So you’ve set your goals and you’re working diligently towards achieving them. You’ve set a schedule and you’re sticking to it. You have short term goals and long term goals and you’re going slow and steady and ticking things off that to-do list. And then wham!
You get an opportunity, or a new job, or have a kid, and your schedule for success gets creamed. So waddya do?
Retreat? Postpone? Procrastinate? No. No. No.
You re-configure. You absolutely must find a way to keep going. Re-jigging (is that a real word?) your timeline is a completely natural thing to do. If you haven’t had to do it yet, it was inevitable that it happen to you eventually.
Life is bound to interfere with great plans. But it is what you do when this happens that will determine how far you get with your show.
If you buckle the first (or second or third) time life makes it “impossible” to work on your show then you’re going to need to rethink your thinking.
As you work harder to get to accomplish the goal of completing your show you will find that other areas of your life will begin to excel as well. A friend of mine told me the other day, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” And it’s frickin’ true!
You may find new opportunities at work. Or be offered a completely new job.
When you push yourself and become goal oriented and start checking things off your list it will affect other areas of your life. Your success in one area will permeate into other areas of your life, and that is when you need to be ready to re-jig (there’s that word again) your plans that are independent of your normal schedule.
I just got a call for a four month contract job that will probably entail me working 80 hours/week. I’ve done these jobs before and know that they can become all consuming, but I also know that if I don’t find a way to continue to work on my own shows that I will have to subject myself to these kinds of work hours for the rest of my working life, if I’m lucky.
So I need to figure how I’m going to make my new work schedule work with my goal-oriented timetable. I know I can’t keep researching and writing as much as I do now, so what can I do?
What little things can I do? Can I do more of the things from my “What To Do on the Tough Days” list? Yes! Can I free write more? Can I throw myself more into researching shows to find out what has been done and what hasn’t?
There are different ways you can go when life gets busy so that you can still pursue the goal of creating your own show, but only you can find out what works for you and your show.
The important thing is, is you cannot postpone work on your show. You can slow it down, you can re-plan your work schedule, you can find another plan or route, but you must keep pushing towards that finish line, because if you stop when life gets busy, you just might find that you don’t start again.