Living a Handful at a Time
The Power of Doing a Little Thing Over and Over
There once was a man who undertook a huge task, but he could only get it done “a handful at a time.” Undeterred, he disciplined himself to do that little bit every day from 1947 until 1966. Eventually, his work paid off and he achieved his goal. That story is a key plot line in of one of my favorite films, The Shawshank Redemption. Part of the reason that film resonates so much with me is that I have seen many times in my own life that doing a little thing with great discipline pays off.
Some projects, such as developing character, are so challenging that achieving them all at once is impossible or at least so daunting that we avoid them. These are the projects where the power of repeating a little thing over and over, carrying a handful at a time, can be useful. The power of a handful at a time is the same power at work in geology. “Geology,” says one of the characters in The Shawshank Redemption, “is the study of pressure and time.” Pressure is a small but achievable movement in the right direction. A stream can’t wear out a canyon in a day, but it can wash away one ounce of rock. I can’t get to the second floor of my house with a leap, but I can mount one step. Time accumulates all those regular little contributions into big things.
The Shawshank approach helped me become a marathon runner. In spring 2006, when I was a sophomore in college, I signed up for the Chicago Marathon. The race was scheduled for October 22. At the time, I had little experience with running. I did not run either track or cross country in high school. My racing history consisted of two 5K turkey trots. If I was going to complete this race, I needed to be transformed more than a day or a week of hard work would allow. But I could become prepared if I filled the months before the race with a manageable amount of regular work. And so I printed a training plan that told me what to do every day for about sixteen weeks and started to faithfully complete the workouts. That summer, I was employed by a warehouse where shifts began at 7 a.m., so I would get up every day at 4:30 and run in the dark before work. Every week, I had to complete a long run. It started at ten miles and slowly got longer and longer until, in the early fall, I completed a few twenty-mile runs. When I started my training, I was not capable of finishing a marathon, but after four months of becoming a little stronger every day, I was. I finished in three hours and thirty-one minutes, in the top 14 percent. That race began a string of six years in which I finished a marathon. Each time, I did it through making a long, slow summertime journey of being daily transformed into a marathon runner. I have not run a marathon in more than a decade, but I still run almost every day. Becoming or staying fit can’t be done in a flash, but it can be done a handful at a time.
A major writing project is also more than I can do in a single day. Completing it in a frantic month or semester might be possible, but it seems like a nightmare. The most feasible way to finish is a calm handful at a time. When I started writing my doctoral dissertation on Monday, March 5, 2018, I gave myself a writing goal of a modest 2.5 pages a day. Three to five mornings a week, depending on my teaching schedule, I would sit down to write. My ritual was to change the font first thing because I did not want my writing to look the same way every day. Then I would get to work. Some days, I was done by 11 a.m. Other days, I toiled deep into the afternoon. When I hit my goal – when 100 pages had been bulked up to 103, say – I would move on to other work. The files in my computer tell the story. “Dissertation 03 05 18” was three pages long (Electra font) when I finished writing at 2:24 p.m. on that Monday. The files piled up: “Dissertation 01 21 19,” “Dissertation 01 22 19,” “Dissertation 01 23 19.” Every day, I saved a slightly longer manuscript. By 4:01 p.m. on June 29, 2019, when I saved “Daniel Fischer – dissertation 06 29 19,” the version I sent to my committee, my modest beginning had grown to 514 pages (Times New Roman).
I also used the handful-at-a-time approach to revise the dissertation into a book manuscript. It looks like I need one more round of editing to get my publisher to take the book, and I’ll tackle it by doing a little bit every day.
I’m in good company with the write-a-little-bit-every-day strategy. Robert Boice’s odd but helpful How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure recommends this approach. Historian Shelby Foote wrote The Civil War: A Narrative (2,934 pages in three volumes published between 1958 and 1974) at the rate of five hundred to six hundred words per day. In an interview published in his memoir Working, journalist Robert Caro, author of the mammoth tome The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York plus four volumes on Lyndon Johnson, said he tries to write “at least three pages a day.” Prolific historian Thomas Kidd, who seems to write almost a book per year, tries to write 1,000 words per day.
Christian character can’t be developed through one weekend conference or some cataclysmic event, so since I was a college student I have pursued it with pressure and time through a daily discipline of prayer and Bible reading. To build a devotional routine we can incorporate kids into, my wife and I have recently transformed this solitary routine into communal time by together doing morning and evening prayer – or the shorter version, family prayer – at breakfast and shortly before bed. These rituals are combinations of liturgical prayer and Bible readings directed by The Book of Common Prayer.
A memoir – a recollection of life after a big chunk of it has passed – is quite different from a diary – an account of life as it happens. I want to have the latter, but diaries have to be built up over a lifetime. Carrying a handful at a time makes it possible. Every morning for five to fifteen minutes, I write anywhere from a short paragraph to two pages in a notebook about the previous day’s events. I now have a box full of notebooks chronicling more than a decade of my life.
I want to have a tidy yard and a bountiful garden, but that can’t be achieved with one or two big efforts a year. I carry a handful at a time by spending at least an hour every Saturday planting, weeding, and pruning. If every week I take out a fraction of the weeds at even a slightly faster rate than they grow back, I will eventually get rid of them.
I love learning, seeing how other writers work, and getting caught up in stories, so I read for pleasure for thirty minutes a day on weekdays and Saturdays and an hour on Sundays and read a book that helps me grow for at least an hour a week. I usually keep up with my routine. When I don’t, my response is eccentric, but it does remind me that reading is a priority and that I am committing myself to making sure it does not fall through the cracks. If I miss a session, I make a note of it and make it up on a day when I have more time, often a Sunday or a vacation day. Last night, while I rocked the baby and gave my wife some sleep time without an infant nearby, I read from The Return of the King and knocked out three sessions – that day’s plus two missed sessions. I tend to finish books little by little rather than with a blitz of speed-reading, but with regular effort I am on my way to becoming well-read.
A marriage can’t be built in a burst of activity here and there. My wife and I build it through disciplined handfuls. One is taking a weekly walk where we ask each other questions suggested by some blogger who I’ve now long-since forgotten: “Did you feel loved this week? What’s coming up for you this week? How can I pray for you this week?” We also go on a date once a week, play each other in chess once a week, and read aloud almost every night.
All of these are examples of how regular small investments produce big positive outcomes.
But the power of pressure and time is also sobering. It does not only build good things. Even apparently minor foolish or wicked actions repeated day after day can rot our character. In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, the demon Screwtape praises the “cumulative effect” of “small sins” because “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” Likewise, in Mere Christianity, Lewis warned about what happens if one’s character is even “gradually getting worse”: Since people are “going to live forever,” such decline will lead to “absolute hell in a million years.”
And so, while I know that living a handful at a time can be helpful, it also matters a great deal what my handfuls contain.