BEST WAY
The very best way to waste time is to hurry!
I have written thousands of notes to myself which I could not read even half an hour later. I have, as you well know from reading these pages, lectured myself severely for this bad habit. .It has done little good, so I have had to abandon much of such scribblings written as intended self-starters for late use. I tried, for instance, to limit such notes; to make them as short as possible even cryptic in physical appearance, but that produced even more of the same type of mystery-making material.
Other steps I tried doing them as a separate note file on a floppy disk. That helped to some degree, and I found I found it good to designate them all as “n” or ”f” - for “notes, or “file only”, That, at least, made them stand out as be what they were intended to be - reminders concerned with longer versions to be done later, using that small spark to light the fire.
The idea was to put the former scrap materials on a floppy disc under “N” from which may develop as the file grows to usable proportions and fills out under the usual outline headings which have been so helpful to me over the years: “H, WBTU,, For Inst.- 1.2 & 3, and SW”.
The new system has worked wonderfully well for me, I feel but there has been a reaction I did not expect. - a sort of : burp” effect: I found, to my dismay, that I have been doing the same sort of half-way, costly planning on so much of my life style itself.
It has suddenly hit me as being woeful lacking in good common sense elements, that I should spend all my life - eighty years or so of it writing literally millions of words of commercial copy, new stories, editorials, essays, column and plays as well as s short stories - and never learned to type properly. What a waste of effort and hours! The only typing lesson I ever had were during the Depression years when a young girl in our group found she could get a WPA job teaching in Night School if she could could scare up twenty-five students. I was among the dozen or so who volunteer for typing and shorthand lessons. She got the job. I should have stuck with that opportunity but in my haste to get along with being a writer, I let it get by, Now, years later, I see what a hollow-headed decision I made at that time years ago ...aproverbial case of “haste” making “waste.”
What have I done about it?
Now, just a few weeks before my 88th birthday, I am learning to type properly.
A.L.M. February 6, 2004 [c474wds]
