It’s Saturday, so it’s a bit weird to be sitting down to type this out.
I rarely work weekends – unless it’s on a play, which tends to shift work weeks to include Saturdays and ditch Mondays instead – but either way, having two clear days off a week is essential for me. If I don’t, I start to flag quite a bit, understandably because I’m a human being and not built to work work work.
I also keep Thursdays clear for admin-type tasks, meetings and the occasional trip out with a friend who can’t do weekends. This evolved out of the realisation that I just don’t find the same type of work as satisfying after the fourth day in a row of it, and so my enthusiasm and inspiration start to flag. If I can get a day in doing something useful but different, I return the next day refreshed and renewed. My enthusiasm tank is a bit fuller than before. It also has a knock-on effect: admin and errands can be quite boring, and getting them out of the way feels oh-so-productive. As a result, I’m glad to be done with it and feel a genuine sense of relief on Fridays that all I have to do again is write music for the whole day.
So I suppose you could say I sort of do a 4-day week. But not really, because that extra day is still work. It’s just not composition work.
I’m a creature of habit, and if I keep this routine – no work on weekends, Thursdays ring-fenced for admin and extraneous matters (that may or may not be work-related), I can keep going and going and going. Work becomes straightforward the rest of the time. Monday through to Wednesday I have (usually) a clear block of time to just think about and do composition, and come the end of Wednesday, I know I can shelve that hard work for a day whilst I catch up on all the loose ends I’ve been putting off.
It does take a certain amount of… metal, I think I want to call it. It takes a certain kind of steely stubbornness and faith in one’s abilities to perform and produce to a certain standard on the days I say I will. It’s a deal I make with myself: I promise to do the sort of work on the specific days I set, and in return, I’m able to get everything done in a timely fashion and still make it way more likely that I stay physically and mentally happy and healthy.
It’s a great way I’ve found to balance my time for the most effective use of my composition brain.
The test of this, however, is when we get into deadline territory. There are a few weeks a year when it becomes clear that the time allotted by the client might not allow for such a structure.
On these occasions, I’m flexible enough with myself to be able to postpone ‘Thursday admin’ day for a week or two, or make it a half day, and borrow the time for more composition.
Being, as it is, near a deadline and thus towards the end of a project, it means that a great deal of the hard work of composition is done and hopefully, by this stage, the material is there to make these final days of work straightforward. It’s now just a matter of putting in the time.
So, for a temporary one or two weeks, Thursday admin is postponed until after the project’s completion, and I can ‘steal back’ some of the time and maybe have a two- or three-day stretch of admin, miscellaneous errands and meetings or catchups. It’s not an ideal way to work, but it works for me in the end.
So maybe I’ll steal this Saturday time back from a future work day! Writing a blog counts as work, right?