I picked up a voicemail from my dad last night around midnight. I figured it probably wasn’t a great idea to call him back right then, so I deleted the message. As I did, I thought to myself, “Now I’ve deleted that, I’m pretty sure I’ll have forgotten in the morning and fail to return the call.”
In accordance with the prophesy, my phone rang this afternoon and Dad’s name popped up on the screen. Luckily, it wasn’t anything too important1, but it reminded me how important knowing yourself is if you want to be truly productive.
I know I can be pretty forgetful, which means I should have made a note that Dad had called and wanted me to get back to him so I did it first thing this morning.
If you know and are aware of your little foibles and common mistakes, it makes it far easier to compensate for them. I’m all to aware of my forgetfulness and I take steps to deal with it2 to keep me on the ball and at my peak of productivity.
What are your little niggles that dampen your productivity? How do you work your way around them?
Did I want to go round and watch the game on Saturday? [↩]
such as making use of Evernote as widely as possible [↩]
I wrote a few weeks ago about getting ‘a job‘ to help get me out of the house and a little less stir-crazy (one of the pitfalls of working from a home office). I expected it to be hard work, but that was kind of the point; it would hep my mental state, my writing and my honeymoon fund.
What I didn’t realise was that it would be such hard physical work and that as a consequence, I’d become stronger and fitter so much more quickly than I’d been planning on with my regime at the gym.
The unexpected benefits of the things we do in life can be some of the best. The same thing goes for business, writing and filmmaking, too. Sometimes we do things because we enjoy them, sometimes we do things because we think they’ll be good for us or for others and sometimes we do things because we feel we have to.
Whatever your motivation for doing something – positive, negative or self-serving – it’s always good to be on the look-out for those things we’d never have had access to or experienced had we not taken that certain task on.
In one of those strange pieces of serendipity that come along now and again, no sooner had I Tweeted out yesterday’s blog post than I came across this Tweet from friend and fellow Twitterer, Jeanne.
A Twitter pimp extraordinaire, screenwriter and black belt in Tae Kwon Do, Jeanne is an inspiration to many, from her Twitter feed and blog to hosting the weekly US #scriptchat sessions.
And what wonderful timing as I resolved to give up fear for lent, for Jeanne to link through to her blog post about doing exactly the same three years ago and never looking back.
In 2008, I gave up fear for Lent. It changed my life forever.
I rarely give things up for Lent. A few years ago, I gave up going into hospital , but that one didn’t last, thanks to those pesky medical people trying to keep me alive.
This year, though, I’m vowing to give up the fear of failure.
Too many of life’s decisions are governed by the “what if it all goes wrong?” question or “what if I look silly for trying it?”. Too often we skip over great opportunities because we can’t immediately see how to make them work and we worry about what it’ll look like to our friends, colleagues and clients if they don’t.
So this month I’m going to enter into every project with a sense of the infinite possibilities as opposed to the dread of defeat.
That’s not to say that I will be hurling myself into projects willy-nilly. Fear of failure is very different to realistic expectations for the success of a project and if it doesn’t make financial (or time-cost) sense, then it will remain on the back-burner for the time being.
What are you going to commit yourself to for Lent? What are you afraid of failing? Announce yourself here – loud and proud – and we’ll all keep tabs on each other.
I’ve spoken on this blog before about Jon Reiss, filmmaker and author of Think Outside The Box Office, the authoritative guide for finding and building an audience for your low-budget indie flick.
Jon has now gone a step further and established the best iPhone app integration with your film. You can read Jon’s post announcing the app over on his blog, but here’s the key part of it:
This is an app to share the graffiti and street art you love with others. It is free – and is intended to create a broader community around Bomb It.
Rather than simply using the app as another platform for selling his film, what Jon has created is another way to engage his community. He’s adding value to his audience, giving them a way to talk, debate and share while still pushing (but not overtly) the BOMB IT brand out there.
By keeping the app BOMB IT-branded, the people who know him and his film will start to use it and share it with their friends (from with in their community and, thus, the target audience for the film) and spread the word. More awareness = bigger target audience = more views. But, significantly, Jon’s not trying to expand beyond his identified “niche” – he knows who is audience is and how to cater for their needs; textbook indie movie marketing.
