How to Find the Time to Do the Thing You Want to Become

Back when I was a latchkey kid, my brothers and I would come home from school and snack. We had cereal most days until my older brother stumbled on the combination of Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread. Just Miracle Whip slathered between two pieces of Wonder Bread. Nothing else.

From that point forward, I had a Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread (MWoWB) sandwich every day after school.

I mean every, single day. My routine was:

It’s the strongest routine I’ve ever had in my life.

As you can imagine, I became like a Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread sandwich: pale and fluffy on the outside, soft, tangy goo on the inside.

Not a good look.

The only reason I didn’t continue snacking on Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread sandwiches in college is because I didn’t have the refrigerator space. Keeping a loaf of bread in the room is tricky, as well. Perhaps most of all, my roommate would have thought I was insane.

The urge to snack when returning home to an empty house remains. Eventually, I made better nutritional choices (salami on sourdough rye!), and became aware of whether I’m actually hungry, or just feel like eating.

But I made the change.

We are creatures of habit. If you figure out how to swap bad habits for good habits, you can improve your life.

If you can figure out how to make your writing into a routine as compulsory as my routine for eating MWoWB sandwiches, you’d be one of the most prolific writers of all time.

I learned to replace a lot of my bad habits with good habits through the writings of PJ Eby, a life coach and Python programmer who explored how to hack himself the way we might hack a computer system.

He used a nice metaphor of humans being like a horse and rider. The horse is a powerful animal driven primarily by instinct, but able to learn tricks and take commands; the rider is a human with the intelligence to make use of the horse, direct their course together, and take good care of the horse.

For instance, a rider who loves his horse would never feed it MWoWB sandwiches. It spikes the blood sugar, leading to an insulin crash, and that’s about it.

A rider who cares about their horse would give it a variety of grass, hay and oats (I guess; I’m not a horse nutritionist). They’d exercise the horse, make time to play, and practice trotting skills. They’d also muck out the stall and take them to a vet.

We humans often treat our own bodies much worse than that, drinking too much booze, not getting enough sleep, and eating MWoWB sandwiches too often. We know exercise is good for us but we don’t make time for it, or do it often enough. We go long stretches feeling we are busy but not really sure what it is we were doing. The time just got away.

We may know that playing games or doing creative arts—writing, drawing, song or dance—can improve our minds and bring joy into our lives, but the busy routines of life keep us from doing it. We may treat our own bodies like rented mules, with no concern for our health and well-being.

Or worse, we self-medicate with cigarettes, booze, or MWoWB sandwiches.

Sadly, we may not even realize we’re doing this to ourselves until we hit some critical problem such as poor health, emotional bankruptcy, or much of our lives has passed us by.

It doesn’t have to be that way, but how do we change a lifetime of habits?

Three things work against your interests in living life as the person you want to be.

First, there are the habits and routines we developed as kids and young adults before we knew any better. Surviving childhood is tough, so I don’t blame any twenty-something who ended up with a bunch of weird, self-defeating routines. Your parents may not have known any better, or were struggling themselves, and did the best they could, but now your go-to comfort food is Mountain Dew and Doritos.

I could go on and on about the less-than-ideal habits and routines we bring forward into adulthood, along with the misunderstandings, grudges, and trauma. Very few people know how to live a good, happy life; they’re doing their best though, and then they have a kid, and raise the kid as best they know how, and pass on as much baggage as wisdom. Maybe the kid figures it out, maybe the kid repeats all the same mistakes.

Second, there is our entire culture geared to drive you into consumerism. We have commercials and influencers telling us what’s great, and selling us on the experience. We watch TV shows about wealthy people living the “good” life, and then advertisers offer us a little slice of that good life, $19.99 at a time. We can dress like them, use gadgets like them, or eat like them, if we don’t mind buying stuff.

My brother—who turned me on to MWoWB sandwiches—didn’t think of MWoWB as a sandwich because God spoke to him in a dream. We saw people slathering Miracle Whip on bread in commercials five times a day during our after-school cartoon watching. Our mom was on a budget, and Miracle Whip and Wonder Bread were featured prominently on the grocery store shelves. There were coupons for both in the newspaper. Of course she bought it, and of course we ate it.

That’s not to say this is all a conspiracy to keep me a chubby kid addicted to the ultra-processed foods of the Standard American Diet, except that it is a conspiracy. The manufacturers promoted a product on the TV shows we watched, the grocery stores offered coupons to bring in the cash-strapped parents, and both my parents had to work for us to survive, leaving us alone to do what we thought best.

I’m still susceptible to this conspiracy and so is almost everyone on the planet. We are faulty but it’s not our fault.

Which brings us to the third thing: we are hardwired to fall for these traps. Evolution chose the humans who conserved energy and loved to eat starchy, fatty stuff to store extra calories for the days ahead. Evolution also chose those humans who copied each other—monkey see, monkey do—which helped us survive in times of crisis, but now makes advertising so potent.

The ad agencies know how to push our buttons to sell us stuff. TV and film studios know how to create entertaining products, which puts us right in the crosshairs of the advertisers. We watch, they sell, and we buy to belong.

Once we see how they push our buttons, we can wrest some of that influence away from the hucksters pushing product.

Going back to how I started to change, PJ Eby’s hack I found useful was to look for the source of our bad habits and routines. That is, the underlying emotion held tight in our psyche that triggers the need for some relief, and which makes us vulnerable to bad habits or poor suggestions by advertisers.

To break my routine of snacking when I got home, I had to realize that I ate comfort food after school because we were kids without parents. It wasn’t traumatic (we knew they’d be home soon enough) but it was unsettling. My mother worried all the time about us being alone, and didn’t want us running wild in the streets. Stay home, lock the doors, was her wish. The underlying message was that we weren’t safe until they returned.

