WTWN #69 - Prioritize your Priority, or it’s no priority at all.
Artistic people can be hard to live with because they try to do too much.
“Do the duty which lies nearest to you. The second duty will then become clearer”. - Thomas Carlyle
“The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities." - Stephen Covey
“The reason most goals are not achieved is that we spend our time doing second things first.” - Robert J. McKain
The signature advice, "Secure your own mask before helping others,” is familiar from air travel and frequently extrapolated as a metaphor to stress the importance of self-care.
But a problem arises when you put too much into the basket labeled “your own mask.”
I’m the kind of person who finds it difficult to support others or even socialize with them when I haven’t taken care of myself. For example, when I haven’t had enough to eat and sleep or haven’t done my daily tasks.
Further compounding the problem is that, as a creative person, I tend to dump all my creative efforts into the “my own mask” basket. I must create, organize, and submit my poetry to journals and write short fiction and essays. I even consider writing this Substack part of my creative life and, therefore, part of securing my own mask.
The plot thickens once I’ve added yoga, meditation, and getting 10,000 steps daily into the same “my own mask” basket. I’d love to say that, like a Tardis, my basket is bigger on the inside. But it’s just not true.
It’s no secret that supporting a family and maintaining a relationship can make self-care challenging. In addition to being a creative person, I am also the father of an 18-month-old son and have a full-time job. Sometimes, my toddler wakes up in the middle of the night and cannot get back to sleep. I am expected—indeed, required by spousal responsibility—to help my wife, upon whom the brunt of childcare still falls despite my attempts to maintain as egalitarian a relationship as possible.
Enter some good advice.
I attended a few counseling sessions in the Spring with a top-notch psychologist. After I listed all the productivity hacks I employed to ensure I got my creative work done and still had time left for my family, he told me in so many words that I had to choose. It hit hard because he was right. But months later, what that means is still sinking in.
You can't prioritize both your creative work and your primary relationships with your spouse and children. You must designate one of them as the top priority and the other as secondary and then adhere to that hierarchy.
For reasons that deserve an essay of their own, your top priority must be your spouse and family.
It’s a mathematical reality that you can have only one top priority. Your creative work must come second if you have relationships you wish to preserve.
Before you despair, remember that time management can still help make much creative work possible. The thing is it must come in your spare time. You can't use your so-called extra time to do creative work if it takes away from your primary responsibility to support your wife by caring for the children, if it takes away from fully listening to your partner, if it inhibits intimacy, or if it keeps you up later when you should be in bed.
In my “day job” as a Product Designer, I write technical requirements for a software team based on business requirements. We “stack rank” the incoming requests that require software design. This means only one top priority at a time, and we do one thing before starting another to avoid a jumble of scattered focus. As soon as you say intimacy and childcare will come only after meditation, yoga, daily steps, poetry, essays, and reading; you have wrecked the stack ranking that would put your relationship first. It won’t work, and you will pay the price.
This may seem like a no-brainer, yet it is another thing on the lengthy list of things I have been slow to realize as an otherwise intelligent person.
I have recently begun prioritizing a good night's sleep because it will help my relationships and marriage. However, it may come at the expense of early morning reading. So be it.
When you can only get something done by stealing time from something else, be mindful about where you steal it. Sleep may be the best place for some people, and work may be better for others. But be careful not to steal from Peter to pay Paul, for example, stealing from your relationship to give yourself more time to write.
Prioritizing creative work when one should be spending time with the family is one reason artists have gotten a bad rap throughout history. Unless your spouse condones or helps create the time for you to attend to your creative pursuits, you will be challenged, which is probably one reason why creative people often marry each other because they understand this. If your spouse’s needs aren’t met, it doesn't matter if you try to hide your reading, writing, painting, or whatever you feel you need to do in the middle of the night; you will have a mess.
Believe me, I feel you if you also have this conflict in your life.
My relationship is the foundation of my life, the foundation of my family, and my primary support mechanism. I need to prioritize that foundation.
One day at a time, I am still learning to do this after twelve years of marriage. I mean to truly prioritize my partner, not just give lip service to that ideal.
It’s hard but possible, and it requires trust. If I am focused and resilient, I’ll complete the rest of my life tasks in time.