Small Chunks

My life has turned all topsy-turvy in the past couple of weeks.  Anything new is liable to do that to a schedule, and when that something new is a small child with needs and a schedule all its own, it can take what was a very orderly, normal schedule and turn it on its head.  Not long ago, I used to have a good hour or hour and a half most days in which to do my creative work; now, I'm lucky if I can find twenty minutes to rub together.

Despite that, I still seem to be getting a fair bit of work done.  How am I doing it?  With luck, a lot of patience ... and small chunks.

I've always been a fan of the chunk, despite how disgusting it sounds.  A chunk is simply a small bit of ... well, anything.  I use chunks with my piano students -- take a section or a measure or a beat and play it over and over and over until it's ingrained in your fingers.  It can feel maddening at times to play something so small until it drives you mad, but the crazy thing is, it works, and often with less total time than it would take to learn it in some other way (say, playing the piece all the way through every time).

The small chunks I'm using now are small chunks of time -- the two or five or ten minutes here and there that let me get a little something done.   Now small chunks aren't ideal for creative work -- I like getting into a groove for an hour or two -- but that doesn't mean it's impossible to get creative work done during them.

So, what exactly are small chunks good for?

• Correspondence -- A fair bit of creative work is corresponding with other creative types, people who are publishing or printing your work, people who want to buy your work, or just other people you're networking and staying in touch with.  This can quite easily be done in little chunks here and there, and is actually often better this way -- if you've only got two minutes to send an email, you can't drone on and on, wasting both your time and theirs.
• Creative decisions -- A lot of creativity is making decisions upon which you then need to act.  Frequently, these decisions don't take much time -- it's the follow-through that takes the time.  Knowing what you need to decide and making those decisions -- or at least weighing them -- in these short chunks of time is a great use of those few spare minutes.
• Idea gathering -- Much like the decisions, the ideas that go into a creative work usually come very quickly -- it's the implementation and extrapolation of those ideas that takes hours and hours.  Brainstorming ideas for pieces, jotting down themes to play with later, exploring possible ways to harmonize a tune -- most of these can be done in a short chunk of time.
• Proofing and editing -- Every time I finish a rough draft of a piece, I print it out and then use a red pen to mark all the things that are wrong with it, all the things that need fixed -- notes in the wrong place, things that don't look right, dynamics and expressions and tempi that need to be added, that sort of thing.  I can do that sort of work anywhere, and since it drives me crazy to do that sort of thing, doing it in very short, finite chunks actually works best for me.
• Actual creative work -- I said before that short chunks of time aren't ideal for creative work -- I didn't say they were impossible.  It is entirely possible to get something creative done in five or ten minutes ... just not much.  For me as a composer, that might mean I add two measures to a piece.  Still, that's two measures added -- think of it as the musical equivalent to "A penny saved is a penny earned."  If I find enough of those small chunks of time, I've got a piece.

Don't let "I don't have time" be an excuse for not following your dream and creating what you want to create.  Most folks who say that really mean, "I don't have several uninterrupted hours to string together and devote solely to my creation."  The truth of the matter is that almost none of us do -- the Creative life is built from a lot of little actions, taken in very small amounts of time, and added together.  Use your small chunks today and see what you're really able to accomplish.