Blessed by the Potato

[Back to the first post in the Value of Simple self-publishing behind-the-scenes series]

The Value of Simple had a bit of a strange origin in that I didn’t originally set out to write a novel-length book, but to just update the novelette-length PSGtDIYI with some suggestions that had rolled in over the years. So the process I started out with was not ideal: I was writing in Word and tapping enter twice at the end of each paragraph, as I do when writing for the web to do block style.

For longer documents, especially books, you want to break that kind of habit, and faithfully use defined styles for your text, headings, footnotes — everything! Let the paragraph formatting take care of the space between paragraphs, because odds are you’ll want to set it for each production form factor, and going back to do it manually over 200-ish pages is a nightmare, while doing it by just updating your “normal” or “body text” style is a snap. These styles are also important because they often translate to other programs — if I were to export to InDesign, or to Calibre. Finally, they allow for lots of cool automatic things to happen, like creating tables of contents that update page numbers on their own.

So my one major tip for writing is to use those styles — create as many as you need, but no more. Other than bolding or italicizing a few words within a paragraph, all of your formatting should come through styles and page/section breaks.

I did a lot of outlining for this book, and in a few cases decided to not bother with some potential chapters while they were still at the outline stage, which limited the amount of work put into stuff that was destined to be cut anyway. The outlining also helped me see some holes in the story — which is how the project grew so quickly. Sometimes I find you just have to write and see where the story takes you, but for non-fiction I really think outlining can help.

For writing, the structure of a book like this helped a lot: I was able to chunk it into a bunch of smaller segments which I could handle in a few consecutive writing sessions — a mode of operation I was used to from blogging. I also set self-imposed deadlines, which helped me to keep pushing myself to get it done. I knew I would have to set it aside come June because of some projects at work on the horizon, with March-April being my big writing window. With a layout in place I could get a good sense of how much progress I needed to make, and whether I was staying more-or-less on track to hit my deadlines. Sure, more sections were created as the writing and reviewing progressed and holes in the story were found, but it did go pretty much as planned. Some experience from work writing reports and of course having my thesis under my belt helped a lot with self-discipline and planning. And having a deadline I didn’t want to miss for submitting to traditional publishers helped me get to just the right level of stress so I could keep pushing out drafts — knowing that I would have a review period after they got to sit so I could make it better.

Just sitting down and writing is hard enough, but there’s a lot more to go into being a self-publisher. You need to produce a high-quality finished product, which will mean bringing in people to read, critique, and improve what you’ve written — those can be friends or volunteers with an interest, or editors for hire. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all the people who helped read early versions of the book and criticize it and make suggestions, especially the bloggers and advisors who gave up their time to make sure it was accurate.

It takes time for all of this to happen, even after the first draft is done. Below is a look at what my timeline looked like, including the false starts and set-backs. Basically it was ~3.5 months to write the first draft, a cooling-off period for your beta readers to read and your mind to go elsewhere (mine was longer but I’d say give yourself a month), then another ~3 months for revisions, packaging, registering, and publishing. I had read that it took about 6 months for publishers to respond to queries — in practice it is at least 8 months (the fastest one took that one and I still don’t have a response from the others). I’d suggest giving at least a year if you want to take a shot at submitting to a traditional publisher before your self-publishing adventure begins.

My timeline:

