IndieBiz - Claim Time from your Life for your Biz. Part 1.

Well, since No Media Kings, seemed to dig my last Indie Intern posts on how to get and keep ‘em, I felt inspired to hammer our another set of How To thoughts that occurred to me yesterday - this time it’s about time, and how to get more of it.

I started to jot down things I’ve done over the past couple years to get myself more time. I don’t necessarily recommend any of this, because these are things very suited to my personality. So please take with much of your own salt and smartness, and leave what’s useless to you aside.

1. Sort out your social guilt.

In a network of indie artists (friend network, or webby like Indyish) there are constant events, projects and happenings - potlucks to concerts to fundraisers to vernissages to demonstrations. Many many more reason’s to go out then 1 person could attend, unless that 1 person’s job was attending things (sweet, but definitely not where we’re at with Indyish).

If you have as a basic value that participating in your community and supporting independent artists is important, how do you ever justify NOT going out? For me, I need to work hard to get clear eyed and objective when deciding when to go out, and the first part of that was setting any guilt sheeet aside, getting it out of the way. I decided I shouldn’t ever be spending time out of a desire to be liked, to be popular, to be seen at the right things. This may seem to fly in the face of the conventional Network!! imperative, but in fact it’s just about true networking, or smart networking. Try to look objectively at your individual circumstance, not the social Should in the room.

For me, it comes down to a basic checklist which determines whether or not I’m going out, no matter who or what I might see if I do:

1. When was the last time I ate?

I am a skinny burn-it-on-all ends type of girl, hence, am no longer allowed to go out to places if I’ve missed a meal. I’ve learned through brain people and experience that our ability to pursue rational thought degrades like crazy with no nutrients. Hungry, your networking will be at best scattered, at worst, irresponsible. I have the kind of metabolism that can forget about hungry for ever unless my brain gets bossy about it so I’m learning to lay down the law - No food recently? No going out - eat and then make use of the brain boost.

2. How much sleep have I had recently?

Similar - no going out if there’s even a small chance of dozing at the show. Nobody wins if you go out to support a band and you’re seen sleeping during the performance, this is not time well-spent. Not that this has ever ever happened …

3. What’s on my To Do list for today that I haven’t done yet?

Networking or socializing or blowing off steam are all really important things, but is the event I’m “supposed” to go to more important then what was on my list for today? If yes, great, go out! If not, well, decision made, no problem, not going.

4. What’s on my To Do list for tomorrow?

Even if I did get everything done today and deserve a party, I still need to remind myself to check in on what I want to do tomorrow. If I have a morning phone meeting with a potential sponsor or something, or if I need to get a press release finished and out by noon, I can’t go get drinks in my system, or get tired. If I do, I’ll be taking useful time away from myself. Something important tomorrow means no go, or at least, no boozihol.

So those are my basic rules for the bail (bail: as in to bail on a plan, to bail out of the boat, to cancel or not go.)

The bail can give you time back into your life, and make you more effective… but in the moment of the bail, it can feel like you’re betraying your fellows, or a social ethic of mutual support or togetherness. It can also feel like everyone will forget about you and your project, so all your hard work will be for not.

A key step in resolving this and getting more Biz time in your life is to…

2. Tell People What You’re Working On.

For some people this is harder then it sounds. Alright, at the very beginning when the project is mostly an excited idea I’ve found it easy- I’m a really imagination-based thinker, so when I have an idea, I can imagine it through to completion and it almost feels done and it’s heck yeah easy to talk about something dream-scheme fantastic and all finished… then the truth sinks in.. ugh, I haven’t actually really even started much.. and ugh, hearing it aloud I hear the assumptions I’m making, the gaps where only hard work will fill it in, the areas where others know more then I, where I’ll need to ask for help and potentially be mocked for my ignorance. Ahhhh, and it’s at this point - facing the unavoidable reality of mistakes and hard work - that many good projects are cast aside. Which is fine - some projects are meant to be ideas for now. I’ve begun to identify those as they are coming out of my mouth and started making sure to tell people that’s what’s going on, ie; “I’m making this up now” or “this is total dreamscheme” or “this is sounding increasingly implausible, but anyway, the idea was sweet while it lasted”.

Identifying and naming these things helped people recognize the difference between my flights of fancy and my real work, and it saved me time explaining to people later that no, I hadn’t built that Tech Toys Orchestra or whatever I’d been talking about dreamily, throwing ideas aroundy, the month before.. good, that’s the first half of the task.

The second half of course, is to talk concretely and honestly about the real projects that you are trucking along with. For this the trick is getting your perspective right. You don’t want to focus on the bugs and mistakes, nor do you want to be building your project up to more then it is, with either of these biased view-points you’ll face the big-downer or bubble effect, and both are a bit hard to recover from. With Indyish, for a while, I found it impossible to talk about what I was working on casually. “What’s up with Indyish these days?” people would innocently inquire, and I’d be in a mental quagmire sorting through the 700 things that pop up from different angles every day and define my job here. Thing is, if I can’t talk about it, people not only lose a little interest, they assume I’m not busy all the live long day, they offer me lots of alternative ways to spend my time (all mostly great, and hard to resist if I can’t get clear on where my time is actually going) or they become frustrated with the speed of Indyish development, assuming that if we can’t talk about it there’s not much to say.

Eventually I realized that I just needed to sort out our current Goals from my current and constantly unraveling list of To Do’s. People asking casually about Indyish don’t care about bug stomping or policy drafting or concepts slowly hatching for the next 3 years with much brain work and advice gathering and research. For the most part, people have so much going on in their own lives, they only care what the end result of your work will be, and only if it affects them, and only if it’s gonna be soon. If I can successfully tell people one or two things we’re going to be releasing in the next short while, be they events or new web features, I find 2 very useful things happen.

1. People who dig the goal and identify it will become very supportive - supportive of us, and of whatever time we need to take away from social circles to complete it. They’ll also offer help, advice, point us at people who could be interested, and actively (unless you ask them not to) spread the word for you about what you’re working on when people ask hey, where’s Risa?

2. People who don’t get the goal will make themselves known as well, and this is very useful and good to know. Identify this quickly and you’ll save lots of time and energy. The difficult thing about this stage is realizing that some of your closest peeps may not get what you’re into. People who’ve known you the longest can be the hardest to convince, because they can’t be objective about you. Your mom may be your biggest fan and still roll her eyes when you tell her spent all day on the press release for your first EP, especially if she’s lending you money for rent. You’ll see people do small things which communicate their lack of passionate intensity about your biz, without realizing it sometimes; like change the subject, or shift into a joking way of talking about what for you is definitely not a joke, it’s your heart on a stick! Though this can be painful, be thankful for the time it can save. Don’t waste time trying to convert people, especially close friends and family, to get you. Now that you know, you can retract with no hard feelings, keep these friends and family for lovin and venting, and be in control of the time you spend doing that, knowing that it’s not the same as time spent with people who are self-motivated to see your idea succeed. And if you’re having a hard time finding those people, welll, you might just take it as a sign that your idea needs work. Focus your labour and hours on developing the concept, the sound, the website, until it becomes something people are drawn to like magnets, whether you’re out at the potluck or not: this is the true indicator of time well spent.

Whew. That’s a lot of words and I have heaps more notes on this, as I always do, relentlessly wordy one that I am, so I’m stopping.. stay tuned for Part 2 coming soon, which will include tactics for setting and meeting small goals and a list of related software we’ve tried, some of which have actually been helpful!