Saturday 27th October 2012 has been World Occupational Therapy Day and I am writing this in the closing minutes of the day which I celebrated by taking part in the special #OTalk organised by Gillian Crossley with Helen Rushton for the OT Global Day of Service on the role of Occupational Therapy in Public Health. I also attended a virtual classroom discussing Assessment and Social Media delivered by Merrolee Penman with Anita Hamilton. This was a test of the software for Tuesday 30th Virtual OT Conference which has the theme Occupational Balance.

My plan for earlier in the day was to read some of The Casual Vacancy and despite enjoying the first few pages my body decided to let my eyes droop and I had a snooze instead. Then I nipped out to meet some friends. Tomorrow I am staying in!

The OTs at Salford have come up with a fun quiz to review people’s Occupational Balance – they’ve called it Occubuzz and you can find it here – http://www.occubuzz.com/

Not surprisingly I found myself to be occupationally overloaded (hence the daytime snoozing). I decided to use some stick art to investigate why (inspired by the immensely talented Gillian).

I get interested in things really easily and find that I pick up things and then try and balance them along with my desire to watch TV, read, write, sleep etc – my PhD supervisor used the imagery of spinning plates this week which I have borrowed for my pictures.

But there comes a stage where this overload can become too much and things drop, and once you’ve dropped one thing, it can throw the balance of everything else off and you end up with broken plates.

So what I’m trying to do is OT myself and gradually I am putting some of the plates down to one side or sharing them with others. November’s plan is to prioritise creative writing by participating in NaNoWriMo and my PhD. I’ve still got a way to go so I’d call it an evolving process of finding the correct balance (as you can see by from today’s effort ;o) – but I get an extra hour in bed because the clocks go back shortly).

I was planning to write this in time to submit to Linda’s OT Blog Carnival but decided to prioritise and get some sleep. You can find the other wonderful entries here though -it does seem that balance is something that doesn’t come easily in today’s society (and OTs themselves need to work at this too).

So – who here finds themselves overloaded and what do you plan to put down/share?

If you already have great balance please share your secret.