• Mid 2013: Decide, based on conversations with readers, to update and expand Potato’s Short Guide to DIY Investing for a 2nd edition. Begin taking notes on what I’d like to change and add, and drafting a few blog posts that will get further refined and incorporated into the book. (I end up with a massive stack of doodled-on envelopes, scraps of paper, and only a few pages of the notebook I intended to use to organize those thoughts filled out)
• Fall 2013: Get super-busy at work. Put 2nd edition on hold, with plan to take time off at xmess and write entire thing over 2-week break.
• Winter 2013: Massive ice storm, evacuate house for 10 days from power outage and burst pipe, zero writing gets done — and other tasks on the xmess to-do list have to get done in January, somehow. Postpone 2nd edition to early spring.
• February 2014: Super-busy at work for a brief period, with a big slack period following that. Use accumulated vacation to take days off (~1/week) through last two weeks of February, March, April, and May to write.
• Spring 2014: The actual writing begins in earnest. As I get going and talking with people the scope blooms, and it evolves from a 2nd edition of PSGtDIYI to a completely new book in its own right. I become a big fan of outlining during this period to keep the scope under control and to keep myself going — I decide at the outline stage which suggestions to cut (people had lots of questions they wanted answered). When writing for a day I can just pick a section from the outline to flesh out with a chapter when I had a block of time to write. I try to write for ~2 hours each afternoon while baby is napping (~3 days/week, using weekends and the day off) and another ~3 hours each evening (~6-7 days a week).
• Late April 2014: Realize that this is becoming a “book book”, start talking to some published authors about the process, read up on submitting queries, borrow a copy of Writer’s Market to check on publishers’ timelines. Prepare a kind of a business plan, a detailed proposal, and an elevator pitch. Convert vague “finish by June” timeline to a more defined one to take me through to the end in May and then into the fall for self-publishing.
• Mid-May: Complete draft finished — send pitches and manuscripts to publishers and copies to external reviewers (for feedback and promotional purposes), which included bloggers and experts in finance as well as complete novices to be my beta readers.
• Summer 2014: Get ultra busy at work, the book is shelved for a time. This is good as it gives time for ideas to percolate, and for the manuscript to fade from the front of my mind so I can more critically and objectively review and edit it in the fall. Start talking with Ben (a friend and colleague who is a document design guru and artist) about hiring him to create a cover as the stark white cover with the money bunnies just aren’t going to work.
• Fall 2014: come back with fresh eyes and a big stockpile of edits and suggestions from the reviewers. The experts help point out minor errors or places where I was over simplifying, and the novices helped me understand how they approach investing after reading just this book, what was clear and what was not. Burn a few more vacation days, weekends, and late nights revising and polishing. Also finally get cover concepts back from Ben and start working to a final cover design.
• September 2014: Decide on release date: December 1, 2014. This gives what I thought would be plenty of time to do further edits, arrange for printing and background details, while also providing the traditional publishers with a 6-month window to respond before I launch into self-publishing. Register ISBN (instant), set up store front, continue with increasingly minor edits (but there are always more). I wanted to wait as long as possible before splitting the file into separate layouts for the different versions (print book, large screen PDF, small screen PDF, e-reader), so that I wouldn’t have to repeat edits across all files. Inevitably a few more changes are found and made, which takes three times as long with so many document versions. Submit cataloging-in-publication (CIP) request [note that this was not quite early enough], bookmark information on how to get into the library system. Get cover ideas from Ben, and refine to create the final cover art and layout. Research companies for printing-on-demand or small-batch printing*.
• October 2014: Start contacting second wave of reviewers (just for publicity this time around). Create InDesign files for cover (too much work for the interior — that was entirely completed with Word and Photoshop). Find incredibly annoying rights restriction on a font that won’t let me embed it into the PDF, have to change fonts. Submit files to IngramSpark, order proofs. Start thinking about the book launch party — as a birthday present my “events team” takes over the details of catering, room booking, and much of the promotion so that I can focus on my talk and not worry about logistics.
• November 2014: The 6-month mark on my submissions/queries to publishers passes with no response — self-publishing is a go! Proofs arrive, distribute as ARCs to reviewers. Have a constant debate about when to order the first print run for self-distribution sales — I don’t want to leave it too late and show up to my launch party empty handed, but I want them to be suitable for libraries by having the CIP block in them — I get seriously antsy about not having that in hand and it taking way longer than I read it should. I also want to enable distribution on IngramSpark as I’ve heard it can take up to 6 weeks for the listing to enter the Amazon and Indigo catalogs (it took less than 3). CIP finally arrives, and I finalize the files for IngramSpark to include in their distribution catalog, and order the first print run. I finalize the e-book files and upload to retailers to enable pre-sales (Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords), and open pre-sales on my own web store.
• December 2014: Launch! With some reviews up, I submit my paperwork to TPL and LPL (PEI and Alberta libraries were much less formal, I just emailed them before having external reviews, and they had copies on the shelves in December). I had some other marketing plans, but caught a nasty cough right after the launch party and spent a lot of the month in bed just hoping it went well.

