In this time of social media, we have a lot of ways to communicate with each other.

Each one can be considered a level, or a gate, with one requiring more of a person’s time, energy, and focus than another.

Admission to the higher levels of interaction requires that you first prove yourself on one or more of the lower levels.

For example.. I’m a content creator. That means that I have things to do with my time. It means I have things to think about when I’m not actually DOING other things.

Because of this, I’m not going to interrupt my day because YOU feel like talking to me on the phone. It hasn’t happened for years and it will never happen again. I don’t have time for that.

Email

What I tell people to do is email me.

This is because when I *DO* make time for extraneous stuff, I check my email to see if there’s anything worth responding to in it.

That’s your opportunity to contact me.

It’s 100% on my terms, because I couldn’t possibly care any less whether YOUR project gets done or not. I’m concerned with MY projects and MY current clients’ projects.

I never have “nothing” to do. I never reach “inbox zero”. I’m never sitting around waiting.. HOPING for someone to call me on the phone.

If you decide to call anyway, you get the answering machine, which I don’t check, so you’re better off emailing, like I told you. That’s really your only chance.

Some people mistake Facebook and Twitter for email.

Pay attention. All three of them happen to be electronic forms of communication, but “Email me about it” doesn’t mean to PM me on Facebook or to DM me on Twitter.

If you’re not smart enough to figure that out, you’re probably not smart enough to put together a proper business proposal either, so thanks for saving me the time of not having to read your email that you never sent.

Email is not an answering machine.

If you email me with the message “Call me”, you will not receive a call.

If you email me about a business project you’re trying to do, and there are no $,$$$ signs included, you’re going to receive a reply that says “What’s your budget?”, and that’s probably just about ALL it’s going to say.

If your budget’s too low, I can recommend you to someone else that I know that does good work for less money in less time that I would waste brainstorming your project with you and then not being able to work on it because you can’t afford it.

These are the gates I was talking about earlier.

Gates

If you’re not viable on the email level, I’m not going to invest even more of my time, energy, and focus into, say, real-time text chatting with you.

If I’m not going to real-time text chat with you, I’m not going to video chat with you.

If I’m not going to video chat with you, I’m not going to talk to you on the phone.

If I’m not going to talk to you on the phone, I’m not going to meet up with you in person.

A lot of people are stuck in the olden days, back with the horses and buggies and covered wagons, and they want to “get together” to discuss things.

That’s over now, and it’s been over for years.

I’m in contact every single day with people that live hundreds of miles away from me, in different cities, different states, and even different countries.

If you live on the same island I live on (The center of the Universe, Manhattan, New York City!!! >:D) and you can’t figure out how to share ideas with me other than getting together IRL, you’re not up to speed. That’s YOUR problem, not mine.

Unless I’m on the clock, I have zero incentive to stop my entire day’s activities so I can travel somewhere and hang out with you in person to receive the same information that I could have read out of an email.

zero.

On top of that, when you communicate by email, you have DOCUMENTATION of the project and budget parameters so everyone involved can browse the history of the project and you don’t have to rely on he said / she said, or lose good ideas that you chatted about over brews because nobody wrote them down at the time.

Another reason IRL doesn’t work for me is that my time isn’t routinely scheduled. At any point during the day or night, I could be working on a project for a client, working on my own social media projects, mixing music, blogging, having brews with chicks, sleeping, or whatever else, and I’m not going to interrupt my non-routine by having to appear somewhere to discuss something with you for YOUR benefit.

This is why email is the default. I read it when I feel like it, which works for my personal system of doing things. The reason I can do so much in a single day is because I know how my system works and I maximize my efficiency.

When people become viable on the email level, they might be promoted to real-time text chat status, then video chat status, then IRL status.

*might*

Value

At this point in time, I think it’s imperative for people to understand that the playing field has been divided and that if you attempt to communicate in the wrong division, you won’t get your ideas in front of the right people to bring you from concept to reality.

It’s like if someone gives you their telephone number, but doesn’t include the area code. It’s practically worthless, unless you have a general idea of where they live, and you’re willing to call that number in every single area code until you reach the right person.

