Longing for the day ...

Week 1 of the new enterprise - mixed results

One of the key complaints among independent musicians is the lack of time they have to do what needs to be done. I was pondering this - and the counter-argument that there's plenty of time but people don't manage it very well - when I woke up Wednesday morning at about 3am.

I wanted a reality check for my own time management efforts, so I created a time sheet in Google Sheets. Here's a picture of the first week of Hugemusic's financial year (click to download the pdf version):

I colour-coded all of the possible things I could do with my time: green ones are working directly on the music. Yellow is time spent on music-related activities. Day job activities are blue, wasted time is red. and so on - you can see the colour codes on the right of the image. On the right you can see a tally of the number of hours I devoted to each activity that week.

I listed them according to my weekly plan (each day's left column) and what I actually did (the right column) in half-hour increments. Obviously, there's a little inaccuracy because of the half-hour increments and because I sometimes went a day without recording the actual usage - and got things a little mixed up. But the overall pattern is fairly clear.

I'm not going to try to analyse this until I have several weeks' data to play with - but the immediate observation is that things did NOT go according to plan most days. I planned to do a lot more production, rehearsal, and gigging than I actually did. That fits with the familiar gripe - but it will have to be fixed if I am to get anywhere with this plan ...

My other note today is about the marketing efforts I mentioned last post. They are also showing soe very clear results but it's too early to draw conclusions. The obvious statement is that if you upload videos to YouTube and don't tell anyone, they will not be viewed. Duh! Also, the Show.Co promo produced 85 views and NO conversions ... could be a crap campaign, could be an ineffective service. Either way, it's not something I will waste any more time on. I have several marketing initiatives that I know will work, so I'll stick to them.

Of course, I am working towards a plan for regular posts, social media updates, emails, etc. That will include a schedule of releases including a weekly report via this blog on progress. Watch this space for that.

So - feel free to copy this tool. I will post an update on it each week and I'd love to know what you learn if you adopt it. The more we share, the more we learn ...