Leave lots of time at the end. When I thought I was done but for “one or two little things” in September and committed to a Dec 1 release, it seemed so far away. Instead it was a fairly hectic grind to deal with last-minute edits, formatting issues, and then switching gears to start promoting. Formatting alone is like a two-day job just to smooth out all the little wrinkles — you may think that this may have gone better with InDesign for the print version, but stomping ePub bugs was a huge part of that time, which wasn’t Word’s fault (for once). I also had to go back to Photoshop to remaster a few images — some were not quite high-resolution enough for print, or were a bad multiple of pixels so they didn’t look good (an image scaled at 50% will usually look better than one scaled down 47%); others were full-colour images that did not translate well to black-and-white and had to be re-coloured (or de-coloured). A quick tip was that I did any rescaling necessary in Photoshop rather than Word.

* – Note to local print shops: you say you can produce a made-in-Canada trade paperback for me, but your websites suck and I’m too antisocial to want to come down and chat about my unique needs. How much does it cost for 10 copies? 100 copies? 1000? What are the specifications? What are the timelines? Are there set-up fees? Can people order copies on demand or do I need to manage inventory myself? Can you get it listed on Amazon/Indigo? The American print-on-demand shops and small presses are killing you here. And I probably would have paid a little more just to avoid currency fluctuations and possible cross-border shipping delays. But I could not tell at all if you were remotely competitive, and the fact that you were so secretive about your prices suggests that you’re not.

Maybe you’re thinking of writing a book and want to hear about my experiences in self-publishing with the Value of Simple, or maybe you’re just bored and happen to have the site bookmarked. Either way it was such a large project and part of my life that I’m going to talk about it in a bit of detail, and because there are so many aspects to it this is going to be a multi-parter.

Outline of what’s to come in the series:

1. 1. Introduction (this post)
2. 2. Timeline and Writing Process
3. 3. Editing Process
4. 4. Creating e-books (ePub)
5. 5. Publishing an e-book Version
6. 6. Creating a Print Version
7. 7. Publishing a Print Version
8. 8. Registrations and Cataloguing
9. 9. Business Side and Taxes
10. Epilogue: Interview with Melissa Leong (aka Wynne Channing)
11. Epilogue: Interview with Kyle Prevost

Traditional publishing has a fair bit going for it, including acting as a gatekeeper for readers. Every now and then some people complain about the take — as a self-publisher you can keep much more of the gross sale of each book — but realistically almost no one who can go with a traditional publisher chooses to self-publish, despite the potential to make a lot more money if you become the next Hugh Howey or EL James. Publishers offer editors, typesetters/layout artists, cover artists, take care of distribution, sometimes some marketing, and they make it easier to get past other gatekeepers like librarians, journalists, and bookstore purchasing managers. As a self-publisher you have to do all of that yourself or outsource it (and at least some of that should be outsourced for quality), which is more work and also increases your risk of losing money on the whole venture.

However, publishers are slow. Ssssslllllooooooooooooooowwwww. For some things that doesn’t matter — whether your steampunk zombie action-adventure novel comes out this summer or a year and a half from now likely won’t affect how well it will do. It’s just a matter of how much frustration you’re willing to deal with shopping it around and waiting 6-12 months for a response. For me and my plans for the Value of Simple though, I wanted to get it out before changes in mutual fund disclosures started to hit and people really felt the need to go buy a do-it-yourself guide to index investing. Other topical issues can sometimes be fast-tracked by publishers, but it may be a reason to look to self-publish for you.