If someone lives their life on Twitter, you want to “@reply” them. They will always see when people mention them, but depending on the Twitter client they’re using, they might never see DMs (direct messages). Also.. Someone being on Twitter all day and happening to have a Facebook account doesn’t mean they’re monitoring their FB account at all.

Someone having an email address on their website doesn’t mean that they’re monitoring their email more than once a day or once a week, if ever.

Someone having a telephone number on their website doesn’t mean you’ll ever get anything other than an answering machine.

It’s up to YOU, as the person that wants the work done, to figure out the best way to contact the people you want to work with. It’s not up to THEM to make themselves available in whatever medium you’re used to, because if y’all never connect and nothing gets done on your project, YOU lose and THEY don’t.
–
Follow Bill via Google+ | Facebook | Twitter | Email Subscription | RSS Feed

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It’s amazing to me how sites and apps seem to be created, conceptualized and programmed by people that don’t actually use them.

Here’s how commenting works..

• There are people that want to read the comments but not say anything themselves.
• There are people that want to say things but not read anyone else’s comments.
• There are people that want to do both.
• There are people that want to do neither.
• There are people that change their minds.. They wanted to follow comments before and now they don’t, or they didn’t want to follow comments before and now they do.

Proper Implementation

I handle this on my blog, billcammack.com very simply, by enabling all those options.

• People can read my blog posts without commenting.
• They can comment without subscribing to comments (which would send them an email every time someone commented on the post they contributed to.
• They can subscribe to comments without writing anything (they don’t have to contribute in order to follow the conversation)
• If they comment without subscribing, they can subscribe later. If they subscribed and want to end their subscription, there’s a link for that in each email that they receive.

Essentially, this are two tiers of options. Your desire to speak on a subject does not obligate you to receive correspondence on that topic. Your lack of desire to speak doesn’t exclude you from following the conversation by subscribing.

One Choice Is No Choice At All

OTOH.. Facebook has been retardedly programmed so that if you click “like” on a status or link, you automatically receive every single comment anyone ever makes from then on if your account is set up to email you when there’s activity on a thread you were active on. These are the options you have on Facebook:

• “Like” or comment on something and receive updates forever.
• Don’t chime in and relieve yourself of a flood of Facebook bacn emails.
• Block the flood of emails by telling Facebook not to send you emails about that type of activity on your account.. and never receive ANY indications when ANY of the threads you commented on or “like”d are updated.

Why It Matters

Why does this matter to me? :) Because I’m missing out on a lot of comments my 2,235 Facebook Friends WOULD make if they didn’t have to be subjected to the flood of comments that came behind them.

*MY* conversations are being stifled on Facebook because people that would LIKE to give their opinions are avoiding getting spammed for the rest of the day until one of my threads goes out of style.

While they’re doing all the stupid updates they do, like changing the photos section so there’s no tab where you can see ONLY the new pictures that your friends were tagged in, all they have to do is implement a way to OPT THE **** OUT of comment streams and they’d see a lot more activity on Facebook and serve a lot more ads.

This is why I’m amazed at some of the “updates” Facebook does. It’s as if the people programming it don’t have any friends and don’t have any conversations and never have it happen to them that they just WISH they could opt out of something so they could comment on a hot topic and then be completely done with it.

I’m only approximately halfway to the maximum of 5,000 FB friends and I’ve had this problem for more than a year already. There are lots of people that hit the max limit ages ago and must have been pinging FB about this forever already. I don’t see why implementing OPT-OUT COMMENTING isn’t seen as an OBVIOUS WIN by the Facebook strategists.

EDIT: August 09, 2010 (10 days after I wrote this article)

Thanks to Dock Drumming for pointing out this article that was posted on 08/09/2010
www.allfacebook.com/facebook-letting-users-unsubscribe-from-feed-story-notifications-2010-08
“Tired of getting updates every time someone comments on your popular friend’s status update because you were the first to comment? Worry no longer! Facebook has begun testing a feature which lets users opt-out of those notifications. By clicking a simple “Unsubscribe” link (as pictured below), you can turn off notifications from stories that you comment or like. It’s a useful feature that can help you instantly reduce the noise.”

