Week 1 - Getting Mentally prepared.

It is the first of June 2014.

The start of the the journey into creating some music and blogging about the process.

Some of this will partially be based on Music Success In Nine Weeks by Ariel Hyatt, for no other reason than I need a plan.

Given, my musical priority is and will be The Hair Thieves nine weeks is a little ambitious.  So I will spread the nine weeks out over many months.

I will assume Arial thinks I might already have material written, gigs on the go and what not.

I am starting from near scratch.  Just a collection a few under developed ideas and lyric snippets. Song is different tunings and time signatures.

At the moment I only have two rules for this project.

1. If the song starts sounding like it should be a Hair Thieves song, then it should be and I will show it to E to say if we should use it.
2. Given the The Hair Thieves brand tag is"An eclectic mix of ambient indie pop rock punk jazz soundtracks", this project should have a focus and not be eclectic. I have an inkling as to what I want to do.  More about that soon.

  So, back to Ariel's book.

The tasks this weekis to set some goals and set some dates for those goals.

Apparantly, only 3% of people have their long term goals written down and it has been proven that people who track their goals are more likely to achieve them.

I have been a been advocate of David Allen's Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity methodology. I have had a system in place for about eight years now.

It mostly works, for me. I will blog more about my time management system in the future.

So I already have a working task tracking system in place.

The bit of Getting Things done that I have always struggled with is the big picture.

What are my life goals?

I don't have issues with goals for individual projects, but what is my life goal.  I really don't know.  Ariel also iterates the need for lifetime goals.  I'm still unconvinced.

So for the purposes of this experiment.  I will limit my goals to twelve months and this one project and reserve the right to change them whenever!

So this weeks task are to

1. Write down each day. 5 victories.   (Now I used to do that years ago, so I will start again)
2. Write down six Focus areas for the next twelve months
1. with dates
2. that involve me only
3. are realistically achievable

In the book, Ariel mentions money goals.   I'm slightly uncomfortable with that.  I would be happy to make enough money to sustain my musical hobby.   I have no ambition to be a full time musician.  I love my day job enough to want to carry that on as a career.

Right, so whilst I get my mind thinking of what I want to achieve for this project.   I have some immediate tasks to get on with namely :-

1. Name the project
2. Get the domain name
3. Get the social media names for it
4. Create project structure on my music PC for it
5. Create a project structure in my lyric writing system.

So let's begin and get all of this into my task management system.

later

Rollasoc