3.5 The One About Doing Less More Often

Do less more often.

It sounds deceptively simple, doesn’t it?  It made me highly suspicious.

Being self employed, I have loads to do.  All the time.  Yes, yes, my lovely normal friends, you have loads to do as well.  But most of you have the job you do and you do it; you’ve been doing it awhile, you’re told when to show up, when you can go home, what the parameters are and the possible rewards you’ll get.  And you’re fine with it.  Or you’re fine enough with it in a way where you’re not going anywhere and offset any negative feelings by pocketing office supplies.

My job is getting the job.

All. The. Time.

I live in a constant state of hustle.  And when I try to take a moment to breathe, my mind is doing an end run on me demanding to know why I’m not hustling.

I have a list.  It’s a loooooooong list.  Everything I want/need to do, new ideas for tv shows and films, places I can improvise, auditions I need to learn, books to read, profiles and websites to update, marketing and publicity, courses I want to take, people I need to get in touch with, projects to be worked on, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, meetings, etc.

And I can struggle with all this.  Knowing that my ability to keep myself clothed and fed with a roof over my head depends on my doing all the above and more on a regular basis can be overwhelming.  And doesn’t always work.  (Read ‘broken kneecap’ &  ‘inability to work’ paired with a serious lack of ‘financial IQ’ growing up and you’ve got ‘screwed’.)

I can find myself putting things off because the scope of what needs to get done is too much to handle.  Especially the things like websites, marketing, publicity and writing a book because these are things I don’t know much about, so I have to learn about them first, and it’s intimidating and—well,  it goes on and on and on.

Then a friend of mine pointed me in the direction of Dallas Travers (www.dallastravers.com/index.php).  She’s a writer and career coach for actors.  And she has a little PDF document on her website called “Do Less More Often”.  It’s specifically a marketing document, but it managed to re-arrange things in my head.

Something I logically already knew, but said in a way that made something pop.

And only eleven pages long.  :)

Essentially, when you break things down, they’re manageable.  And an actor and writer’s career needs to be managed.  It’s a marathon, in the simplest sense, and as Dallas puts it, it requires “taking consistent and persistent action”.  And these actions are not all going to see immediate results:  throwing myself into the world of self web design for my script consulting business (www.whytheface.ca) took time.  And patience.  And effort.  There were days when I was lucky I finished one page in the way I wanted it because I was working outside of my comfort zone, going by trial and error. If I am itching for an immediate result, I’ll go improvise somewhere (being silly + people laughing = possible free beer).

And since I became consciously aware of and began implanting this idea, everywhere, with everything,  I’m getting so much more done!  And, on the flip side, it’s also allowing me to have some breaks or time off without my mind poking at me about the hustling.

Because there will never be a point where I will cross the last item off the list.  There’s no ‘end’.

But if I do less more often, I actually get more done.  Which gets me further along to where I want to be.

And it somehow seems easier.

And if there’s a way I can work hard to get what I want and it somehow seems easier, I’m in.

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