This blog post took longer to write than the others.

The work life balance is something we're taught about from a fairly young age. All play no work is just as bad as all work and no play, but it’s not that black and white. You can’t quite describe play as all the things that aren’t work, because there are lots of other aspects to life as well, aren’t there?

A full time job is pretty much what it says on the tin, full time. My job at the moment is working for the council in the benefits department sorting out food parcels for during COVID, which basically means I spend a lot of my day talking to lots of different people, which can be quite tiring and sometimes can be very difficult. And I’m sure I can speak for pretty much everybody when I say once I get in from work I could quite happily sit on the sofa and not move until I go to bed. But unfortunately that's not quite how life works all the time. Now don’t get me wrong, a day here and there doing absolutely nothing is wonderful but it's not really a reality. And even though you might finish work and be tired there's still plenty of hours left in the day to get things done and filling those hours is all too easy. 

This is where the other parts of life come into it all. Everybody has at least one if not more extra curricular activities, I know that kind of sounds a bit like school, but it's true. I myself do different exercise classes a few times a week but again they’re never longer than an hour so there's still plenty of time left in the evenings after that. But again (sensing the pattern here) there’s other things on top of that, probably not classed as ‘extracurriculars’ but definitely obligations that, while you still might enjoy doing them, are not really something you can choose not to do if necessary. Cooking being the biggest, but cleaning, doing weekly quizzes with family members and friends (new courtesy of COVID), all these things that have to fill a certain time of your day or week in general. Now it may seem like I’m complaining, and I’m really not, I love cooking dinner, if anything I offer to do it most evenings. I don’t always offer to do the cleaning but that's a whole different discussion. And the weekly quiz with my family is something that I do enjoy doing, and realistically the closest thing to a social life I have right now. 

So this means that social life is not something that plays a factor in how busy my life is at the moment due to COVID restrictions cutting off our ability to spend time with the people we care about. But on the plus side this means that I can put a lot of my free time into Haywire. Which of course is a positive but also means that I am often very busy. At the start it wasn’t too bad as a lot of the work we were doing was just making plans that hadn’t happened yet, but that was over 2 months ago and now were very deep into our plans and everything seems to be happening at once. Now of course the obvious solution is to learn to prioritise, which believe me I have been trying to do. But the reality is in order for any business to work, and starting up a theatre company isn’t that far from starting up a business, it needs to be at the top of your list. Unfortunately I can’t really turn around to my boss and tell them that I just can’t work today cause I have other things to do. So right now Haywire, while it is my top priority, it is second on my list of things I absolutely have to do. Although this does mean that whenever I don’t have to work, Haywire can come first. 

Currently, as things stand, the way Lucy and I work is by making a bunch of lists that need to be done, and then working through them. Except that every time we hold a meeting, that list seems to grow and grow. I’ve put in a little layout of what an ‘average’ week of my life would look like. This was two weeks ago now and is sort of an average week when we are rehearsing a Pocketfull monologue as these tend to be the busiest weeks for me. 

Look at it all!

So as you can see there's lots of orange on there compared to everything else, which is mainly because the to-do list for Haywire is usually quite long, but also the bits that are green tend to be significant chunks of my day. It can get quite difficult, on a Monday and Tuesday because I spend so much time in the office, my mind is so busy with other things and Haywire takes a bit of a back seat. So quite often I reach Wednesday and I’m never quite sure how I got there. I just know that my to-do list is still as big as it was at the weekend if not longer. I think it’s also worth noting that the Sunday before this me and Lucy spent 2 hours of our first rehearsal just talking through the agenda for Haywire the following week, so this was definitely one of our busiest weeks. As you can see above though I had a day off from my job on Thursday so most of that day was spent working through my Haywire to-do list. This week we were rehearsing our most recent Pocketfull piece, A Dramatic Reading of the Greatest Book Ever Written. I was acting in this one and Lucy was directing so we were seeing a lot of each other that week. This was probably a little busier for me than usually as normally once we reach the weekend I see the actor run the monologue one more time and then they go away and record it whereas this time I had to do all the line learning, and there was a lot, and then do all the recording which took some time. But it was very enjoyable to act again so that was a bonus. We did however take on an extra project this week. We tend to have a bad habit of planning every project to all happen at once, because y’know we just love theatre that much. The putting together of our video response to the government's comments about the art sector was something we had been discussing for a few weeks and wanted to get out as soon as possible, so after discussion with the people involved it was pretty much hitting the ground running from there. So naturally we planned it in the same week we were doing our first entirely Haywire Pocketfull. But actually it worked out for the best in my opinion, me and Lucy were already meeting up multiple times in that week anyway and while the focus was mainly rehearsals it meant that we could have a lot of mini discussions as we went as opposed to a big 3 hour one at the end of the week. And in the end we were able to stick pretty much to the deadlines we’d set the week before. Issues arise like any project, mainly internet connection has become the bane of our existence, but the way we’re running things right now seems to be working pretty well. 