So speed was one factor in choosing to self-publish. By the time I realized the Value of Simple was its own book — and a real book-length book, not just a second, expanded edition of PSGtDIYI — it was largely done. It’s hard to think about sitting on something like that for years — the book has a life force of its own and it wants out. I also knew my odds were low at getting picked up by a traditional publisher because I’m not a household name with a regular newspaper or magazine credit. Balancing that was the fact that it was good and needed. So I put together a proposal and sent either the full package with manuscript or a query to a few publishers — I took a shot at traditional publishing but had a time limit because knowing the odds were against me I didn’t want to waste years trying to shop the manuscript to publisher after publisher. To highlight how slow they are, I still haven’t received a reply to one query (which they recommend you do before sending a manuscript because it’s supposed to be much faster), and the rejection for the full package I sent to Wiley came almost three months after my generous time limit expired and I went the self-published route.

Traditional publishers are also (gasp!) interested only in making money from the books that they put out, and not taking risks to do so. That means they want a book that will fit neatly into a genre where they know there will be readers, and preferably by an author who is already established and has an audience of some sort (which may not necessarily be a book audience — celebrities and webcomics with huge followings will often get traditional book deals). That was a strike against me and the book on the traditional publishing route¹. As a self-publisher you may have alternative goals beyond just making money, such as using a book as a marketing tool to help boost your business, or your profit targets may be smaller², or the demons that live inside your brain may have already forced you to write it and now you’ve just got to do something with the manuscript in your lap.

Speaking of demons on the brain, that is the main reason to do something crazy like write a book. Think of being a paid author like an iceberg: a few at the top are above water and actually making money at it — and some of them are glorious and sparkle like diamonds — but many more are not. They’re below the surface and invisible, and quite possibly underwater in the sense of losing money if they’re paying for editors, shelf placement, book tours, and artists. The Value of Simple has reached my first success milestone — that is, not failure — so I am making money on it. But given how long it took me, and how I could have done freelance⁴ editing or writing with my time to make more money³, it was not a smart economic decision. I have seen some horrifying stories on self-publishing forums of writers who are making a living as self-publishers, but they generally do it by not paying editors and taking a quantity over quality approach — which in the long term may make the already existing stigma against self-publishing much worse. Of course, it’s also easier to make money if you’re in a field where there are more readers: horror, mystery, and erotica are global markets, whereas investing for Canadians is a really limited market.

Be sure to ask any questions in the comments section and I’ll address them in the coming posts. Also note that I am Canadian, so this will focus on the particular issues that all the American guides and personal experience posts miss.

1. In hindsight, I should have let someone else take the author credit and just collected the money as a ghostwriter.
2. For PSGtDIYI it was a bit of a toss-up whether I was going to give it away for free. I was mostly looking for pizza money, which is orders of magnitude below a publisher’s criteria.
3. Or made sandwiches at Subway for minimum wage, though that would have been harder to schedule in and do while I kept an ear on a sleeping baby.
4. Weird realization: it’s been two years since I’ve had a freelance project that required me to use InDesign.

Last week Sandi and I presented Money 201: Planning and Investing at the Toronto Public Library and it was a blast. I think it was one of the best lectures I’ve ever given¹. Sandi opened it up with a discussion about goals and direction, making money fit your life, and she did it all with only a few graphical slides. Then I picked up from there to go into investing in a bit more academic way. The room was nearly full, the audience was involved, the energy was good, the questions were great. I hope at some point we’ll be able to do it again.

In brief, my part started with the old fable of the grasshopper and the ant: we know we need to save for the future. Then I took it a step further: with inflation and long lives we need to not just save but to invest. Then a breezy breakdown of what investing is and how it’s kind of scary (discussing risk) and not scary at all (showing how easy passive investing is).

At this point I’m not quite sure what to do with the material — I can leave it alone for now, and if/when we do another seminar then the lucky people who come can see it anew, or I can put up the slides… but that loses a lot without the accompanying talk and discussion. I can also make a video/podcast out of it, but at an hour² just for my part is a lot to listen to, and a lot of work for me if no one is going to watch it. Let me know in the comments if that’s something you’re interested in (also if you’d prefer to see a video of me standing and gesticulating with my hands as though it were a lecture, or a voice-over on the slides which is cleaner).