Looks like Facebook might be getting on the case! ;)

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The year is now 2010 AD. Doing business in person is OVER. It’s completely unnecessary, as well as a waste of time and billable hours. Let me explain to you how things work now.

Virtual Collaboration

When you go to work, what do you do? You sit in your cubicle and you type on your computer. How do you interact with your coworkers? O_o Do you get up and walk over to where they’re sitting and start running your mouth? No. You don’t. You click on your instant messaging program, such as AIM, iChat, gTalk, whatever, and you type directly to them.

If they’re logged in, looking at their screen and interested in chatting with you, they’ll return your communication at their earliest convenience. If you can’t get to them that way, you send them an email. If you can’t get to them *that* way, you send them a voicemail.

The point is that the people that you’re in the same office with don’t actually need to be in that office with you. They COULD have been on a different floor and you could have communicated with them exactly as efficiently. They could have been in a different BUILDING and you could have had the same interactions. They could have been across town or in another city, state or COUNTRY and you could have interacted with them exactly as easily as you did with someone that currently shares your physical space.

When you’re working on your computer and you want to show somebody something, what do you do? Print it out? Wait by the printer for your pages to be served? Walk your pages over to where your coworker is sitting and discuss them? Welcome to 1990. Nice business you have.

No. You share information with your coworkers via computer. You share documents, images, audio files, videos… It doesn’t make any sense to create something on a computer and then take it offline to show it to someone that has an online connection. Plug this into the aforementioned business model and you can share files and concepts with people in another neighborhood, borough, city, state or country just as quickly as you can share files with someone that shares your physical space.

Video Conferencing

Another technological advance that you should be aware of and taking advantage of is video conferencing. With the press of a button on your end and a press of a button on your coworker or client’s end, you can video chat with them, f2f (face to face) as if they were sitting across a table from you. You can hear them. You can see them. They can see and hear you. You can send them files or images for their review. You can collaborate with each other in real-time on sites like Google Wave and drop.io. You can exchange large files directly or via Usendit or FTP servers.

You can also share your screen with whomever you’re chatting with. This comes in handy so that you don’t have to send anyone anything. You give them access to your screen and they watch as you bring up images or documents or even edit a video while they give their opinions remotely from their own office or wherever they happen to be.

If you’re both on Macs and using iChat, you can even utilize machine control to “take over” the other person’s computer. The other day, I used machine control to change some effects on a client’s Final Cut Pro project on their own computer while they sat there and watched. I didn’t need to go to their location. I didn’t need to even see them, as they shared the screen with me directly and we communicated via iChat audio.

In fact.. Since I work via computer, *most* of my clients, I don’t see at all. They either send me physical materials or I receive them via internet. I work on them and then either post the new version of the video to the internet and send them links so they and their coworkers & clients can review it or I open a screen-sharing window and play it down for them while we discuss it.

Time Is Money

The work I do is based on deadlines. If something’s due next Tuesday, I might very well put in 14 hours on it for two days in a row and knock it out. I also might put in 2 hours a day for 7 days in a row. This means that I can make money at any time of the day that I’m physically awake. It all comes down to when I’m in The Zone and I feel energetic and efficient about knocking projects out.

As a freelancer, any hour, half hour or quarter hour of the day is potentially billable time. I might wake up at 4am and put in 3 hours of work before the client even wakes up. I might be ready to go party at 7pm and get an emergency call for a last-minute revision from a client and end up putting in two billable hours calling up their project, making the changes, rendering and uploading the new version.

Work is done, invoices are sent, money is paid… ALL without any of us ever being in the same physical space. Not only is it unnecessary, but movement wastes billable hours, and Time is Money. There’s no reason for us to TRAVEL somewhere to have the exact same exchange of ideas we could have just as efficiently remotely.

The only exception to that is when I need to do an on-site supervised edit. There are times when it’s not efficient for the client to send me tons of footage and I need to go to their location to sit with producers to create the show.

In that case, travel can’t be avoided. In other circumstances, the clock starts and stops when I begin and end concentrating on your project. If we decide to video conference for 30 minutes, you’re billed for 30 minutes of time. If you’re calling me on the phone, you get billed for that time. If I’m reading and responding to your emails, you get billed for that time.

