Everyone has a Time Problem

Or finding the eternal pond (also find a typo win a hot-off-the-press paperback!)

With the regularity of clockwork, someone will ask me—a colleague, a student, a doe-eyed reader at a q an a—how do you find the time for it all? How do you get it all done?

And frankly, I’m always a little surprised by this question.

Because the answer is that I don’t.

I don’t get it all done.

I don’t always meet my self-imposed writing deadlines.

My laundry is piling up as I write this, my kids have to ask me three times to buy them more shampoo. I haven’t even taken down the Christmas tree yet, and it’s the middle of January. I do eat home-cooked meals every night, but that is because most of the time, my husband cooks.

I don’t get it all done.

And after years of feeling bad about myself, thinking I was doing something wrong, because it often feels like everyone is getting it all done but I somehow can’t, I have finally come to this truth: nobody gets it all done, and everybody has a time problem¹.

One of my favorite poems is Brenda Hillman’s poem with this title, Time Problem. Where she addresses, “The problem/ of time. Of there not being /enough of it.”

Even before I had my own family, I felt the pressure of this poem, the desire to be untethered from time. And in the years I have returned to this poem, I have looked up from my own grading at my own daughters with their mathbooks, and I have wished and wished that I did not so viscerally share the experience of this problem. That feeling of being wholly rung out by time.

I have spent hours fretting about time, its lack of enoughness. It’s running out.

For most of us, working, creating, living lives with our families and friends—life is busy. And it is only natural for humans to want more life, more hours, more time to create, and be together, and to fill our lives with meaning. It is so natural to want more time.

But the thing is, the time problem is a lie that suggests a solution. The right planner, the right hack.

But really, time is just about choices. It is about accepting what won’t get done and focusing on what can get done when we let some stuff go. I can teach my daughters to do their own laundry. I can block hours off my calendar for writing. I can make writing dates with friends.

I can stop expecting there to be some magical moment when there is enough time, and instead live in the reality that I will always want more. And that this want is human, it is the same want that drives me to tell stories, and the same want that urges me to spend time with the people I love.

There will never be enough time because life is the spending of time, the being in it, the whole great flow of its passing. The only way we can approach the “enoughness” of time is to choose to spend it on things of value. Things that bring us closer to our meaning.

This baby is now eighteen and that fact is certainly underlying my thinking on time.

That is to say, I manage my time problem by acknowledging my choice in priorities. I prioritize good food, but not a kitchen where everything is put away and every counter cleared. I prioritize reading time over tv time. I prioritize writing by making it happen first thing every day.

At the moment, I have no hard deadlines, but I write as though I do.

That is how I deal with my time problem. I try to focus on the things that feel infinite. The things that really matter. The things that shine with the light of an eternal pool. Sometimes that is floating on the real pool, and sometimes that is here, at my desk writing reflections.

The dishes can wait. Or my family can help put them away. Then, at least, we’ll be together. And since I know that we will never have enough time together, well—I’ll take what I can get.

In the News

I’m SCBWI-KS-MO Author of the Month, you can read an interview with me here.

I had the opportunity to raise my voice in support of the freedom to read in my local community at this month’s school board meeting. If any of you want support speaking out against book ban attempts in your community please reach out. Authors please consider joining Authors Against Book Bans.

Upcoming Things

February 7, 2026, 10 am- 12 pm The Lodge, Saint Louis Writers’ Guild: The Poetry of Prose join me for an interactive workshop on how the tools and tricks of poetry can enliven your prose.

February 24, 2026 A Catalog of Burnt Objects Paperback launch pre-order below

The Associated Writing Programs Annual Conference (AWP) 2026: March 6, 2026 10:35-11:50 Panel The Non-coercive Rearranging of Desire: Teaching Writing Despite ‘AI’ with Éireann Lorsung, Arisa White, and Kate Schapira

Remember, We Play A Typo Game Here

If you catch a typo in my post, please call attention to it in the comments. The first person to catch a real typo (not an intentional grammatical choice) will win a prize. This month it will be a paperback copy of A Catalog of Burnt Objects. Hot off the press! They haven’t even arrived here yet, but they are in the warehouse so they will soon. If you don’t see a typo, drop a note hello in the comments, and if there somehow isn’t a typo, or if no one catches one, you will be entered into a drawing to win.

Fine print:

You must be a subscriber to win, and you must share your mailing address with me so that I can send you the prize. US addresses only. You have until the next newsletter comes out to find a typo, but only the first person who finds one wins, even if I’ve made five typos. Thanks for playing!

1. You know how in that Anne Lamott essay Shitty First Drafts she say something like everyone’s first drafts are shitty and for that one person who is typing away like she has a dictaphone attached to god, well —we don’t like her very much. It’s not natural to not have to write multiple drafts, just like for most of us in the modern world, it’s unnatural to not have a time problem. For those who don’t well, take your leveled-up consciousness and don’t ask me to lunch. I don’t have time. (Kidding/not kidding.)