ones too), but I find this aspect of creativity nearly intolerable. I hate committing to a choice—a word, a sentence, an organizing principle—knowing I will just have to change it later.

Yet this is how ideas get refined. I revisit them, rework them, see how they relate to each other, begin to see what’s more or less important, find new relationships, decide what’s a tangent and what’s core, eliminate the excess. Did I mention that I hate that this is how the process works? It’s excruciating to me.

After coming across the work of psychologist Carol Dweck, I’m beginning to understand my reaction a little better. Dweck has done research into the difference between performance goals (“I did great! I’m smart and talented! Reward me!”) and learning goals (“I persisted and eventually got there! Yay!”)  As the proverbial A-student, I grew up (happily) performance-focused, rewarded for consistently Getting It Right. This works fine until you hit a setback. Performance-focused A-student types never learn to manage the frustration of Getting It Wrong. Their (my) approach is: “There is a Right Way, and the goal is to get to the Right Way sooner. Wrongness is unacceptable and a big waste of time!” The kid who’s rewarded for persistence rather than performance thinks, “Oh, I love a problem! If I keep working at it, I’ll figure it out.”

“I love a problem”? This attitude is completely alien to me. In my mind, “I don’t know how” leads automatically to “Therefore, I cannot.” My progress is continually throttled by the emotional conviction that “No answer YET” equals “There IS no answer.”

And really, almost all of life is about Not Yet. The moments of “Got it!” are brief and fleeting. So it would be useful to learn tolerance and appreciation for Not Yet.

A scientist I’m acquainted with heard my description of creativity-as-successive-iterations-of-not-rightness and told me, “That’s how science works: Asking successively better questions. It’s a cumulative process.” I like the word “cumulative.” It suggests not that things are wrong-wrong-wrong-until-Bing! they’re OK, but rather that I’m building on my work so that it keeps getting better.

Tolerating not-rightness is a learned behavior, and I don’t know (yet) how to learn it. I have some ideas, though. And I’m persisting.

How’s the Early Bedtime Project going? Spotty. But positive even so. The inconsistency is not a surprise—I acknowledged that late-night work sessions are a longstanding habit, maybe even part of my identity. As expected (I even built it into the plan), I reverted to working into the night under deadline pressure. Now that I’m not under deadline, I’m finding it really hard to return to the plan. I still think it’s possible.

Even though I’m not going to bed so early these days, a few things are different, in a good way.

• I have gone to bed early a few times in the past few weeks, and slept nicely.

• I haven’t beaten myself up for working late when I needed to.

• I think of myself as someone who will resume going to bed earlier. Maybe my identity is shifting a little.

Some other things I’ve noticed:

• Although shutting the computer off by 9:00 doesn’t guarantee I’ll meet the early bedtime goal, not shutting the computer off by 9:00 does guarantee that I won’t fall asleep until much later than I want to. To put it more simply, it’s really, really, important to turn the computer off early! Even if I don’t feel finished that day!

• And I have to be careful about TV. Okay to watch some, earlyish. Watching a lot, late-ish, gets me worked up and makes it harder to fall asleep. I need to find other ways to reward myself for turning off the computer, aside from TV.

• I had planned not to be distressed when I take a long time to fall asleep on a given night, or wake up in the middle of the night. Nice theory, but when the tossing and turning and mind-racing go on for hours, mm, not so easy to let it go. I need techniques to call on when that happens. Indeed, you yourself may have been wondering, “But Janet, what are you supposed to do when you go to bed early and then lie awake? Because I [meaning of course you] do not find that kind of thing at all motivating!”

So here’s what I’ve been trying, on nights when sleep is difficult:

Mindful breathing. Middle-of-the-night Mindfulness 101: Notice what’s going through your mind, without getting involved in it . . . notice what’s happening in your body, without feeling compelled to fix it. Then bring attention to your breath, observing when your mind wanders away from the breath and gently bringing it back. I admit that switching from thinking (with mind racing) to observing (without attachment) does not come so very naturally! I’m practicing . . . Anyway, here are some ideas for doing this at bedtime. (The breathing exercises are all good. Pick the simplest one, or the first one, or close your eyes and point. Don’t get all agitated over which one to use.)

Acupressure. One night this worked! Not every night. There are lots of acupressure points that are supposed to help with insomnia. This video explains two of them very clearly. (Sorry about the brief ad. But note the video is from the lovely people at the late lamented Elephant Pharmacy!) An internet search will turn up lots more.

It’s 9:30pm (oops!) as I draft this. Turning off the computer now—will edit and post during daylight hours. See? Stopping before I’m finished. I can do it.

I’m a night owl, as you may have deduced from the time stamps on my blog posts. I actually like mornings, I do!, but for years I’ve been in the habit of doing my creative work (and often my less creative work too) late, late at night.

