On a trip back home to Finland over the holidays I was reading n in flight magazine of certain Finish airline who I shall not mention here (until they sponsor me with bag full of free flights). There was an article on Finnish working mentality. Finns are known for being hard workers, but this does not mean we work every waking hour... well... not in general anyway. We use term work hard, work smart. The term stayed with me and has been playing around my head since then. It is very often you can get overwhelmed on all this promotional stuff in your music career and I think implementing this way of thinking can be pretty crucial to your success. Sometimes music business can feel like looking for a needle in a hay stack. You need to turn over every rock, look around every corner even for a small bit of success. Personally I find when you spend as much time on this as I do, the tools you use become very important, this is where that Finish work hard, work smart comes in play. So lets start from a few simple task management things. I hear you say how hard it is to find time to do everything and especially if you have full time job as well. It is very important you get organized. Arrange your schedules for the week. See when you have the band rehearsals, see when other parts of everyday life take over and what amount of time you are willing to commit to the promoting of the band. Now let me be honest here, it does take lots of time, and there are tasks along the way, that will require longer than hour here or there. But still you can be smart about your time. So lets say you have only one our at a time, maybe three to four times a week. For these precious hours to make difference you need to work smart. I have learned to work on the move, so give me a corner of an airport with WiFi and I am good, but it took me time to get to that point. To get organized I started in my small office (probably bit smaller than your average box room), desk, computer and a note pad. Decide what it is you want to do today, find a new concert for your band, create a video, locate a good studio for your next recording, work on your website or social media sites etc. Now decide how much of your time you want to dedicate for this task. Set out to do this task and only this task! Turn of your Facebook chat, only answer urgent phone calls and get the task done. Trust me on this one, you'll be surprised how much more productive you can get this way.
Now as to tools. One simple bit of advice I can give you that probably has saved me minutes every day, and probably hours every week: for the love of all the good things... stop using Internet explorer and swap over to Google chrome. Now this is very specifically advice for PC, on mac I believe Safari is still the way to go. But there is nothing more frustrating than spending time waiting for your browser opening the simplest pages... Firefox is good, but in my experience Chrome is still faster, especially when you start running multiple tabs. So do your self a favor and try it out.
Another simple tool that you should never under estimate is the simple note pad. And here I don't mean the one in windows, but the one you should have beside your computer and you write with pen;-). Write down all your ideas as they pop up. This can be lot more effective than you think.
What are your tools you for making you work smarter?
Talk to you more next week.
J.P.
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