WHENEVER it is that I’m doing something for the benefit of your project, you’re getting charged for it. It’s in your best interest not to add preparation and travel time to that. If I have to break down equipment, pack it up, transport it and set it up at your location and then do the entire process in reverse when we’re done, all that goes into your budget.

Wasting Time

Anything that falls outside of the categories of “What I feel like doing” and “What I’ve agreed to accept money to do” is most likely going to be completely ignored. I currently have 11,498 unread email messages and 2,388 unread Facebook messages. Unread.. As in I never clicked on them. (As a side note.. Some of my friends would have had WAY more unread emails than I do, except they declared email bankruptcy and created an “inbox zero” condition by deleting all the emails they knew they were never going to go back and deal with)

I have too many people asking me for too many things to concentrate on the vast majority of them for more than the time it takes me to read the name on the message and the subject, which is approximately 3 seconds (entirely without sarcastic exaggeration). If I can’t figure out why I should read your email from the title, I’m not going to waste my time reading it.

Spending even 20 seconds per email, reading 3 of them wastes a full minute. Reading 30 of them wastes 10 minutes. In yesterday’s 24-hour period, I received 189 emails. At 20 seconds per, reading all of them would have wasted more than a billable hour of my time yesterday. That’s not considering the time it would have taken to think about and reply to all of those.

There’s too much going on with my day for me to waste time reading emails. This is the same thing I said about Twitter more than a year ago as far as people that claim to follow tens of thousands of people. It’s absolutely impossible because that would mean they were spending every waking minute reading and/or replying to Twitter posts, but that’s a different article.

Future Plans

Other than scheduling work, I don’t make plans. There are two reasons for this. The first one is that I don’t know what I want to do until I want to do it. The second is that if I agreed to do something with you on XYZ day and then something different comes up ranging from doing work for a client to having drinks with my best girlfriends to being asleep, that’s what I’m going to do during that time that I told you I was going to meet you. In fact, I probably won’t even remember that I agreed to do whatever it was you wanted to do when the time arrives.

Everybody that actually knows me knows that I’m EXCELLENT at doing what I want to do and HORRIBLE at doing anything I don’t care about or don’t feel like doing. I can’t tell you today what I’m going to want to do three days from now. When that day arrives, I’m most likely NOT going to feel like doing whatever we talked about. I’d rather do something else or nothing at all.

For that reason, I don’t waste other people’s time making plans with them that I might veto at the last minute. I might have a new client or a new girlfriend before that time arrives and whatever you mentioned to me exited my mind a long time ago.

Welcome To 2010

There’s a new format of business & social interaction going on, whether you’re aware of it or not. There are people I communicate with every single day via computer or text messaging and we’ve been doing this for years. There are people I do business with entirely efficiently & professionally without ever having to go somewhere to physically be in their presence.

The ability to multitask and switch gears on the fly when I feel my attention shift from one zone to another is what makes my days four times as productive as most people. I stay on my grind twice as long and achieve twice as much during each hour I focus on something.

Much of my efficiency is derived from NOT wasting time all day. I don’t waste time traveling places. I don’t waste time meeting with people in person when we could do it on the phone or via video conferencing. I don’t waste time doing things that I don’t want to do. I stay in my zone and when my focus switches, I apply myself to whatever the best current use of my time is. I don’t waste billable hours reading and answering random or irrelevant email.

I party hard and do my best to enjoy my friends to the fullest. I stay in touch with people in England, Japan, Israel, Hawaii, Texas, California and lots of other places around the globe on a weekly basis. The time of being limited to your current geographical region is OVER. We now have world-wide opportunities to do business with and socialize with anyone with whom we share ideas and/or ideals.

There’s too much to be done with our days to waste time on old business models of sitting down for drinks or traveling to conferences in other states or countries. Create and maintain your online presence. Stay in touch with current friends and meet new ones via Social Media. Propagate your business & social brands. Reduce the amount of time you waste every day and increase your efficiency.

Get with the program. Recognize the opportunities available to you TODAY. Work smarter, not harder. Open your mind and realize your true potential. Your friends & clients aren’t just down the street from you.. They’re EVERYWHERE now.