Speaking of lots of work, let me now give a behind-the-scenes glimpse at preparing something like this. It basically took about 15 hr of prep time for a 1.5 hr presentation — and I’m still buzzing from the energy of that day so let me go ahead and say that 10:1 ratio of prep time for a great presentation is about right in my experience from preparing other classes and lectures³. Of course, everyone is different: some people can write some bullet points on cue cards in the drive to the talk and be amazing, and my PhD supervisor famously gave other people’s talks cold (zero preparation time), just talking based on what he saw on the slides as they came up and rolling with it. Or check out this guide from TED, which suggests that if anything my 10:1 prep ratio is not practicing enough. IMHO you should always plan at least one real-time practice run, especially if you have a time window to hit — good talks don’t just materialize from being charming and winging it.

First, there was the idea stage: Sandi and I were psyched to do something for financial literacy month 2013; when that plan fell through we took our early discussions and wrote a proposal for the Toronto Public Library and submitted it. Yes, Money 201 actually pre-dates the Value of Simple — we submitted the proposal for it like two years ago now, thinking TPL would go a lot faster. Instead it was over a year before we heard back that there was a branch interested in hosting the seminar, and once they did get back to us they were booking 7 months in advance⁴.

Anyway, with this actually a go I now had the book in hand, so I set out to try to basically recapitulate it, with some more detail on planning to come from Sandi’s part. Well, as you can imagine, there’s way too much material to cover in that kind of time: I had to create something new that would fit. So I spent about 2 hr putting together a first draft slide deck which outlined a more focused talk, expanding on some parts of the book and ignoring many others. Then I spent about an hour doing a dry run on my own to identify problems with the flow and scope, which led to another 2 hours of slide revisions and rewrites (some of this was digging up a reference for a quote and double-checking some math).

Then because this was a joint presentation I had another 2 hours to discuss it with Sandi so that our parts would mesh together well, and to get her feedback on my early slides. That was followed by another 2 hours or so of revisions and rewrites.

After that I took about 2 hours to practice in front of Wayfare (though the talk was only an hour, there was lots of time to stop and ask questions, discuss what works and doesn’t, to accept criticism, see what’s too detailed, and where things come out of nowhere). I only had about an hour of revisions after that — mostly reordering and cutting slides rather than revising them or writing new ones.

Finally, another hour to practice the “final version” on my own, check the timing and flow — which includes creating a few mental checks, like where the ~1/3 and ~2/3 points are so I’ll know when I might have to hurry up or slow down if I get off my timing at the real thing. That inevitably leads to a last few tweaks of the slides, which with the other prep tasks like copying backups to my cloud drive, a USB stick, making sure I have a laser pointer and bottled water packed, etc., is another hour of prep time.

In all that slide prep I try to think of likely questions and a trick that has carried over from my academia days is to have question slides ready — if I have say 50 slides to present then slide 51 might be my ending “thank you, questions? contact me here:” etc. slide, but then past that I keep slides ready to help answer questions. Many of the extra slides I had to cut back on for time are kept there because I don’t like deleting things, as are a few slides I made just to be ready for questions. Even if I don’t have to bring them up to answer a question, that kind of advanced thinking of likely questions (and their answers) really helps the Q&A part go more smoothly.

A financial literacy event like this can feel really good to do — lots of happy people in that audience who walked away knowing more and feeling better about their money and how it intertwined with that future, which is affirming for us as presenters. But make no mistake that it’s a much bigger time commitment than just the hour or two spent up on stage.

1. and if I may toot my own horn, that is indeed saying something.
2. and to toot horns again, our timing was great — few people appreciate coming in on-time for a 1.5 hr lecture, but it is important and requires work and practice to nail it.
3. for my PhD defence it was naturally more, closer to 200:1 (and that’s not including data analysis tasks like making graphs — just presentation prep). I had a very indulgent and supportive lab group who critiqued me through three full-length practice runs.
4. so using that as a guide, if you’re interested in seeing another Money 201/new title TBD with Sandi and/or me, it likely won’t be for another year or more, at least at TPL.

