I fear that this is all sounding a bit Teutonic and compulsive, as if I’ve measured out my life with the only kitchen tool even more pathetic than the coffee spoon. Most difficulties, it turns out, are time soluble. Under my timer’s new administration, I would set myself a reasonable-seeming stretch in which to work on something, and that something, lo and behold, would yield. I could no longer tell myself that I didn’t have the time to respond to a long-postponed email, because I now knew that composing such an email took somewhere between eight minutes and 10. I could no longer claim to my piano teacher that I had given ‘‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ ’’ a good, solid try, because I now knew that I had fought through its thicket of chords for no more than 20 minutes. My timer was a crisp metal yardstick laid down in the fog of my temporal intuitions.
A timed hour of research would seem to take between three and four hours. Five minutes on the Internet, as measured by my timer, would pass in what seemed to me about 35 seconds. To my mind’s perpetual, child-in-the-back-seat questioning (C an we get up yet? Can we get up yet?), I had finally discovered a stern answer: ‘‘Has the timer run down? Then, no, we can’t.’’Īs more of my activities fell under my timer’s gaze, I began to notice something interesting: My inner sense of time had, thanks to years of not having its work checked, become deeply warped. To be exactly 43 minutes from my next break - a break that would itself be of a discrete length - was, it turned out, vastly more bearable than having to decide over and over whether a particular impulse was worth following, whether a creative impasse was the kind that you ought to surrender to or the kind that you ought to overcome. To my surprise and delight, this hunk of Chinese-made plastic proved a capable tyrant. Never before had I felt so many gusts of trivial desire: I needed to buy stamps at the post office, to dust the window sills, to locate the jump-rope I was fairly sure I’d left in the back of the closet.įed up with my flightiness, I ordered from Amazon a simple white kitchen timer - nearly identical to the one that sat neglected in a kitchen drawer throughout my entire childhood - and I made a resolution: When it came time to work each morning, I would set the timer for no more than an hour, and then, barring fire or bodily emergency, I would not budge. This sounded simple, but it was, in fact, as difficult to accomplish as it would have been at a desk on a ship caught in a typhoon. In my first year of working from home, I had discovered how crucial it was that I stay fastened to my desk. It began, as many habits do, in desperation.
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