Journal Entry #8

Journal Entry #8

Commitment and Consistency

This is my first semester stage managing at college. Though it is quite exciting at times, it is also absurdly stressful and something that I struggle to keep up with throughout these last few weeks of the academic year.

The most difficult part for me at this point has been trying to figure out how to find time between 18 people’s schedules for rehearsals. When you think about the situation conceptually, it does not seem like it should be that difficult to block out a few hours of time each week for what feels like a small group of people. In reality, it is an extremely arduous and grueling task. Not only do I have to factor everyone’s individual daily events, but also have to worry about times when their schedule changes or days that there are campus events that I have to worry about myself (i.e., room draw).

Because of all these little stressors, it is always a good idea to set goals for when I should have the next schedule completed. That way, I have time to focus on my own things too, such as homework or social life. However, though I have good intentions, often these goals will not be met. Not meeting little goals such as I should look at people’s schedules by Wednesday, then reserve spaces by Friday, and finally send out the rehearsal schedule email by Saturday night can be very distressing. I constantly set goals for myself and often push them back further and further until the last minute when it is Sunday night and still nothing has been done.

This situation is not like writing an essay in which not meeting goals is only a disappointment to me. There are seventeen other people waiting on me. Often when I don’t get the schedule out in a decent time, people start asking after me for it. After being called out on my procrastination by my director, we told each other that a good time to have everything set up by would either be on Friday or Saturday of the week before the rehearsals were scheduled for. This was a good idea in theory, but I was not able to make it work in practice.

In fact, just this past weekend, I approved my ideas with my director on Friday afternoon, and yet did not send out the schedule until Sunday evening. I hate that I am such a procrastinator, but I do not know how to effectively remedy this quality in myself.

The concept of commitment and consistency is the idea that once you make the decision to do something, you feel pressure to behave in line with whatever you have decided on. Goal-setting is an example of this. One way to help improve commitment and consistency in goal-setting is to make your goals public. If you tell someone else about your desires to do a certain thing, it is said that you are more likely to do that thing because you have someone else holding you to your promise.

I feel that there is one flaw in the logic of making your goals public. Your determination to stick to a specific goal I feel has a lot to do with the level of comfort you feel with your audience. Say you are either telling your best friend or an acquaintance that you are making a goal to complete something by Friday. You may feel much less unease with the best friend if you do not make that goal over not making the goal and having to face the acquaintance’s reaction. I think this has a lot to do with how much you fear the way your audience will react. Setting goals publicly to people you are very comfortable with is probably not much more effective than just keeping your goal private.

Taking another look again at my case, you can see that I probably met more scheduling goals in the beginning of the semester when we first started rehearsing the play. Now that my level of comfort with the cast and production team has increased, there is less of a fear of disappointing them.

Even so, when I do not meet someone else’s expectations (such as my director), I still get enormous waves of guilt. Now that the play is almost concluded, I realize I do not have a lot of opportunity to change my procrastinator ways, but hopefully next semester I will learn my lesson.