Our weather finally dived into the deep end to prepare for winter. That’s now only a few weeks off and hard to believe. The leaves never changed colors. Some simply dried out and fell off.

On “Write Like a Pulp Writer,” I’m digging into the time management lesson learned. That’s becoming a fairly big topic because no one quite talks about it. If you’re reading a standard time management book, they talk about your work career and accomplishing those goals. Your personal life is this thing on the side that’s there and has nothing to do with the goals (along with sleep).

The writing ones talk about squeezing time in around the day job. Neither talk about how these are going to impact each other, or what you can do to offset that. That might be a book on its own.

And here’s a realization for you about revision:

New technology offers the promise of making less work for us. Which is a lie. It makes more work. When I was in the Army, we printed PowerPoint slides and copied them onto transparencies. That was the technology available. If the presenter had a change to one of the slides, he simply corrected it verbally at the meeting.

Enter technology to show presentations with a computer. Now people revise their slides twenty or thirty times, tweak one more word five minutes before the meeting.

The computer makes writing easy. No doubt about it. Perfect tool to cycle while working on the first draft. But it also makes it easy to do what I see people do with PowerPoint. Revise, revise, revise…because you can. They don’t think that the ease of the tool is making them do more work.

 Something to think about: What if you could only do one draft?