The Secret Lesson of High School

The novelist Douglas Coupland appears in a new magazine ad for Blackberry phones. He is casually posed in what appear to be stylish old-man pajamas, looking pensive as he takes a call from the zeitgeist. The ad states that Coupland writes "two hours a day."

What?

Aside from the revelation that Coupland actually uses a Blackberry, I find the claim that this prolific novelist - whose last tome weighed in at five hundred pages - writes only a couple hours a day to be astonishing. The ad goes on to assert that that Coupland spends the rest of his day engaged in design and art projects.

As someone who now dictates the entirety of his own hours, I think about workflow effiency a lot. When you're cashflow negative, and you're on a deadline, the question of how productive you are often rears its head.

The most efficient period of my life - the time when I felt like I was accomplishing the most - was high school. I have never felt quite as productive as I was then - felt being a very telling word. After all, how productive could doing menial Spanish translation exercises and simple chemistry problems be? Even this humble blog post requires more mental resources than much of my high school curriculum.

But even if I wasn't solving the world's problems in high school, I still felt like a very productive person. And that feeling is one of the most elusive and valuable ones for anyone who works, especially those of us who sit for large amounts of time in front of a monitor. How did high school, of all endeavors, achieve that effect?

My belief is that the great implicit lesson of high school is this:

Your first 45 minutes engaged in any endeavor are always more productive than your next.

Your entire day is engineered to conform to this axiom. You are always switching modes - subject to subject, mental to phyiscal activity, time for lunch - after three quarters of an hour. Very few things in high school require more than 45 minutes of your attention. It demands smaller bursts of concentration, as opposed to long grinds. Now ponder the fact that a job will often require you to focus on the same problem for the entire day.

And so, I've tried to structure my day the same way that Douglas Coupland does: as if I were still in school. (In his Blackberry ad, Coupland even goes so far as to say, "I've basically turned my life into art school.") I obviously don't have the same curricular breadth that I did in high school, but I attempt to break my work into 45-minute problems, and rotate among different "disciplines" within screenwriting. I'll work on a character's emotional story for an hour, and then switch to action sequence design, and then on to villain character design. I also switch modes of activity by going to PE (read: yoga) everyday. And I always take time out to feed myself well - another manner of switching modes.

The result of this high school-like regimen is a significant increase in my output without a corresponding dramatic increase in the actual amount of time I spend writing. Like Coupland, I really only spend a few hours each day engaged in the head-against-desk-banging that constitutes the activity of writing. But as they were in school, those hours are easy(er) and fast(er), and the only demand upon my time is that I solve a handful of manageable problems.