Use Multiple Schedules to Keep Your Life Under Control

Today’s topic is how to schedule your life when the time demands of your profession change on a regular basis.

Artists! Actors! Musicians! Creative people! These are my tribe. Unfortunately, as a general rule, they’re also broke. Public speakers are also my tribe, but some of them are pulling in millions. So I guess it all evens out.

Two of the members of my current Get-It-Done Group are professional singers. Their lives are in a constant state of chaos. We tried setting up a standard weekly schedule for them so they would be sure to spend time on everything it takes to keep them moving forward.

It worked like a charm! Until it didn’t.

Schedules change

If you have a regular 9-to-5 type job, you can create a standard weekly schedule. You can predict where you need to be often enough that you can make it a routine. 

But in the case of a professional singer, life gets unpredictable. They have travel, they have performances, they have prospecting, they have studio recording, they teach lessons. Many of their professional demands are inflexible. Performance dates are set in stone. Studios are rented for specific days and times. Backup musicians have their own schedules that need to be accommodated. And around all of this, a professional singer needs to be do their networking, bookkeeping, website maintenance, prospecting, and everything else it takes to run a business.

When they’re at home, it makes sense to have regular prospecting hours, administrative days, gym time, cleaning time, and so on. But a regular 9 a.m. meeting with an assistant, which might work when working from a home office, work won't work when they have to be in a recording studio at 8 a.m. every day for a week. It’s a constant struggle.

Plan multiple calendars

Toss in a little advance planning, however, and this problem melts away like pancake makeup in cold cream. (Don’t ask how I know this.)

Singer Kathy came up with a brilliant solution—have multiple master calendars.

By planning you calendars in advance, you have a template to fall back on to make sure you’re meeting all your needs.

At any given time, her life is running in one of three modes: traveling for live performances, recording in a studio, and working from her office. Rather than having a single schedule that she tries to impose on her whole life, Kathy’s has developed a calendar for each phase...

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