Mayday! I have too many planes in the air!

Prioritization when there's too much going on

Back when I was still working in email marketing for a big retail company, I used to jokingly refer to myself as the team’s air traffic controller. Every day, we’d have multiple emails to be launched, and it was my responsibility to ensure that each email was coded, QA’d, and sent on its merry way.

These days, I feel like my responsibilities are reversed in that I have multiple planes in the air that I need to get on the ground safely.

Some folks might remember the 1999 comedy-drama, “Pushing Tin,” with John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton as a pair of ambitious air traffic controllers who battle it out as they try to safely land planes at a busy airport.

Not surprisingly, the pressure and his arrogance eventually gets to Cusack’s character and he spirals into burnout.

Overcrowded skies

If you climb into bed each night wondering through an exhausted haze if you have too much on your plate, the simple answer is “yes, you do.”

Quite simply, we all do.

To give you a sense of what’s currently on my plate, here are a listing of the Self-Care areas that I use to categorize my goals/tasks in the Finch app.

• Hygiene - includes everything from brushing my teeth to moisturizing my skin

• Health - tracking medications and medical appointments

• Nutrition - reminders to take vitamins and track my meals to best ensure I’m eating as I need to be

• Movement - physiotherapy exercises

• Create Joy - prompts to take time to listen to music I love or work on my current paint-by-number

• The Pup - all tasks related to taking care of our dog, Lucy

• Plant Care - individually tracking the varied watering and fertilizing schedules of all my plants

• Productivity - a grab bag of random adulting tasks such as updating the budget and placing our weekly grocery order

• Athena Creative - activities associated with my business as an artist including writing two posts a month for Athena’s Art Newsletter, managing online sales and making art

• The Perfect Ride - detailed breakdown of tasks associated with the picture book contract I’m currently working on

• Tilted Windmills - activities associated with ramping up our other business such as seeking out workshop opportunities and writing this Substack

• Volunteering - the work I do with the Eau Claire Community Association and Accessibility Renovations for Kids (ARK)

• Connection - reminders to connect with folks around me such as my daily Scrabble game with Stefan and weekly coffee meetup with the neighbours in my building

• Self-Kindness - prompts to rest and take stock of my wins

• Sleep - reminders to get adequate rest by getting in bed by 10:30pm and tracking whether I’ve been able to sleep through the night

Now, clearly, tracking to this level of detail is a bit ridiculous and I will fully admit that I have further streamlined my usage of the Finch app self-care app since I first reviewed it back in March. Still, I think this level of detail reveals so many of those hidden tasks that chew into our time without us realizing.

Of course, we need time to take care of the needs of our physical body, but also make space to stay connected with our friends and family.

Of course, we need to follow up on that potential business opportunity, but also unwind doing something we love.

And somehow we’re going to do all of this while still getting in bed at a decent hour every night? No wonder so many of us are going to bed exhausted.

Regardless of how much we want to pack in our days, time and energy are finite resources, which is why prioritization is so important.

Triage Tasks: Get that plane on the ground now!

If you’re sitting in the air traffic control tower and you learn that someone in one of your aloft planes is having a medical emergency, then you are going to want to land that plane as quickly as possible. Regardless of what else is going on, that plane gets moved to the front of the line.

An example of a “triage task” for me might be an unexpected flat tire on my wheelchair.

my painting “Flat Tire” (2023)

No matter what happens to be going on that day, if I get a flat I immediately have to clear my entire schedule and rebuild it around getting the repair done. I know if I don’t, I am not going to be able to do anything else in my day effectively.

For you, examples of triage tasks might be:

• your young child gets sick and you need to stay with them while they are home from school

• a pipe bursts in your home and floods your basement

• you or a loved one has a health emergency

We might hope that we never have to face any of these types of “stop and drop everything” types of tasks, but the reality is that we all do and they need to be prioritized accordingly.

Managing time-locked tasks and hard deadlines

In keeping with our airplane analogy, imagine these tasks as passengers with connecting flights. These folks have places they need to be and getting them there is time dependent. Also, if they miss their connection, they are likely going to be pissed about it.

In other words, these tasks are often not just about you, but other folks who are depending on you to get that task done at an agreed upon time. Examples might include:

• filing your family’s income tax on time

• handing off a report to a colleague

• submitting a grant application

• take a parent to a doctor’s appointment

One of my more frustrating time-locked tasks is booking my rides with Calgary Transit Access—the city’s ride-share service for folks with disabilities. The booking service only allows one to book a ride up to four days in advance and, since the service fills up quickly, the best chance I have to get the slot I want is to book it right at 8am five days ahead.