Nothing wrong with that. Being free to stay up and sleep in is one of the main reasons I became self-employed all those years ago. (It is true! Maybe the main reason.)  But this style works less well for me than it used to. I feel tired and behind the curve a lot of the time—kind of in a state of perpetual jet lag. I do seem to have more potentially productive energy in the morning, on the occasions when I’m awake—I’d like to take advantage of that. And the late-night schedule presents problems when I have to get up early to lead a workshop.

I experimented with shaking up the late-night habit on my mini-vacation last month. I got a spa treatment in the afternoon, which left me super-relaxed. I fixed a simple dinner at the place I was staying, watched a low-key movie on DVD, and went to bed at 11pm. 11pm is early for me! Ah, the benefits of being out of my usual environment, without the usual stimuli, and with lots of pampering.

I was able to build on the post-vacation-early-to-bed momentum for a few days. But as with previous campaigns, I quickly slipped back into my old ways. Nevertheless, I continue to examine this habit with an eye to changing it! One idea seems key:

Turn off the computer by 8:30 or 9:00pm. This also includes stopping other work, such as bill-paying. So that I have the time I need to wind down before bed.

Habits—not so simple

This intention has a lot of sub-issues attached to it, making it not so easy to stick with. For example:

I need to get used to stopping before I feel finished. (This principle alone could be a whole series of blog posts.) Also, I need to practice accepting that a lost day doesn’t have to be paid for with a late night—or another way of putting it, accepting that for an earlier night to happen, there may be Less Accomplished and that’s OK. It doesn’t feel OK! Need to work with that.

And there’s a big piece in all of this about not wanting to miss anything. I’m like the little kid—I was that little kid—who wails, “Do I have to go to bed? Can’t I pleeeeeeze stay up longer? When I grow up, I’m going to stay up as late as I want!”

I need compassion for the part of me that doesn’t want to Miss All the Fun.

Another piece: Often what throws me off the Earlier Bedtime Project is an imminent deadline. Staying up half the night seems to be a major way I cope with the anxiety of turning nothing into something. Whether it’s the lack of distractions, or sheer exhaustion that eventually wears away my resistance, it’s hard to give up a successful, if dysfunctional, coping mechanism.

So, when I inevitably slip back, for whatever reason, I’d like to not be surprised or overly discouraged by it. To notice the pull of the old habit and let that be OK…and then get back on the horse.

Inviting, not just avoiding

Some positive incentives might help too. For instance, really noticing what my energy is like in the morning. Do I create/think better then? If so, acknowledging and running with it might be self-reinforcing. Also self-reinforcing: Luxuriating in the post-computer time. I worry about being bored. What if I looked forward to watching a TV show I love, fixing a nice snack. Thinking of it as really treating myself to lovely, restful evenings. Enjoying my evening Sabbath. So that I’m going toward something I value, not just giving something up.

One other thing: Not freaking out if I take a long time to fall asleep on a given night. Tossing and turning for a while doesn’t mean the plan is flawed or that I should give up. I need to remind myself that one night, a couple of nights of restlessness are not a big deal.

These are all great-sounding ideas, but a lot to keep in mind—more than I can keep in mind when feeling the tug of the usual way. My focus:

Computer off at 8:30 or 9:00. Treat myself to some lovely rest. Kindly thoughts for the worker bee whose work never feels done, and for the kid who doesn’t want anyone to tell her she has to go to bed, ever.

I like the quiet slow week that eases me from Christmas into New Year’s.

I spent a day and a half in Sebastopol, one of my favorite places. It’s an environment conducive to slowing down—to the degree that I found myself doing things like setting my wallet on the bakery counter and then wandering away. (The wallet stayed where I left it. Good wallet! Good people!)  I strolled the Zen garden at Osmosis. I went to bed early.

I’d brought along the book Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest. It’s a meditation on the danger of focusing on accomplishment at the expense of dormancy, and full of musings on the delights of rest. I opened it to the chapter “Selling Unhappiness,” which seems well-timed for the end of the Christmas shopping season, and for setting intentions in the New Year.

Author Wayne Muller talks about the illusion of Sabbath time that’s portrayed in innumerable ads—of carefree, attractive people at leisure, relaxed and happy. We long to be like those fictional people, and we imagine that if we buy what the ads are selling, we can have a bit of their lives. Except, writes Muller:

“While they are promising happiness, they are really selling dissatisfaction. Our entire economy is predicated upon dissatisfaction. If we are satisfied, we do not need more than we already have…

“Instead of buying the new coffee maker, make coffee in the old one and sit with your spouse on the couch, hang out—do what they do in the picture without paying for it. Just stop. That is, after all, what they are selling in the picture: people who have stopped. You cannot buy stopped. You simply have to stop.”

Stopping is easier during this quiet week; it’s easier when I’m away from my usual routine. I want to build more rest into my life. I’m starting with turning off my computer in the evenings. Maybe I’ll add naps in the afternoon. Where will you pause today?

Have a delightful new year.