Eating that MWoWB sandwich was comforting—I mean, it tastes great, if you’ve never tried it—and it fit in with what advertisers wanted us to do.

Finally realizing as an adult that I was safe on my own, I was able to break the emotional craving for a *nutritionless* snack once I was home.

If you’re a frustrated creative who longs to write poetry or stories, or to draw pictures, or learn music or whatever, you may have to break free of habits or routines chewing up your time.

To take a more fairytale approach, consider that your evil stepmother locked you in a closet and won’t let you write a novel. It’d be clear what you’d need to do to finally finish your novel: you must escape, or vanquish, your evil stepmother.

What if the evil stepmother was so good at being evil that you hardly notice what she’s doing? You know you can’t get around to finishing that novel but you’re not quite sure why not. You feel fine, there’s plenty to eat, and you get outside often enough; yet, you’re so busy with chores, social obligations, and having fun doing stuff with your stepsisters that you never get around to writing. The evil stepmother didn’t want you to be miserable, locked in a closet; she only wanted you to pay attention to her world, and be part of the family. Your wish to be a writer simply wasn’t part of her plan.

You might feel the pangs or longing to write but would likely discount them because everything else is going fine.

What you don’t realize is that the evil stepmother is a narcissist who wants everyone to pay attention to her world. She doesn’t give two shits for what you want to do. Your dreams and aspirations? Who cares. You live here, now, and here is where you’ll die.

She never says it, but she thinks your stupid novel has no place in this world. And you‘re too comfortable to change.

I’ve long desired to be a writer, and have gutted out a few novels in my life. I probably could have done more earlier, but I had several bad habits that wasted valuable time. I hardly realized they were bad because, thanks to the evil stepmother, I was comfortable and busy with life.

The worst of those bad, time-sucking habits was the fascination around online activities, such as email, web surfing, and, eventually, social media.

For years, I wanted to be someone who replied to every email with long, thoughtful prose, fun anecdotes, or chatty news. Email me to ask if I had a hammer, and I’d tell you who invented it and how he made it (some guy named Armand invented the hammer, and he made it with baking soda, I guess??).

I also spent way too much time reading various websites that purported to be about self-help, current events, or how to become a writer. I should have ignored 90% of that stuff and figured out how to write novels.

To break those habits, I had to confront my insecurities. I was obsessed with consuming knowledge, and being able to explain things when asked (or even if not asked). It was something of an inferiority complex, and manifested itself as an insatiable need for general knowledge.

Not being a writer was a (mild) trauma, and learning about stuff was the MWoWB sandwich I ate to feel better about that.

Slowly, I weaned myself from those desires. I still read a lot of stuff online, and check out social media, but it’s focused on writing topics, and marketing; things that can help me be a successful author.

Let’s say you’re in that fairy tale and the evil stepmother prevents you from writing your novel, or doing your art and whatnot. But she hasn’t locked you in a closet, and she doesn’t even tell you to stop doing your art.

What if you’re still not writing your novel but it seems nothing is preventing you?

It may be that the evil stepmother has cast a spell binding you to the comforts of modern living. That is, the closet confining you is invisible.

To reveal the closet you must look for evidence of its existence.

The closet is all the things preventing you form doing your art. They’re commonplace things that are work, family, or social obligations. They’re things you think you ought to be doing, or want to be doing, and they take up most of your time and leave you exhausted.

They’re all the things that are not *doing your art*.

One technique to find the closet is to track everything you do for three days. Every ten minutes, write down what you did the previous ten minutes. It can get to be a long list of things, but you’re trying to escape the closet, so get busy.

I’ve done this and it helped a lot. I began to see how much of my nine-to-five job was silly questions to be answered, or resolving confusion for other people. Of course I’m going to do my job, but solving other people’s problems is an energy suck, and my nine-to-five chewed up a lot of mental energy.

Work, obviously, is a big part of the closet, and the energy drain was another big part.

Around the house, there are dogs and a cat, which take up a lot of time and energy. Their love returns some of that energy, so they’re not a big part of the closet (but they’re still part of it).

Same with family—my wife, children, and extended family—are part of the closet but not a part I want to avoid. (I chose to be in this closet.)

Then there’s things like watching the news, dealing with spam phone calls, lawn work, house maintenance, and dealing with clutter. I also enjoy watching television and the onset of long form drama on streaming services can be a huge closet. It’s easy to get swept up in all the dumb bullshit of running a house, then look to a comforting TV show as a reward for taking out the trash.

The closet you’re in, and which is preventing you from doing your art, may be the whole bunch of things you do as part of your life. To complete that novel, you may have to walk away from some of that.

When you have your three days of data, look at the repeating busywork. Look for the time spent recovering your energy.

Maybe don’t start with leaving your spouse or quitting your job (but we can dream, right?). Instead, skip some TV shows. Ignore more phone calls during the dinner hour. Don’t get sucked into arguments with strangers on the Internet.

Some folks worry that they won’t be a serious artist until they’ve place a book with a serious publisher, or that they won’t be an artist until their drawings hang in a serious gallery. Nonsense.

To make yourself a writer, artist, dancer, or musician, you must make it your occupation. That doesn’t even mean you get paid for it. Rather, you spend a significant amount of time at that work, and you strive to improve your talent to master the craft.

If you want to become a Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread sandwich, eat a lot of Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread sandwiches.

If you want to become an expert on streaming television, knowing all the shows currently available for viewing, then spend a lot of time streaming television.

If you want to become an artist, then occupy yourself with artistic work.