Welcome to the new world, Neo.

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Grace, Christine, Bill, Kathryn & Annie

I’ve been popular since the first memory I have available to me, somewhere around 5 years old.. or maybe 4, if I could actually pinpoint dates.

I’ve had crews since Kindergarten. I’ve always had my close set of friends that do stuff together and then a reputation that emanated from there.

If you had never heard of me in a school that I was in, you heard of something that I did, but you didn’t know I was the one that did it, or you didn’t know that I was the catalyst behind the action.

That doesn’t matter.. I know what I’ve done, and it’s my own personal resume of action, events and achievements. As funny as it seems, being that I’m usually the #3 Bill on Google, behind Gates & Clinton, I’m not actually interested in random people knowing what my name is or being able to spot me in a crowd. I’m DEFINITELY interested in my friends being able to find me and see what I’m doing. It’s basically, if we’ve shared part of our lives together, I want you to be able to get in touch with me if you feel like it.

Having said that, there’s a certain privilege that you get used to when your reputation has preceded you for your entire life. You have nothing to prove to anyone, because everyone who was there knows what happened. Your clients know the quality of the work you did for them. Your homeboys know the fun they had hanging out with you. The chicks you messed with know what you did to them. It’s like the saying goes… ” If you don’t know… You’d better ASK SOMEBODY! :D ”

Spheres of Influence

Social Media has afforded us all the opportunity to expand our spheres of influence. I have friends I talk to on a regular basis from Germany, England, Hawaii, Canada, Israel and coast to coast across the United States. That’s all lovely, but if you don’t manage your online relationships properly, you make yourself beholding to the sites that you use to interact with your friends scattered all over the planet. I’m thinking that that’s what led to my Social Nightmare the other night. :)

I’ve had a couple of minor scrapes with what I’ll call “loss of props”, but nothing like what many people have experienced *shudder*. I used to use this live streaming site, which all of a sudden fell off the face of the earth one day and wasn’t available again AT ALL for something like two months. The problem with that is that the videos that I had created on their site and crossposted to my blog completely disappeared. Not only did that erase the live show that I had done (and at that time, there were no backup options), but the community that I had built on that site was gone as well. None of the people that I knew from there were able to access my videos on that site OR my account on that site, so I took a short. Fortunately, I hadn’t created much media there before the site went down.

I had uploaded my videos redundantly to this other video hosting site which proceeded to allow certain videos of mine to be posted and rejected others, due to their ToS (Terms of Service) standards. This wasn’t acceptable to me, because there was no telling in the future when they were going to decide that a video of mine wasn’t suitable for their site, and it would screw a series I was doing. That was it for my involvement with that particular video host.

I uploaded a video to YouTube that I had been GIVEN by the CHOREOGRAPHER of the piece, and she had received the video FROM THE EVENT with the understanding that she would use it to publicize herself and her dance company. Someone not in the know, from the event staff, saw the video, which I edited myself and wasn’t like ANY video they could possibly have had available to them, being that I created the video from the raw feeds, contacted YouTube, complained and had the video taken down. I could very easily have had it reinstated, however, it wasn’t worth the time and energy it would have taken me to go through the process, so that’s the only video I’ve ever had taken off of YouTube. Meanhwhile, the spectre remains that any content I upload could be removed at any time. Not a good feeling.

I uploaded a video to Facebook that was removed because someone complained about it:

Click for high-res version

Same deal here… You get the picture that you’re building houses on sand if you continue to utilize 3rd-party sites to maintain your internet presence and worldwide props.

Game-Changers

There have been web video hosts that have bailed out of the game ENTIRELY, sending the people that had hosted videos on their site scrambling to find a new host as well as download ALL. OF. THEIR. CONTENT. from that host and re-upload it all to a new site… AND re-link every single post they ever made so that the new videos show up in the old posts. Tragic.

Personally, I was removed from google for four days, which was an extremely interesting experience. 80% of my site traffic comes from Google, which I’ve been told is good. \o/ .. It was interesting, being virtually anonymous for the first time in three years (since 2006). It was fun and strange at the same time. Most importantly, it was a clear indication of how much we lean on these social networks that we build our internet presences on.