A reader writes in, asking about a particular mutual fund manager. They’ve read The Value of Simple, but aren’t sure if they should switch to DIY index investing considering their particular funds have outperformed net of fees the past few years, and have won Lipper and Morningstar awards.

This was an interesting email to receive. The reader had four different ways of saying that past performance for the particular fund was good.

The Lipper and Morningstar awards are basically useless as indicators of a fund’s ability to out-perform their fees in the future. The Lipper awards in particular are completely focused on past performance, so winning one doesn’t tell you anything a screen of past performance wouldn’t already. The Morningstar award includes “style consistency” and “tax efficiency” as other criteria, but is again basically just a metric of past performance.

There are studies that show that past performance is not a criteria for finding winning mutual funds, so by extension, the Morningstar and Lipper awards shouldn’t have any bearing, either. Indeed, I went back and spot-checked the 2010 Lipper winner, and they badly under-performed in the subsequent ~5 years. Their 10-year average (including the out-performance that won them the award and subsequent under-performance) is now equal to the index. I then quickly checked all the 3-year winners in the Canadian equity category from 2007-2014 (the range data is available from Lipper), and all but one of them went on to under-perform the index. (I didn’t check all of the winners in all categories because they have dozens and dozens of categories to try to spread the love around)

So why is past performance not a good indicator of future performance, when it is for say, job performance for an engineer or a sales associate? There’s always a combination of luck and skill in performance and outcomes, but the proportions change for different tasks. The engineer’s outcomes might be mostly skill and a bit of luck, so a good one in 2010 will probably still be good in 2015. A sales associate might have an equal mix of factors affecting their past performance — finding the skill may not be too hard, but it may not be immediately apparent in past results. But for mutual funds the skill can be completely swamped by luck, so it’s quite hard to find, especially from the customer’s chair.

I’m not dogmatic about indexing and active management, but pragmatic: I think some people can out-perform due to skill, maybe even enough to beat their fees if they do it professionally. However, identifying that small percentage of managers is a task that’s comparable in difficulty to just being an out-performing active investor yourself, and that is very difficult in my mind. You have to have a good understanding of what skill looks like to be able to spot it amongst all the luck and marketing. And the MER acts as a huge hurdle: these guys might be very skilled, but out-performing by even 2% every year is quite an achievement, and that would be needed just get you back to even. In my opinion, going with indexing is the better bet.

Another consideration is what value you get for the MER paid. A big issue in the industry is that typical big bank/big firm advisors just sell funds and don’t provide the detailed plans, hand-holding, tax advice, or other services they claim in newspaper articles are reasons to avoid DIY investing. If you’re getting good service, then you have to decide whether it’s worth 2% — or whatever the fee difference is — to keep getting that level of service, or if you’d rather do it yourself and save on the fees and avoid the risk of their performance streak ending. If you’re not getting good service for what you pay, then paying the higher MER is purely a bet on their ability to out-perform, and historically that has not been a good bet to take. Demand better service to get your money’s worth, or take matters into your own hands (which may include paying fee-for-service for the expertise you need to supplement your own efforts in indexing).

In all my years and all my learning, I have never quite got the hang of mornings. I used to be pretty good at sneaking up on them from the other side, staying up all night to get them when they least expect it, but waking up and facing a new day is just such an impossible concept. I know some people can basically just roll out of bed and be something called “chipper” and “alert”. I am not one of those people. I used to play snooze-button basketball with my alarm clock to gradually wake up over the course of an hour and a half, then search for caffeine before risking communication with other humans.

At several points in my life I have studied the evidence and become convinced of the utility of breakfast, and have woken up early to eat this mystery meal before leaving for work. Inevitably, after a few weeks of that I decide (consciously or not) to forgo breakfast in exchange for more time in bed, or less stress at cramming the rest of my routine into an unrealistically short period of time.

