Competing Priorities

I have a lot of things on my plate right now. It's taken me a while to realize that I will always have a lot of things on my plate. So I need to figure out what is most important and find ways to carve out time for these things.

Friends and family- I have a surprising number of close friends and family members. I feel out of sorts when I am too busy to spend time with them. Of course, I resent it a little if I'm always traveling to Seattle. But recently, everyone has picked up some of the friend slack and is traveling to Tacoma to hang out. I am also married to a wonderful man who is my favorite person to hang out with. It can be hard to motivate myself to do other necessary things when I am hanging out with him.

Work- Not only do I need to pay rent and bills, I have a community of support at work. More than 300 people care about my well-being and what I'm up to. If I don't go to work, I find myself much more lonely and stressed out about work. It's also a convenient way to double dip- earn money while hanging out with friends.

Self care- I need to sleep, craft and have time to myself or I am more susceptible to crankiness and stress. I am not a great motivator or leader when I am cranky and stressed.

School- Almost done! I need to just focus on the last stretch and it will pave a good path for my theater. I've finally identified some supportive mentors and with their help I can not just crank out the last few months of papers, but actually develop something meaningful. At times I feel that I've gotten myself into insurmountable debt to earn a useless degree. In opening my own non-profit it is unlikely that I will see a monetary return on my investment. However, it would simply not have been possible to open a theater without going through this program. Not because I learned many practical how to run a business skills. If I had wanted that, I should have enrolled in an MBA program. But the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences degree has taught me how to think and what my values are. It has helped me discover my purpose in life, which is more valuable than a program which would have simply funneled me into a high earning career. Success is not dependent on money earned and stuff purchased, but on purpose discovered and fulfilled.

Working Class Theater NW- I could work full time managing this theater and still not do everything I need to. I have to find the right people to bring on board to share the workload. I may be the moral center of this project and the final arbiter of boundaries, but that doesn't mean that I need complete control over every aspect. The nice thing about a collaborative project like this is that it can invite participation and ownership from anyone who is on board with the mission and values. 1. Getting people on board. This has been taking much of my time in the last six months or so. I've been meeting with local theater managers, and soliciting participation from friends and volunteers. I've been talking up the theater to anyone I can and overseeing other people's contributions to the theater. 2. Business Management I've been slacking here. I have a bunch of end of year things to get done (taxes, licenses, accounting) that I've been waiting to have time to do. It's hard to do things I dislike when they don't pay me or bring any outside support. This is an area I should hire out. 3. Accountability and timeline My friend Amy is a career counselor and has offered me a few sessions of deadline setting help. She's also offered to help me find a long term counselor so I can check in with someone who cares but is neutral. It's no good setting goals with my friends- they will let me slide without too much grief because they love me and understand my excuses. But I need to get my crap together so that I can actually make this theater happen. It's not enough to say I tried when I know I haven't really tried.

Life Stuff- Since I don't have a household staff of ten, I still have to wash things, care for my pets, cook food and otherwise try not to live in a slovenly hovel. I neglect this category even in good times, because really, who loves to clean? It affects my mood if I don't have enough underwear, am forced to spend my money on eating out every day or never get time to cuddle the cat. I'm also allergic to dust, so there has to be some baseline of cleanliness or I am popping Benadryl like candy.

Volunteer/Community Building- Spaceworks, City Events and Recognitions Committee, attending theater, everything I do to be a part of the art scene in Tacoma gets my name and face out there to people who I can help and who can help me. It is important to do community service and not just extoll its virtues from a pedestal of laziness and hypocrisy. I also have to do a certain amount of supporting other people before I can legitimately ask for their help in turn. I try to keep this to a minimum due to my unpredictable schedule and personal time selfishness.

November showed how much I could accomplish when I really invested the time and energy in my theater. I had so many awesome people helping me out. However, I had to track them all and that was a lot of work. It stressed me out sufficiently that I needed to take December off because I knew I couldn't handle holidays and theater at the same time. January I've been at work so much that I got my healthcare notice the other day. (Background for non-stagehands- you must work 120 hours a month for two months in a row to qualify for healthcare through IA 15. For a shop job or house job that is very do-able. For a bounce worker like myself, that is a lot.)February I know I have to cut back on work so I can attend all of my classes and set my theater up to succeed.

Candi from the DASH Center may have found a space she is willing to share with us. Judy is helping me put together a website that has all of the things I need a website to have. I am on track to graduate from the UW in June. I have video footage, a season picked out, artists lined up, and a small cache of able volunteers. I have a great support network and some groundswell of excitement and cautious optimism. I only have so much time in the day and much of it is squandered by travel and procrastination. So my task this quarter is to figure out where I can do the most good. What tasks are worth doing personally and what tasks are best hired out. Do I have time to follow up on all the tasks I hire out? What systems can I put into place so that timelines and check-ins and tracking happens smoothly and without more effort than just doing things myself? I hope that writing regularly on this blog will help me see the patterns so that I can adjust according to what I actually do rather than what I think I could do with just ten more hours in the day. Allons-y!