How to juggle your passions effectively

Hey everyone! So, I've been pretty busy recently, but not so much overwhelmed, despite stretching myself in several very different directions (as usual). In addition to finishing my show (you can help by participating or sharing the Indiegogo campaign in the sidebar), learning my lines for The Tempest (and yes, we have a campaign for that too!), working on a dance show set to happen late June, putting together my visa petition and working as a tour guide to support myself, I have also started meditating every day, designed 2 knitting patterns, finished knitting a huge shawl, started drawing and blogging again and managed to go see three Broadway shows in less than two weeks. Now for those who know me, I have literally spent my life trying (and failing!) to devise a schedule that includes everything I like to do and everything I have to do while still staying manageable and flexible enough for me to stick to it. I had pretty much given up on trying to pursue everything while also feeling like I was accomplishing something. Enters: DA book! 

Now I have read many books dedicated to people like me, and this is by far the one I've found the most useful. It gives a lot of good advice, but I only took away two, and so far they have changed the way I organize my life and made it way more fulfilling and easier to manage (you can purchase the book here)

The first advice is to choose the 4 things you'd like to give priority to in your life at this moment. Those are by no means set in stone and you can change them anytime. Then divide a notebook into 4 and start making lists of things you need to or want to do regarding those 4 things. For instance, for me, for the last few months, the four things were "Tell my own stories" (and this transformed into a subcategory of  "Create One Woman show"), "Start setting foot into the knitwear design world", "Prepare my visa application" and "Deepen my spiritual practice". The list for Create One Woman Show included things like "Write 7 years old monologue", "find second hand suitcase", "cut music for second choreography", "look up solo festivals", "create crowdfunding campain", "write blurb for workshop in March", etc.... The categories can be anything and everything, "spend more time with my kids", "read more", "learn chinese", it can be a mix of things you have to do (preparing my visa) and things you just need to feel healthier in your life (deepening spiritual practice). 

Then comes the second part of the advice: the actual scheduling! Margaret Lobenstine's book is mostly aimed at people with day jobs, and she says to dedicate chunks of time in your schedule to those four things, without defining in advance to which. You just block 2h in your day for that, and when you hit those two hours, you take your notebook and look at what you feel like doing at that moment. I do things a bit differently since my schedule is very flexible and mostly self imposed, so I actually have way more time than someone working 40h a week. I use a weekly planner mouse pad (best invention ever!) on which I write categories I want to be active in during the week. In my case, it goes well beyond the 4 things (again, if you have a day job, 4 might be quite enough!), though those might get a bit more attention. Next to each category I draw 3 or 4 boxes. Each box represents an uninterrupted period of time of one hour or more. Everytime I spend an hour or more on one activity, I check the box. If I spend only 30 min, I check half. If I spend more than 2h, I check two. The goal is that by the end of the week, I will have checked at least more than half the boxes in each category (so if I had 3 boxes next to knitting, having 2 checked. If I had 4 boxes next to Visa, having 3 checked etc...). Usually, for the 4 main ones I try to check all the boxes.   

Here's what my schedule looks like at the beginning of the week (note that I'm not actually using the specific days, just the sheet as a whole to represent the week). The sticky note is for my current to do list, of things that are urgent or don't fit into any categories, like answering a specific email.

And that's it. When I get a chunk of time at home, I look at what category looks empty, what I feel like doing at the moment, if I need inspiration I go to my notebook and see what I could do to advance my 4 focal points, and away I go. And if one week one activity stays blank, then the next week I put a star next to it and make it a priority. Working this way has many advantages: I seldom feel forced to do anything, and keeping track allows me to see my progress and actually feel like I'm accomplishing something instead of running everywhere and not realizing how much I'm doing. It also lets me know which activities I tend to avoid and help me work on that. This new organization has really helped me feel like I'm moving forward and I thought I'd share what I found to be extremely efficient.

With this, I will leave you with some pictures that were taken when I workshoped the first 20min of my solo last month. I only have 4 weeks left to finish it, so I'd better get back to it! :)