And time is the big problem with mornings: it doesn’t behave or flow right. I can sit there at night, when everything is sparkly and sleek and working as it should, and time myself as I perform the necessary house-leaving preparatory tasks to plan when I need to haul my ass out of bed for the morning. I can put two poptarts in the toaster, determine that it takes 90 seconds to toast them, 25 seconds to slather them with peanut butter, and all of 195 seconds to shovel them into my food hole and wash them down. Practice run done: 310 seconds for breakfast, add it to the morning time budget, set the alarm clock back appropriately and we will be able to squeeze breakfast in. But then morning comes and time stops working properly. My carefully practiced and timed breakfast routine goes horribly awry. It’s going on 12 minutes and I still have half a pop tart to eat and somehow there’s melted peanut butter dripping on my pants.

I cannot accept that this is merely a subjective time dilation effect, caused by my severe case of night owlism. My toothbrush has a digital timer so that I brush for precisely 2.0 minutes. Yet in the morning, even though it still ticks up towards 2:00, it takes five minutes to get the whole process over with — the morning effect clearly affects even piezoelectric crystal-based time measurement.

Anyway, all this is to say that I am “morning challenged” and pretty much always have been.

Then into my life comes a wonderful bouncing baby, who becomes an amazing little toddler girl. Now instead of an alarm clock I wake up to the sound of “Daddy! Come pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease!” Bopping her on the head does not get me an extra 15 minutes to snooze so I pretty much have to get up at that point. For a long, long while she was waking up too late for me to even see her before I left for work, but then over the last year that has flipped so that she wakes up crazy early, following the ancient toddler urge to be up before dawn so that they can watch the sun rise and ask “why?”

And while to me it all sounds universally crazy early, there is a big difference to waking up at 5:30am and 7:00am, and incredibly it leads to a totally non-linear relationship in the time to be ready for work, a function I call the Toddler Morning Efficiency Curve. You would think that it would take about the same amount of time to do basically the same sets of things each morning, no matter when your wake-up call happened to come in. Indeed, if there was a non-linearity, you’d expect to become more efficient as the time to get out the door for work came closer and you started to hurry or cut non-essential things out of the routine — the hurry-up hypothesis. But it’s not so simple.

If she wakes up at a “normal” time (normal for her, not for me), let’s say 6:30 to 7 am, then things proceed reasonably well. We can spend 10 minutes or so where I am just a useless bag of shambling meat, a zombie barely able to greet her and see if she needs a diaper change immediately or if it can wait a few minutes for the strength and dexterity to return to my hands. At some point shortly after waking up, I can go potty, tell her that I’m about to go potty, reassure her that I will be back in just one minute, and then go potty and listen to her wail for daddy to come back because this is a surprising and distressing abandonment and not something we do every. single. day. that daddy always comes back from.

Then we’ll get her dressed, maybe have some time to read a few books, play for a bit, or watch an episode of Mr. Rogers, then we go wake mommy up so I can have a shower and get dressed myself.

If she wakes up later, we can cut down on the playing or TV watching, but then have to deal with the whining that happens around the severe and unfair deprivation we’re causing through that action. The bigger issue though is that sleeping in just a bit seems to activate the lazy sunday lay-in region of her brain (the posterior cingulate? it’s got to be used for something, and seems to deactivate with any other active behaviour) and she no longer wants to get dressed. She wants to wear her PJs all day.

Even more inexplicable and fascinating is the phenomenon of waking up earlier. So many early theorists in parental dynamics predicted that if you had more time in the morning, you would at worst be finished everything by the same deadline — that the lateness barrier could not be breached from the left-hand side of the curve. How wrong we were.

Instead, we have the case where daddy is a nearly-immobile shuffling zombie, eyes 75% closed (often one closed entirely and the other largely closed against the harsh light of a 10 W night light), while the toddler draws unholy manic energies from the predawn night and tears circles around him. When it’s time to get dressed, she becomes and impossible squirming octopus of giggles, pleased as punch that she can so easily avoid having clothes put on her, free to live out her dream of running around the house naked.

Add to this the propensity for shuffling-sleep-zombie daddy to collapse onto any bed, couch, or other soft-looking surface “for just one more minute” of “inspecting his eyelids for holes”, and the whole thing becomes non-linear: the delays and funny effects on the flow of time from the early morning start using up more time than the extra head start provided in the first place, and everyone ends up late for school and work.