What happens if you get removed from Google?
What happens if Twitter gets shut down, like Pownce did?
What happens if YouTube stops serving videos, like Stage 6 did?
Where are you going to be if that happens?
WHO are you going to be if that happens?
Who will you still be in contact with if that happens?
Who will be able to find you online if that happens?

Another thing that’s bothered me to a slight degree as of late is how sites have been changing themselves to emulate other sites… Specifically, Facebook, FriendFeed & Twitter. They’re obviously all trending towards being the same service and focusing on real-time content delivery. Meanhile, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect and who knows how many other “Connect”s are scheming on consolidating your internet experience, similar to how AOL used to have it locked up back in the day.

Because of this, these services are changing their functionalities right out from under their users’ noses. All of a sudden, there’s a change in the way Facebook’s home page works. All of a sudden, there’s a change in how the Facebook Fan Pages work. All of a sudden, there’s a change in how @replies work on Twitter. The problem with this is that depending on how you set up your interactions with these apps, these sudden changes could jack up your entire content delivery scheme and send you back to the drawing board.

Another problem is that sites that gained their fame from piracy are now trying to clean up their act so they can distribute their content on television and through other outlets, so now they’re ripping the music out of people’s videos that have literally been there for years and in some cases, “suspending” (read: deleting) people’s accounts for violations of the CURRENT ToS that weren’t violations of the ToS at the time that the videos were uploaded.

Creepy.

So, I believe this shell-game that all these sites are playing led to my Social Nightmare the other night…

The Horror

I went to one school between 4th grade and 8th grade. It was a specialized school that you couldn’t even get into without taking an IQ test. After a certain grade level, you couldn’t even get in AT ALL. As was my usual MO, I built my crew when I got there, and we shared life together for what seemed like forever at the time.

Was I at the top of the chain? Nowhere near it! :D My Friends were My Friends and that was that. We did what we did and enjoyed ourselves every single day. We weren’t the rich kids or the best dressers or the kids that threw the parties and raided their parents’ liquor cabinets, but we had our position in the school and held it down. Every day, we were writing a new page in our own history…

Due to my own fault, I got transferred to a more prestigious high school in 9th grade. This meant that the social cred I had built since 4th grade was now out the window and I had to build my rep from scratch amongst 3,000 kids that I didn’t know from Adam. That went well enough, and by the end of Junior year, I was involved with all the cliques I needed to be involved with. I was back in position. The people that needed to know who I was, KNEW, and the rest were out of the loop.

Going into senior year, I was rather comfortable with my “new” social status. This is where my recent nightmare came into play. I dreamt that I had been transferred back to my original school in the 12th grade. I remember the feeling of standing in a classroom where the kids had no idea who I was, because I had been gone for three years. Out of the kids that DID remember me, there was no telling who I was NOW, because I had been MIA since 8th grade. I had also missed out on three years of bonding experiences and history-writing, because I had written that history with kids that I was no longer going to school with. All my cred was displaced… useless to me at this point, and I basically had one year to start all over from scratch before leaving for college.

The Problem

Why was this a nightmare? hahaha You wouldn’t know unless you were naturally used to having “followers”. It’s like being a king without knights… What’s the point? You don’t have props BECAUSE you’re the king. You have props because OTHER PEOPLE recognize you as the king and treat you as such. It’s the same situation as when people get fired from a job they held for years. In a lot of cases, people’s ENTIRE social set is comprised of people that they work with and removing that bond of “we work together” is a traumatic and life-altering experience for them.

This is how you’re going to feel if Twitter disappears and your thousands of followers are in the wind. This is how you’re going to feel if Facebook bans you for activities they feel violate their ToS. This is how you’re going to feel if YouTube “suspends” your account, and all of your blog posts are now linked to nothing.

So, yes.. This nightmare was a double-tragedy or perhaps a double-travesty, because the years I spent in the new school were now useless and the years I DIDN’T spend in the old school weren’t going to help me with my senior year.

