I Miss the Bells: What Trading a Classroom for a Blank Calendar Actually Taught Me

For sixteen years, my day was decided for me before I ever walked in the building. Seven class periods. A bell to start, a bell to stop. Lunch at 11:42, every single day, whether I was hungry or not. A planning period that showed up at the same hour like clockwork, five days a week, nine months a year. I used to complain about it. The rigidity, the way the bell would cut off a good class discussion disregarding what anyone was in the middle of saying.

I didn’t know I’d miss it.

When I quit this spring, I pictured a version of my days that looked like freedom: no bells, no one else’s timeline, nothing but me, my laptop, and Novel 5. What I got instead was something closer to a wide-open field with no fence around it, and I have learned, the hard way, that I do not do well in a field with no fence.

The Reality Of It All

Here’s the schedule I actually set for myself when I left teaching: write until I hit 1,000 words, work on the blog, whether that’s planning a post or drafting one, spend time on newsletter subscriber growth, learn something new, market and post on social media, and chip away at turning my short stories into novellas, five of them eventually, with the idea of one day releasing them together as a box set of quick suspense reads. On paper, it’s a good list. It’s the kind of list I would have handed a student and said, here, this is manageable, this is doable.

In practice, I can knock maybe two of those things off in a day before something drags my attention sideways, and it is never the things on the list that do it. It’s everything around the list. A few weeks ago, Amazon emailed me to say Book 2 of my Secrets series had already been published, under a different publishing company. Not mine. I spent the better part of a day proving I was, in fact, the author and the publisher of my own book, before I’d written a single word of Book 3 of the series. Some days it’s sorting real emails from the spam trying to look like real emails. Some days it’s opening my dashboard to check page reads or sales, seeing a dip, and losing an hour of writing time to a feeling instead of a sentence.

None of that is dramatic. None of it would make a good scene in one of my own novels. But it adds up to the same result every time: the 1,000 words don’t get written, the blog post doesn’t get planned, and I go to bed having done a little bit of everything and not enough of anything.

I used to think the problem was me being undisciplined. I don’t think that anymore. I think the problem is that for sixteen years, something else built my discipline for me. The bell did the deciding. I just had to show up and do the thing it told me it was time to do. Now I’m the bell, the classroom, and the kid who’d rather stare at their phone, all at once, and it turns out managing all three of those people is a full-time job on top of the actual job.

I used to complain about the noise, too. Seven periods of teenagers is loud. My house, most days now, is dead quiet. I got exactly what I used to daydream about during my planning period: uninterrupted time, nobody needing anything from me every fifty minutes. I didn’t expect to miss the noise. I didn’t expect to miss having other people’s energy in the room, a reason to be “on,” a hallway full of chaos that somehow made it easier to sit down and focus once my door was shut. Quiet, it turns out, isn’t automatically productive. Sometimes it’s just quiet.

I don’t have this solved yet. I’m not writing this post as the after picture, some tidy story where I built the perfect system and now I’m cranking out 1,000 words a day like clockwork. I’m writing it because I suspect I’m not the only person who left something structured for something that was supposed to feel like freedom, and found out freedom without a frame is its own kind of hard. Right now I’m experimenting with building myself something closer to a bell schedule: blocks of time with a hard start and stop, in an order I don’t get to renegotiate every morning depending on my mood. We’ll see if it sticks.

If you’ve made a leap like this, structured job to something wide open, or you’re a writer who’s found your own version of a bell schedule that actually works, I’d genuinely love to hear how you did it.

If you want to follow along as I figure this out, sign up for my email list and I’ll send you the first chapter of Where Secrets Stay free, along with updates on Book 3 of The Secrets Trilogy and whatever I learn about running my own days between now and then.

Until next time, remember: some structure you don’t build. You just miss it once it’s gone.