A Weekly Routine

Getting Organized Column
BackStage, June 2006
topic: a weekly routine

Routine Maintenance
By Kristine Oller

It’s Wednesday afternoon and your shift is over; the rest of the day and night is all yours. Should you catch an early movie? Take the book you are reading down to the beach? Visit the mall in search of a new shirt for auditions? As you ponder your options, you suddenly realize it is the middle of the week and you have yet to make a serious dent in your lengthy acting-related to-do list. Then it hits you that it is already the middle of June–which is almost the middle of the year. What happened to those plans you made in January? Where has all your time gone?

The pursuit of one’s acting career often exists without any sense of urgency—hey, if you don’t get that mailing done today, there’s always tomorrow. As an actor, you are your own boss; the external motivators of most jobs–deadlines, goals, structure, consequences, rewards—don’t exist unless they are created and enforced by you. Your days and weeks can easily become months, even years, spent without any substantial progress made toward turning your dreams into reality.

Regardless of your circumstances, you can and should create a weekly “actor routine” for yourself. This organizational tool will help you automatically devote a portion of every week toward taking consistent actions to move your acting career forward.

Your Weekly Grind

You may feel that imposing organization and structure onto your lifestyle will squelch your creativity and artistic expression. It won’t. What will happen is that the business aspects of your career will get the attention they require to produce opportunities for you to get paid to be creative and artistic.

The actor routine is built around activities that need to be done habitually each week to keep you in the know and your instrument finely tuned. Before you begin, carefully consider your level of experience and the amount of time you have available to devote to your career. Too ambitious a routine can lead to burnout and feeling overwhelmed.

Step One: Decide what general activities are most important for you to do right now on a weekly basis. Your routine might include any of the following: reading the trades, doing drop-offs, submitting electronically, maintaining your database, exercising, attending acting classes or improv workouts, mailing marketing materials, watching movies, reading plays or business books.

Step Two: Refine the routine by adding specific quantifiers. Perhaps each week you commit to having coffee with one new contact, reading the trades, attending one industry event, exercising three times, mailing post cards to 10 people on your target list, and practicing a dialect for one hour.

Step Three: Add rhythm to your routine by linking your chosen acting activities to other regular weekly activities in your life. If you have a day job, use three of your lunch hours each week to do your actor reading. Update your database each week while watching a favorite TV show. Write thank-you notes while doing your laundry. First thing every Wednesday morning, do your online submissions while getting a coffee at Starbucks.

An actor’s schedule can vary widely from one week to the next, so don’t expect to tie each activity on your list down to a certain time on a certain day. Anchor as much as you can, and then plug what remains into gaps in your schedule throughout the week. This actor routine is intended as the baseline of your career. Even if you do nothing else during a particular week but your selected routine activities, you are at least taking enough steps to move you steadily toward your goals.

Your Support System

If you think you are the type of person who has difficulty sticking to anything “regular” or “routine,” get support. If you have the means, hire someone to do your data entry, drop-offs, mailings, or online submissions. Work with a trainer to help you exercise or a coach to help you learn a dialect. Team up with a friend or colleague who will provide daily, weekly, or monthly accountability.

Many people, especially those with attention deficit disorder, respond well to what is known as body-doubling. They find that the presence of another person in the room helps them focus and complete tasks. This body double is not actively helping; they are simply in the room, engaged quietly in their own activity. If this works for you, find or hire someone to come over for a few hours each week.

Having a weekly actor routine in place is especially beneficial when your life is at its craziest. Plugging away at your routine even when you are buried in play rehearsals or shooting on location can help ease the transition back to “regular life” and into your next big gig.

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© 2005-2007 Kristine Oller, all rights reserved. You are free to use material from these columns in whole or in part, as long as you include complete attribution, including live web site link. Please also notify me where the material will appear. The attribution should read:

“By Kristine Oller of Personalized Organization. Please visit Kristine’s web site at http://www.kristineoller.com for additional information and resources on organizing and career strategy for creative people.”

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