Did this matter to me very much in the dream? No. I always play it where it lays. Regardless of the situation, I move forward. My goal was to build what I could in one year and then start all over as a frosh in college. The real question is… What are YOU going to do if this happens to YOU?

What’s Your Plan?

What’s going to happen to your current social circle if any of the sites you depend on cease to exist? How are you going to rebuild your set of followers? How are you going to rebuild your social cred? What are you going to do when a site decides that videos you posted years ago are no longer acceptable and they delete them all, or even worse, delete YOU from their site, entirely?

Are you the type of person that can get displaced and hit the ground running? Are your social props based on who you are as a person or only the company or product you represent? Are people learning who YOU ARE, or what you’re selling? If you get laid off from your job, are any of your current coworkers going to want to hang out with you? Are any of your Twitter followers going to help you find a new job?

What happens if you lose your internet connection? What happens if you lose your cell phone? Can you get back in touch with the people you already had as contacts? Will they care? Will they even notice?

Strangely enough, I think the solution to this situation is a return to the lowest common denominator, which is email. I touched on this in Digital Internet Snobbery, but at the time, I was talking about not walking away from people that use archaic systems like MySpace. This time, I’m talking about walking TOWARDS the ancient, because that’s where most people are comfortable and still reside when it comes to the internet.

The issue is distribution, not technological advancement. It’s about making it easy for people to find you where they’re most likely to look, not attempting to force them into using all the great new sites and apps that you use, which they’ve never heard of and certainly don’t care about. It’s about being able to reach people and have them reach you if they feel like it.

Even if you have the ABILITY to start from scratch and rebuild your fan base, why should you? Why go through the trouble of reconnecting with hundreds of people when it’s better to not lose contact with them in the first place? What’s your backup plan in case Twitter or Facebook or YouTube lands in the dead pool? Do you have one? Do you NEED one?

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
 

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Continued from “Time”, Parts 01, 02, 03 & 04:

Life is easy when you 9-5 it. All you have to do is go where they told you, do what they told you and leave when they told you. Two weeks from now, you get a check and then the cycle starts all over again.

As a freelancer, your time has to be divided amongst several things every day, and it’s up to you to get proficient with selecting what to focus on and how much time to devote to it.

Efficiency

The selection process is actually critically important. I already discussed micromanagement of time, but it’s just as important, if not more so, to minimize the time that you waste DECIDING what to focus on. For instance, it might take you one minute to read someone’s email, but it took you 30 seconds to DECIDE whether you were going to read that email. Perhaps a more efficient style would be to jump right in, start reading and if you realize it’s something you don’t care about, bail.

I know that 10 seconds or 30 seconds doesn’t sound like much, and a year or two ago, it wasn’t much to me either. When you get to the point of receiving 100 emails every day of varying levels of importance, those seconds can add up to a major time sink. Consider the process to respond to a “new Twitter follower” notification (assuming you don’t use a program to auto-follow people who follow you):

1. Hear the background notification
2. Take your mind off your current project
3. “Feel” whether this is a “check the email” moment or not
4. Type the shortcut to toggle to mail
5. Read the title
6. Click on the email
7. Find and click on the link
8. Wait for the browser window to open
9. Check their friend/follower ratio
10. Check what they’re talking about on Twitter
11. Decide whether to follow them back or not
12. Close the window
13. Toggle back to the program you were originally using
14. Get your mind wrapped around your project again

So now, because you chose to have your mail client open and polling for mail, however much time was just extracted from your focus on your current project. Sometimes, it’s necessary, like if a client emails you that there’s a change in plans or an unique opportunity comes up that requires your immediate attention. Other times, it can be put off until later (or never), so making that decision quickly is in the best interest of your time, productivity and focus.

