Time Management

Working full time in a company you find yourself dedicated to your work, and may I say to your passion 100% percent. Even when your rehearsals finish late in the evening, going home having dinner and resting your body after a heavy work load, your mind is somehow still in the studio. You have left it there ready to find you at the same space at the barre where you will probably repeat a similar pattern of a routine the next day. Ofcourse, sometimes you have surprises! A new rehearsal may be added to your afternoon, a dancer could be injured last minute so you would have to fill in for her spot in the next performance, a new guest is staging the new ballet therefore you would have to dance at your best of abilities to show a good impression. These are surprises that keep you up on your toes (literally) every day!! It can be very exciting! finally a chance to show what you can do! But it can also sometime be overwhelming, depending on the responsibilities you have as a professional, which are usually a lot. At the end of the day, you are the one carrying the performance, you are the one on stage, so as the say, 'the stage is yours' ! 

So as you can imagine, the stress can get be quite overwhelming for many dancers out there, leaving little opportunity to let the brain from detoxing from all the worries on a daily basis. Speaking to a few dancers from my own company and friends working abroad in all different areas of dance a feel that there is a similar pattern going on. Isolation, lack of sleep, and constant thoughts of work, choreography, self doubt, which are factors that stop us form evolving into the artists we can actually be! I have been trying to work on this a lot since a few years now. I feel that I am a person who gets paranoid and quite worried for small thing very easily, feeling that there is just too much on my plate to handle. So what I have been trying to do is to step back and look at everything in perspective. I am human, therefore I cannot complete tasks with the click of a finger, as much as that would be nice. What I can do though is not 'drown myself into a drop of water' like my father tells me when I get stressed, but instead look back and prioritise. I have a lot to learn from my father, who would write a 'to do list' every evening before he would go to bed, just to make sure he would not leave anything behind. And that is called Time Management. 

I always give the excuse that I work best under pressure, however, even if I do get there at the end, this is not the way things should be done. Especially when working a full time job, whatever that may be, and University studies. So I will take a moment, and organise myself and take one step at a time. Instead of waiting for the perfect idea to pop in my head with final result, I can instead build up to that idea through my blog and discover more about what is out there in the world of dance through research and interesting discussion with colleagues, tutors and friends :)