[fifty-one] minus twenty-eight: how can you make time if you do not take time?

“How can we make time if we do not ever take time?” I love that quote. It’s a riff on a line from one of my favorite movies, The Matrix Reloaded, in which a minor baddie, the suave Merovingian, mocks our hero’s Neo’s polite refusal to dine – and calls him out on his dogged insistence on getting to the point. “Yes of course. Who has time? Who has time. But if we never *take* time, how can we have time?“

The Merovingian is just mocking Neo. But he has a real point: All too often in our fast-paced modern lives, we say to others – or to ourselves – that we don’t have time to do something. Or, at least, I do – your mileage may vary, as may the bricks in the wall of your calendar and your number of irons in the fire. But often what we really mean is not that we don’t have the time, but that we don’t want to take the time to do it.

Sometimes this is option cost. Sometimes, we really need to give up something better to make time for something. Right now, I’m out at GDC, the Game Developer’s Conference, and I’ve already let some of my peeps know that I can’t do dinner Wednesday night, because I’m planning to attend the Game Developer’s Awards. It’s a great show and comes around just once a year, so if I want to do it, I have to make time for it. That means taking time from something else, in this case, taking that off the calendar for meeting friends.

So, too, it is with blogging.

I’ve been trying to blog every day this year, and have already fallen almost a month behind, even though I’ve been posting two and three times a day – when I post. But the problem, I realized, is that I had been fitting blogging in as an optional task at the end of the day. If you stay up late because you’ve been flying, or working on your taxes, or attending a programmer’s get together, then blogging likely gets the shaft – doubly so if you have to get up early to attend a conference. Stake that vampire! Or, blogpost. As the case may.

SO, I’ve decided to try to be more like the Merovingian, at least, in his philosophy of time. If you don’t take time, then you can never make time for anything; so I’ve decided to try taking out some time during the day to blog, rather than making it an end-of-the-day task. Like so many things, it’s hard to say how long this will last, but at least for today, it produced one more blogpost than I would have otherwise.

-the Centaur

Pictured: My favorite table at one of my favorite breakfast joints, Mo’Z Cafe in San Francisco, where this blogpost was authored between sessions at GDC.