Not long ago a friend of mine made me an offer. He purchases books for the Surrey Library system and he told me if I wrote a book, even if it was a single copy and self published, he would purchase it and stock it on the shelf. I thought that was a great offer, but I have nothing in the pipeline. In fact, between work and chess I don’t have all that much free time to dedicate to writing a book. On top of that, my first writing goals were writing for prestigious contests like the CBC Fiction contest and the Bronwen Wallace prize. Ha! Who has the time to do it all?
Today I was in the kitchen doing not much at all when I got a notification on my cell phone. It was a weekly report on my usage and it said I had averaged 5 hours and 13 minutes per day on my phone. There are 168 hours in a week: 40 hours working, 36 hours on my phone (evidently) and about 50 sleeping. That’s still 42 hours left. I spend about 5 hours a week commuting these days, with so much road construction underway, and another 5 disappear on chess night. The Canucks play about three times per week for another 9 hours wasted. That’s still 23 hours a week unaccounted for.
Where does the time go?
Let’s say I cut my phone usage back to 3 hours a day, giving me another 15 hours a week. Add to that the 23 hours that evaporate each week and I have 38 hours I could have spent writing my book. In a year that would be 1900 hours. A typical novel is about 50,000 words, so to complete a novel in a year, I would need to settle on around 26 words an hour. That is crazy few words. And that still leaves me chess, hockey, and 3 hours of empty-calorie gawking at my device per day. And my god! If I could complete 50 words per hour I could polish off two books a year.
How much time does the average person spend on a device these days? I don’t see myself as excessive when it comes to looking at my phone. I check sports scores, watch Keno draws once in a while, look at emails, and sometimes (the horror!) I actually speak to someone. If my usage is typical, and the Outlier theory says you will be a master at something if you spend 10,000 hours at it, a person dedicating the amount of time on a skill that I have at my disposal, would be world class at it in five years. Low income teens in the USA average over nine hours a day on their phones! They could be fabulously skilled at something in a few years if they cut back to three hours a day and invested the time wisely. A quick Google search – not on my phone – says the average American spends over four hours every day on their cell, a whopping 1.4 billion hours a day collectively. Although we can’t assume it is fully wasted time, I imagine the majority of it is.
Going back to the offer to have a book on the shelf of the library, the federal government does a survey every year of library books written by Canadian authors. The author has to register a book on the database first. Then there is a list of libraries they look at, but the gist of it is the government has a formula by which they calculate how many books the author didn’t sell because his or her book was available for free at the library. It looks at how many books the author has, and in how many of the surveyed libraries, and they send the author a cheque. If I did write a book or two, I would be mailing a copy of each book to all the libraries on the survey list, and maybe I would find some of my tax money in my mailbox once a year. If this ever happens, I promise to rush back here and tell you how much it paid.
