Four-Hour Workweek For Musicians
Derek Sivers recently handed over control of the mighty CD Baby independent music outlet to Disc Makers, primarily to allow himself time to work on new musical ventures. He is already heading in interesting directions, as his interview with Tim Ferriss (author of the infamous Four-Hour Workweek) shows…
Time Is Music – The 80/20 Rule
Tim’s four-hour workweek is predicated on the Pareto Principle – this is a theory which states that within many given scenarios, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This is obviously a sweeping generalisation and should not be taken as a statistical truth, but the concept behind it is remarkably robust – essentially, that a small number of sources provide the majority of the value.
Optimising In Finite Time
Because making a living from music (or anything else) demands so many actions, one can be easily overwhelmed. Ferriss recommends that we leverage the Pareto imbalance in our favour – rather than trying to grab a bunch of low-hanging fruit, and get a lot of little things done, take the one or two most important things and do them instead. Order your to-do list in terms of ‘importance‘ rather than ‘ease of achievement‘. He posits the question ““What are the one or two things that, if that’s all you did today, today would have been well-spent?””
Work On Working Well, Not Working More
People who are constantly stressed out, complaining about being overworked and staying late at the office are probably not very good at working. If you assign equal importance to everything, then you’ll get an ulcer. Everything you are asked to do is not equally important.
Doing things the same way as everyone else is often not the most effective way. For example, if you want to get in touch with a prominent blogger to promote your band, sending them an email is the obvious action – and precisely because it’s obvious, it’s less likely to succeed, as that blogger will get thousands of emails a day. In this case, a phone call might be more effective – or you could even try to meet them in person.
Outsource Your Non-Musical Trivia
The key to Ferriss’ strategy is to outsource anything that isn’t high-value, and that you don’t actually need to do yourself. There is a growing culture of outsourcing, and sites such as elance and asksunday are becoming increasingly popular.
I recently posted about outsourcing music recording, but it may well be worthwhile investigating how you can leverage outsourcing for promotional purposes also. If actions are repetitive and time-consuming – such as sending emails, creating blog posts, contacting distributors – it might be better to provide a brief for someone else to follow, so that the work gets done and leaves you free to concentrate on the music. If you value your time more than the cost of this work, then it should really be a no-brainer. Here’s a video of Tim and Derek from the San Francisco Music & Tech Summit earlier this year …