I think one of the biggest things I’ve learnt over the past few months is that there's lots more you have to take into consideration than you’d think. Of course both of us have been involved in productions before in many different capacities and the heavy workload that comes with that doesn’t suddenly change just because everything's online. I think part of me thinks that digital theatre can be a lot easier than a full blown production. But there's also other things that you don’t have to worry about with a non digital show. Just getting the final product uploaded can take out half of your day, not really doing anything in particular, but just the waiting around and the stress of “are we going to make our deadline?” preoccupies your mind so much that you may as well be putting all your energy into it because you can’t really do anything. 

Which takes me onto my final point, which is that I personally never switch my mind off from Haywire. Most people would argue that this is down to social media, and they’d probably be correct. The fact that me and Lucy both work means our hHaywire business hours tend to be in the evening, so there's no sense of ‘I’ll wait till the next meeting to bring that up’ because I can just message Lucy about it there and then. I don’t think one day goes by where we don’t talk about the company in one way or another. Now some people might argue that it's not a very healthy approach and believe me I'm all for having a day off. But now, for me, a day off from my other job just means a full day that I can focus on Haywire, and when you’re starting up any new business days off are not really on the schedule. This is also the reality of running a theatre company that is currently just made up of two people, there's only two of us to take on the workload. So if Lucy has a busier work week, then I’ll take on more of the to-do list and then vice-versa. And like I said before, Haywire is as at the top of my priority list as it can be, and the reason it doesn’t come before my other job is because right now its that job that is making me all my money. So this means that Haywire is my priority all of the time I’m not working, which means that more often than not our Haywire business ours are 8pm onwards. And that's the reality, isn’t it? At the end of the day if you want to make your own theatre and your own company then you take every minute you can get to work on that, because it's my passion and what I love doing more than anything. So for me, the balance comes in that when I’m working (even though I’m probably messaging Lucy about it anyway) I try not to focus too much on Haywire. Even when I’m working from home I won't turn my laptop on or check the to-do list till I clock off. But that's it, once I’m off the clock, Haywire takes over my brain. Yes some weeks it's like working two full-time jobs, but that's the sacrifice I’m making at the moment, so hopefully one day Haywire is my only job. But even then I’ll still be doing work at 10pm at night cause that's just how theatre works sometimes. 

I am in a very fortunate position at the minute that the majority of my job is working from home, and in the coming weeks it's all going to be done from home. So this does make things easier to balance because I can jump from my job to Haywire a lot quicker and I find it a lot easier to switch my brain off from my job when I’ve been working from home. So I think for the foreseeable future the way i’m coping right now will continue, I hope. But what's going to happen when we can finally do in person productions. Well the hope is that early next year Haywire is going to be doing something along those lines and I think then that Haywire will be moved to the top of my priority list. So I hope that my job/Haywire dynamic will change for the better and this will either mean taking holidays from work, or reducing my hours, or the worst case scenario is quitting if I have too. The job I work right now isn’t the most flexible and for me is a filler job because getting a job at the moment is very difficult, so I think my overall hope for the future is that I’ll be able to find a job that I am able to work around Haywire as opposed to working Haywire around my job. And if my job and Haywire were to become one and the same, well then that really would be the dream. 

Liv x