So, if I have a medical appointment across town I need to get to, I’ll put in my Google Calendar not only the medical appointment, but also a separate reminder that will pop up on my phone to “BOOK ACCESS” for that appointment.

I use these types of phone reminders extensively for time-locked tasks because I am fully aware that I’ll get busy or my brain will get full and an important task could easily slide off my plate. I even treat my daily medications as a reminder-worthy time-locked task since I know that if I miss my mid-afternoon painkillers, my body will be as enraged as an angry passenger that has missed their connecting flight to Aruba.

Now, I recognize that deadlines—be they self-imposed or externally imposed—may not be reasonable or realistic. Unfortunately, it doesn’t change the fact that these are tasks that have an unavoidable time commitment attached to them.

What can be done in these instances?

• Request a change to the deadline—remember, don’t ask, don’t get!

• Get help or delegate that task or other tasks

• Reprioritize or drop other tasks around to make room for this priority

• Take learnings from the experience to better schedule in the future

And yes, if this stuff were easy, you probably wouldn’t be reading an article about it right now.

Short, medium and long-term goals

In the “Pushing Tins” clip, there’s a bit where Cusack mentally touches upon each of the planes that are flying in his skies as he mutters rapid-fire about sugarless gum. It’s a light touch, just a mental check-in, but it’s enough to refresh the details in his mind and ensure that that plane has everything it needs to keep flying for the time being.

It’s often much easier to prioritize triage tasks or ones with deadlines attached than it is to manage looser goals that need attention, but not necessarily immediate attention. These days my strategy is to record all tasks as categorized goals in Finch—everything from writing a particular follow-up email to dropping off a donation to the thrift store.

By recording it all in one place, it allows me to quickly browse through everything on my plate—essentially performing that same light-touch skim that Cusack describes as he mentally checks in with all his planes—and decide what parts of those tasks I can tackle that day.

The key element with this approach is an awareness that you aren’t ever going to be able to clear every item off your to-do list. While this may feel inherently uncomfortable, this is an essential part of the strategy as it forces one to reckon with what can be done with the time and energy that one has available on any given day.

It’s an imperfect system and it’s certainly the one that I struggle with the most, but I strongly believe that so long as I am making some progress on that goal then it’ll ultimately get done. And, of course, if something happens that requires it to move up the priority list, I can always slap a deadline on it and shuffle accordingly.

(For an excellent resource on this subject, I highly recommend Oliver Burkeman’s book, “Meditations for Mortals” and you can learn more in my earlier book review.)

Keeping the planes fuelled

In her popular tome, The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron outlines the importance for creatives to “fill the well” or, in the parlance of our airplane analogy, keep those planes fuelled. It doesn’t matter how skilled you might be as the air traffic controller in your life, if the planes you have in the air run out of fuel, then they are going to crash and burn rather spectacularly.

For instance, research has shown that time and again social isolation and loneliness are a leading cause of decline in mental and physical health. I know for myself that one of the things that helped me get through my recent lengthy hospital stay was the fact that I made friends with so many of the nurses and health care aids. I also kept myself connected to friends and family through video chats or simply requesting that folks send me photos of the regular goings-on in their life.

After I was discharged from the hospital, I have been very deliberately seeking out opportunities to form new connections through my businesses, volunteer work and getting to know my neighbours better. This is not always an easy thing for me as a homebody and sometime introvert, but I recognize its importance to my overall, long-term health which is why I have made it a priority.

Carving out essential time to work on my paint-by-number

And, not surprisingly, nothing fuels my tank better than engaging in a bit of low stakes, personal creativity. When I start getting that slightly twitchy, overwhelmed feeling, I find that even half-an-hour of working on my current paint-by-number is enough to settle my internal systems and allow me to slide more easily back into my for-pay creative projects.

Final thoughts

One of my favourite quotes about time comes from Lois McMaster Bujold’s fantasy novel, The Paladin of Souls. In it, the heroine laments to her god that she’s not getting it right as she is overwhelmed with the impossibility of task before her.

He responds:

It is imperfect. So are all things trapped in time. You are brilliant, nonetheless. How fortunate for Us that We thirst for glorious souls rather than faultless ones, or We should be parched indeed, and most lonely in Our perfect righteousness.

In other words, any sort of prioritization system won’t be perfect and that’s okay. The point is to put in place whatever tools and systems we might need to help us manage our time and keep that sense of overwhelm to a minimum.

Happy flying!

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Athena Cooper splits her time between being a fine art painter and a creativity coach with Tilted Windmills. If you’d like to support developing your creative practice, consider booking a free 30-minute consultation.

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