Well it would seem to be “that day” in the preproduction week for Hello, Dolly! at the Reagle Players. We start rehearsal in four days, and this seems to be the day it’s all coming together. It’s a really good thing I like to multitask. It’s like a puzzle. Some pieces can’t be put together until other ones are complete, and then all of a sudden a bunch of pieces start getting fit together and all of a sudden the things that can be completed start growing exponentially, and I’m racing to keep up before new ones come in.

I’ve been getting several emails per minute for the last few hours, mostly due to the fact that I just sent out an email blast to our 49-person cast with a bunch of questions. As each one comes in, I have to take the information out of it, put it where it goes, and get the email out of my inbox and into my Reagle storage folder before another one comes in.

While this has been going on, I’ve been making up the schedule for Week 1 based on a meeting the director and choreographer had earlier this afternoon (which in turn is based on my recommended schedule for the rehearsal process in general). That’s done, has been proofed by the director, but not the choreographer. Once she gets back to me, it will go out to the cast, who are dying to see it.

I also have a contact sheet that needs some details filled in, but is probably about 90% done, and waiting on people to get back to me. My next project is to finish the production calendar (which is in a very rough draft at the moment, only because I drew it up to show the director what the usual structure of the process is). I’d really like to be able to send that to the cast tonight with the week’s schedule.

Then I have to do all the things for me — like laundry and packing and cleaning my apartment.

What I’m Using

I have something of a love-hate relationship with the “Spaces” feature of Mac OS X Leopard. What it is, in brief, is a way to have several different setups of windows arranged on your desktop that you can flip between, instead of having 10 random windows from a bunch of apps all piling up on top of each other. I don’t generally bother with it, as I tend to find it more trouble than it’s worth. But as I’ve been having one of those days, that’s exactly what my desktop was starting to look like, and I needed some organization.

The overall project I had going on (and is still going on) was that I sent out an email to the 49 people in the cast asking them to proof their information on the contact sheet and tell me if they have any conflicts. When they respond, I need the contact sheet open, and the document where I’m tracking their conflicts (and highlighting their names in green if they have confirmed their contact info is correct). Because some of them responded right away and others might not get back to me for hours, I need this stuff open and arranged in a way where I can use it easily, but also not getting in the way of me using other apps, or other documents in the same apps. So I shoved those two documents over to my #2 space. When an email comes in pertaining to that, I see it in Mail, which is in my main #1 space, then I can hit ctl-rightarrow to swing over to the #2 space, where I have the two documents ready to receive changes. The 2nd space looks like this:

The other major app I’m using to keep track of things is OmniFocus, which is a task manager, though that’s a bit of an understatement. For more on that, check out my section on it in the Stage Mgr Tools area of the site (it’s under iPhone and Mac apps). I’ve been checking off a lot of tasks, but also adding a lot of new ones. I have one in progress called “confirm production meeting” which has sub-tasks with the names of all the people I invited. As each one RSVPs I check their name off. When all of them are gone I’ll be able to confirm the meeting is on. I have one major one I’m waiting on — the lighting designer — which is kind of a dealbreaker if he can’t make it. So that is always a big ball of stress over my head when trying to schedule a meeting.

I have a lot of pending tasks I have to do (like 33 of them) cause all of the individual things I have to pack just hit the “due soon” stage, so I’m going to try to cut down on some of those now.

This is also the time to run frequent Time Machine backups, now that I actually have a ton of paperwork that wasn’t done yesterday when I last backed up. These next couple days will probably see a lot more backups than my normal schedule of every 2 days (which are also managed with recurring tasks in OmniFocus).