Leah and I painted a wall in our bedroom, using lots of different colored yarn and 3x5 cards where we wrote out tasks we wanted accomplished. and tried to do the whole schedule thing. -->
I think after about two weeks I gave up. I didn't acknowledge that I had given up, but I was so overwhelmed. The giant calendar on the wall a testimony to my failure. That was 2016/2017.
In 2018 when I was fixing appliances I really wanted to figure out a way to manage my schedule in a way that I didn't feel overwhelmed all the time. Leah and I had two pretty helpful solutions.
- Saturdays were ours. We didn't make any plans on Saturdays because they were our day for art. I remember friends getting frustrated because we wouldn't come and do things on Saturdays, and I remember us needing to be ok with people being mad at us about it.
- Getting up early. I knew that if i was going to compose regularly while I was working a regular job I needed to make sure I was giving composition the best part of my day. That meant if I was at work at 8, I was up at 4:30.
Those two things were really helpful when we were getting Leijah off the ground. But after I quit my job with Mr. Appliance, I had no idea how to manage my day.
Last August, I made a routine schedule for myself in my google calendar. I had fun making it, and was excited to start implementing it, but again, it just became a thing I began to ignore. I felt overwhelmed by my schedule. It felt like no matter what I did, I was always behind. I felt hopeless about how to manage my time. It felt like no matter what I did, there was never going to be enough time.
I think accepting that there really isn't enough time helped me accept my own limitations. The fact that I am a human who needs breaks, and sometimes I'm running late, and sometimes the idea of doing that thing right now might be the end of my will power... (ha I'm so dramatic!)
It began to dawn on me that the schedule thing is not unlike creating. I try something, it fails, I try again in a different way, it fails again, but I learn things from the failures. "Well, why didn't it work?"
My schedule overwhelms me. I feel like I can't do it all. My therapist would tell me that insisting something work flawlessly the first time is an all or nothing mentality, and, while it'd be nice, it isn't a very kind expectation to put on ourselves.
So I tried again.
Last month Leah and I sat down and talked about our schedules, and how we can make sure we are doing the things we want to be doing everyday. We took time to write out things that we want to make sure we do everyday. For me:
- Practice Piano 60 minutes
- Practice Push 15 minutes
- Practice Composing 90 minutes
- Practice Voice 15 minutes
- Practice Video 30 minutes
- Education 30 minutes
- Leijah.Art 60 minutes
When I wrote it out and did the math. I realized I was asking quite a bit of myself: that's 5 hours and it's not including any of my church work.
Comedic Break:
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