Any producers out there looking to enhance their film’s brand with an app would do well to study what Jon has done here, which comes back to the same story we push time and again: know your audience, give them what they want and give them more than they expect.
Engage, converse, offer value. It’s a simple equation that too many filmmakers frequently skip over.
If you’ve established yourself a strict, productive routine, it can be hugely beneficial to give yourself some slack now and again.
As you probably know by now, I’m training for the 3 Peaks Challenge in June this year. Since I’m much further behind all the other members of the team, I’ve set myself a rigorous and punishing work, training and dietary schedule to get myself in shape.
Motivation for anything can be hard to maintain, but even more so when you’re limiting and/or being tough on yourself, restricting certain things and enforcing others. That’s why I’ve taken to giving myself a ‘cheat day’ once a week to allow me to indulge, slack off and generally slob around a bit.
Including a cheat day as part of your regular schedule – whether it’s a day off from work, a day with no internet, eating whatever you like or just enjoying something you don’t usually have time for – can be a much stronger motivational tool than a long-term goal; knowing that you’ve got a ‘rest day’ coming up can help you work harder and more efficiently as well as increase your positivity and productivity.
Don’t be so hard on yourself; cheating’s only cheating when it does you a disservice. Sometimes cheating’s just the best way to move forward.
This week’s Lowdown – part of The Production Office Live – is focused on email marketing:
TOOLS
If you’re going to be marketing your content and products to your email list you first of all need a tool to help you do it. By far the most popular are MailChimp, which starts from free and scales up, and Aweber, which is a paid service, but offers much more in terms of functionality and interaction with other programmes.
Both are good choices, but like most programmes of this ilk – and there are many – it mostly boils down to your budget and what you want to do with your emails. Take a look at them both (and others) and see what you think.
BUILDING YOUR LIST
We all have an email list, we just call it our address book. Most of us don’t like to think of sending marketing messages to our friends, and that’s why there are all sorts of protections in place (in the UK at least) for holding people’s data. Everyone you send a marketing email to MUST have consented to receiving them, either by giving you their address on a sign-up form or expressly agreeing in another manner.
There are many ways to capture email addresses and many examples of good practice. The two most common ways are through your project website – check out dontlethimin.com for a good example of Opt-In email forms – or by offering something in exchange – see Seth Godin’s offer of the first four chapters of Permission Marketing.
As we talked about previously with Crowdfunding, you have to be able to offer value to your list through your email. Which brings us to…
TIPS
54% of people who unsubscribe from email lists do so because they either receive the emails too frequently or because the content is too boring or repetitive. You need to make any marketing emails you send out interesting, informative and relevant. As soon as you lose those three things from your emails, you will start to lose subscribers quicker than you gained them.
Another great tip is the use of social media connections. Adding “Share” buttons from the major social media sites on the ‘net increases click-through by 55% – a huge advantage over all those emailers out there who aren’t leveraging social media in this way.
More than likely, you subscribe to several email marketing lists and the best way to learn what works and what doesn’t is simply to look through your inbox. Some of your emails will be out-and-out marketing, some will be sharing and some will seem to be neither. Look carefully at all of them and work out for yourself what you like, don’t like and how you could do it differently to promote yourself, your film or your products.
I hope this is all useful to your quest to gain more from your online marketing. Have any other tips about email marketing, or your own success story? Post them in the comments section below.
Working too hard, not playing enough and feeling generally a little run down, I’ve been struggling to concentrate and get my head in order with no inspiration to get anything done.
Then, today, thanks to a friend on Twitter, I did the one simple thing that works every time. I got off my arse.
The simple act of standing from your sofa, your desk, your workbench and going and doing something can be all the inspiration you need to get back up and at ’em.
Next time you’re funking1, just choose something, get up and DO IT.
Not only has Tor had to suffer yet another false alarm, but even while she’s hurting, struggling to breathe and exhausted from over 5 hours of travelling, she’s thinking of others.
And when she says, “You cannot imagine,” she absolutely means it. If you haven’t been there, you cannot possibly understand the rollercoaster of emotions that is involved with a false-alarm; being prepared to have your life changed forever before being told it’s not going to happen. And knowing that if it doesn’t happen today, it may never happen at all.
You want to know why I’m subjecting myself to 24 hours of mountain climbing following 3 months of hard training?