Focus

Mainly what I do is edit video. If I’m just assembling something, I’ll probably have mail and instant messaging open because I’m really just organizing items and doing quality control. If I’m doing a “real” edit, all of that’s shut off, because I need to live inside my project and be immersed in it in order to provide the eventual viewer with the same level of immersion when they watch the show. I can’t afford these micro-interruptions affecting my focus, flow, disposition, mood…

This is why I can’t understand how some people have literally all day to be on Twitter. They supposedly have jobs and responsibilities, yet you see them on Twitter 24/7. Now, I understand that there’s work that doesn’t require your full attention, like I said about when I’m assembling something… But how much time that you’re supposedly working for a company are you spending passing notes in class? What do those notes have to do with your actual BUSINESS? If your employer checks your Twitter or Friendfeed accounts, are they going to see you engaging in water-cooler drivel banter? How do you reconcile this time? Is it like smoke breaks? Are you addicted to Twitter like other people are addicted to cigarettes and need to be let out of the building for 15 minutes every hour to get their addiction on?

Focus is extremely important, because you can either move forward a little on several projects in a day or you can move forward A LOT in one or two. It might be a good idea to shut it all down and have designated periods where you enjoy “Social Media Time”. Similarly, it might be a good idea to have “email time” and “telephone time” and “respond to inquiries” time. That way, you could have specific segments of your day devoted to ‘distractions’ and the rest of it spent on knocking out the projects you’ve decided are most important or whose deadlines are approaching the soonest.

Motion

The days of meetings are OVER. Period. Over. Done. I noticed this back in my experimental year, 2008, because what people knew me for changed. When I was known for editing, I would get contacted by people who needed editing. Once I became known for Social Media projects, all of a sudden, I had information that lots of people could use for their businesses, and they began contacting me, wanting some of my time.

That’s all well & good, but when I would run through the obvious video chatting options, it was always “well… I don’t have this set up…”, regardless of how large or successful the company was. This was when I realized how far behind most companies really are.

So I went to a few IRL f2f meetings. My take-away was that A LOT OF TIME was being wasted in transit. Granted, this was before I bought my g1, but I’m way faster on my Macbook Pro than I am on my gPhone, so even today, the time is essentially wasted, or at least slowed to a crawl.

The problem with moving is that as soon as you stop thinking about your current project, it’s completely stalled. It’s stalled while you THINK about going to the meeting. It’s stalled while you get dressed. It’s stalled while you head for mass transit. It’s stalled while you wait for mass transit. It’s stalled while you’re ON mass transit (at least in NYC, because you’re not going to have your laptop out on the subway and if you did, you wouldn’t have wifi anyway). If you took the bus or a cab, traffic’s ridiculous and you either wouldn’t get there on time, or you’d spend $20 to slowly get downtown. It’s stalled while you walk to the restaurant. It’s stalled while you meet with your client or potential client. THEN, it’s stalled all the way back in reverse.

So, not only do you ‘lose’ the time that you’re physically meeting with someone, you lose literally hours surrounding that meeting. This is entirely unacceptable, when all you have to do is set a time, remain efficient until you get the chat notification on your computer and click “accept”. When the meeting’s over, you click “end” and go back to what you were doing. During that time, you have the exact same functionality as a face-to-face meeting, except you can’t shake hands when you’re signing off. I’ve had more efficient meetings with people in GREECE and ISRAEL than I’ve had with people in Manhattan, NYC, USA. :/

Obviously, these issues are multiplied in situations where travel’s required. Entire DAYS can be wasted getting from one state to another. Most of the day can be wasted moving from location to location when filming something.

This is something that needs to be worked into your budgeting. It’s not just the number of hours that you work on the project, but the number of hours that traveling to and from that project remove your ability to focus on OTHER projects.

Solutions

Maximize focus by increasing efficiency and decreasing motion. Accept projects that fit into your flow and reject projects that don’t. Make exceptions for situations that compensate you properly for the entire amount of time that they take away your ability to clear your desk of other projects.

Pay attention to and note all the time that’s devoted to a particular project… Phone time, IM time, email time, video chat time, IRL meeting time, travel time and time that you actually worked on the project. Make sure people know they’re “on the clock” and will be billed for your time before interacting with them. Get your payment up front if you don’t trust them to honor your invoice. If they don’t have your money now, they probably won’t have it later either, so don’t allow people like this to owe you money so you have to waste even MORE of your time trying to get paid.

~Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
Time Category: billcammack.com/category/other/time/

Related Posts

• Business, 2010 [Time, Part 09]
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• Time, Part 06: “What’s Your Budget?”