NaBloPoMo Day 19: Rituals

A local theater acquaintance posted about her daily rituals and Forbes magazine recently published a list of 20 top-of-their-game-women's morning routines. At home, I am all about these things. At work, not as good.

In order to be successful, arts organizations should build routines and rituals into the work day/week/quarter/year. Especially for smaller organizations, where employee(s) must juggle multiple work task hats: deliberate, consistent routines can help ensure that the work actually gets done.

There are so many places to start or things to consider about setting up routines. Arts leaders need to have:

-clear short and long term goals
-strategies and tasks for achieving them
-strategic thinking and professional development time
-networking get-togethers
-donor touches

And other things to consider include:

-which 8 hours out of the day are you really/do you need to be working?
-familial commitments that require a flex schedule
-personal "best" working times
-when vendors/clients/customers need you to be available
-what tasks are "must do" and "now" vs "want to do" and "later" (hint: not everything is high priority/urgent)

As a solo leader, it's been helpful for me to designate weekly routines. That is, rather than trying to hit marketing AND development AND planning AND etc etc every day, I designate each item to a day in the week and try to go deep into that area on that day. And those tasks that I've earmarked as ritual--the things that need to be done every day in order to keep the ship moving steadily forward--get plugged into my daily schedule before and as breaks in between the other work.

Do have a daily ritual or weekly routines? Share them here!

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