This week has been a pretty crazy busy week for me. I’ve been very busy with the day jobs, including learning how to do a new task for my research job. I now have 4 extra hours a week plus a new aspect of my job that takes up 50% of my hours. I’ve done some phone training, but we’ve also had a bunch of technical issues and it’s required so many phone calls and emails back and forth (I’m so grateful that my boss is chill about all this).
I’m very happy to have the new tasks and the additional hours because the extra money helps and I want to make sure that this day job continues beyond when my contract ends in October. But learning new things and trying to balance the hours split between the two jobs for one job has been a bit much. I’m finally starting to get into a good groove with the new work and things are much more normal, but that definitely affected the beginning of my week.
And the beginning of this week was supposed to be pretty packed with social events. But because of the stress I was dealing with from the job, I had to make the decision not to go to them.
I’m not too happy about missing the events. Both of them were actor events. And I know I’m been slacking a bit with my acting career lately. I need to make more of an effort to make my career a priority. But that’s not easy when the money-making jobs need to happen too. I thought I had figured out a good balance, but all the technical issues really made me have to reorganize my time and figure out what things had to be sacrificed. And sadly, the free acting related things had to be sacrificed over the money-making jobs.
Time management isn’t usually my weakness, but I’ve realized that flexible time management is. I get my schedule set for the week (or day), but I don’t allow for issues to come up. I have to get from one thing to another really quickly at times, and if there is a delay it can affect multiple things at once. The delay isn’t usually traffic (I typically give myself double the time I’m expecting it to take to get somewhere), but something in my life that stops me in my tracks and requires my attention before I can move on. Sometimes, these things aren’t avoidable like health issues (panic or gallbladder attacks can easily ruin an entire day). But I need to be aware of other issues that might need extra time and to build that into my day at some point.
I am glad I stayed home to work on the things I had to do, but I can’t help but feel that there may have been another way for me to deal with them and still make it to the events that I want to go to. I’ve been looking at my upcoming calendar and the fun events I have planned. I want to make sure that I can add in some flexible time in there to help make sure that I can do whatever needs to be done without missing out on the events.
I think the reason why this has never really been an issue for me before is that I’ve never been as busy as I’ve been lately. I miss the days where I only had 1 day job and that was it. It was super easy to schedule around that because my hours were pretty set and nothing would change. While my box office job hours don’t change (unless they need me to cover for someone or I have to make up hours), my research hours can be at any time. I try to do them around the same time as the box office job, but sometimes they have to be done late at night. I try to keep things as stable as possible, but life happens and since my job isn’t restricted to certain hours I can’t say that if I miss work at a certain time that I get to skip it. I have to find the time to make it up.
I can’t go back in time to fix the scheduling issues so that I could attend the events that I wanted to go to. All I can do is learn from the mistakes that I made (or the issues that I experienced) and try to make things better for me for the future. Hopefully, I can find a great way to balance out life and work and I can make acting events a priority in my life again.
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