time's a wastin'

I know that the plague of wasted minutes affects most folks in your average modern workplace. What that means is that you never get enough time to do the one thing that we're all being told we have to do: think.

Crises, planning meetings, resourcing, presentations, admin, general people management, travel time to and from clients, all get in the way. And while we are all encouraged to send each other links to cool links and articles and shit, and all want to show off great stuff we've found, I don't know about you, but these days I'm bombarded by these kinds of things. I don't have time to look at half of them, let alone digest them and think about how these new, cool things can impact my work for my client.

There's just no time for kicking back and letting your imagination roam, which is the only ways new ideas happen.

(David Mamet has a great line, somewhere in Writing in Restaurants, to the effect of:

People ask me where I get my ideas.

I tell them, I think of them.

You can hear his frustration in the emphasis of his response. How the hell else do you get an idea? Only these days, he'd add an additional frustrated, "Which I don't get enough goddamned time to do.")

My basic time control tool is booking myself for large blocks of hours. Anyone trying to book me into a meeting at such a time has to ask me if I can manage it; I feel free to ignore anyone who doesn't check my availability.

I'm also getting pickier about the presentations I need to be in. My overpowering need for time to think has begun to win the arm wrastlin' contest with my basic urge to be a control freak. Not the best reason, but a good outcome for everyone involved.

As indispensable as those two techniques are, they aren't enough. In today's combustible business environment, despite the vast forests of advice from time management gurus, there's always another fire to put out.

writing in restaurants

I first bought David Mamet's Writing in Restaurants at a time when I was doing a lot of writing in (not surprisingly) restaurants and coffee shops. And it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, in terms of improving the writing I was doing in these places, but it was far more inspiring than that.

It was a call to arms for meaning. At a time when special effects were conquering movies, and were well on their way to taking over theatre as well, Mamet demanded that you as a writer concentrate on story, i.e., what happened. Description (not just flowery description but any description not demanded by the action of the story) is not only irrelevant but an impediment to the reader or viewer. It tells that person that they can not pay so much attention, that there are words and passages that don't mean as much as others.

The line that gets me to this day comes when he talks about how people (even over 20 years ago) were tending to respond to the question, "How was the movie?" with an answer along the lines of "Fantastic cinematography."

Mamet's response is, "So what? Hitler had fantastic cinematography."

To this day I am suspicious of style that calls attention to itself. I don't much like portfolios that are consistently pretty no matter what clients's work is being shown. And I think that everything can be shorter; it's better to compress and let intentions be found within the language, instead of shoved forward. That's where the poetry in Mamet's work happens. Because when it works, as it (mostly) does in the classic Alec Baldwin cameo in Glengarry Glen Ross, I think it really is poetry.

It's easy to parody the butch, tough guy quality of Mamet's writing (and as Steve points out he's even capable of parodying himself), but with Writing in Restaurants, he helped me think, for the first time, about what I was doing when I sat down with a pen and paper. He slapped (or maybe punched?) me in the face with the fact that style is empty, and that writing has to have purpose.