Carving Out Time

I must write earlier.  I must write earlier.  I feel as though I should write it a hundred times on a blackboard, just to make it stick.  And as I tell my kids, no screens until the work is done (which is getting harder and harder as so much of their work is on the computer).

I started out spending the slow parts of my job searching days writing the blog.  Now there are many days when I'm scrambling to work out a blog entry at night, once all the at-home editing, child transporting, dinner preparing, and evening meetings are done, and I'm just not my best self at that hour.  There is actually a running joke in our home about the "momster" who replaces me at 10:00 each night.

That said, I must carve out a writing time, just as I have carved out gym time.

Carving out is hard.  In the last few months One Life to Live was in production (and we were going through the high school application process for my daughter), I remember feeling all the time that I didn't know which crisis to address first.  Should I be devoting most of my energy to the high school search, or to relishing the last days at work?  Or to a job search, or networking toward a job search?  In the end, I did little bits of each.  And in the end, One Life to Live still ended, my daughter ended up in a good high school, and I came out of it with no job.

Every day, there are so many things demanding our time, and I have found that the only way to have time for the "want to's" is to carve out that time for myself.  No one is going to release me from the "have to's," but if I am to write or blog or whatever it is that doesn't make money or keep the house clean, it is up to me to write earlier or whatever it takes to make it work.  In a way, not so different from the mindset I had as an AD.  If I was to make things better in the studio, it would be by taking ownership of what went on in the control room, not sitting by and just waiting for the director to do so.

So I am happy to report that today, even with a great deal of at-home editing and transporting children, I did write earlier.  And no one was hurt in the carving out of this time.