How Do You Guys Manage Your Time?

Not very well.

Advertising most mornings into the afternoon,
taking time out to make new works.

Then off to my part time job evenings.

If I get a bit burned out, I take day off to come back stronger.

Dave

addition by 9:30 this morning I had run ads towards a reach of 400k people.

I don't do number two - at least not most of the time. To me an image work in a certain way. I don't put on filters for the sake of variety.

I do less and less of #6 although some images end up with stock agencies.

I do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I put most of my effort in here since it pays off the best. Also at this point I have so many images uploaded I'm working more on promoting them. The creative part comes in spurts when I have a good block of time available or I find myself in a good location.

I guess you could make schedule.

You forgot the rest - blogging, putting work in shows, creating books, press releases, forum participation, walk the dog, rake the leaves, chop the firewood, do the laundry....

None of that at all right now. When I sit down for a cup of coffee I jump online to check email, take a quick look at various sites then get back to the real world. Heading out next month for a few weeks so will probably get new shots then. I have to say it's really nice to take a break from producing and posting work because there is a whole world of other things I love to do when my time isn't sucked up by all things photography. I must admit though that this is a glorious fall with the best color I've ever seen here and at times I'm tempted to grab a camera before it's over.

and work here and run an online busy magazine........and all with a bad pulled back

Abbie,

Hope you feel better soon.

Dave

Working from home can be distracting, so I stick to a loose work schedule:

M: follow up on weekend developments/open/create artwork
T: marketing; do research/tutorials/reading/posting/sharing/building online contacts, etc.
W: Open/artwork; other business/household/etc
T: marketing; check gallery inventory, notecards, etc in prep for weekend, order/make/maintain inventory and art related financials
F: Open/artwork; other business/household/etc

That's my framework, and I try to stick with it. Every day, I'm responding to art-related emails and these days I'm managing orders, delivery, and inventory at two locations, and I have a show coming up to prepare for. There's always room to fit in things as they come up (and there are a lot of those, I have a family, a house, and three rental properties)

Thanks Dave, it really hurts at the moment :( but we carry on:)

There's just not enough hours in the day and the 'To Do List' keeps getting longer.

Michel
✈ Travel Photography Contests.

Abbie,

I had a bad back once. I asked a local golf club pro what to do. Golf pros need to know more about this than most doctors.
He told me to get two icy/heat packs. And the belt to put them in. Put one pack in the freezer and the other needs to be used in the
microwave. First apply the frozen pack. This is counter intuitive. The frozen one will drive the blood away from the site. Let this
be done for 20 minutes. Then the hot pack for 20 minutes will drive the blood back fast into the area.

When you take ibuprofen it does extra healing by driving blood into the area, but over time ibuprofen is bad for the organs.

The principle is the same, but the action is safe and better with the packs.

Working at the time in a restaurant I went back and forth five, six times per work shift. I got better in two days.

Dave

depends on the day. we vacation in the summer and warm months and i squirrel away images then. however i got into colorizing so my day is spent looking for more images for later on. i do about a 1000 images a day. i colorize things over the course of a week and upload 4 things a week or so. during that time i tinker on the net and forums. i tweet a few things during that day. its all pretty mundane stuff with no particular order.

---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Kathleen- that sounds good :). I might do the same thing in March of next year between the end of winter scenery and the beginning of the spring bloom. March is probably the most blah month of the year here in the northeast.

I'm lucky to have 3 or 4 hours a day to put into the photography stuff so I definitely need to schedule my days. I like your scheduling system Cyndi - I am probably going to do something similar to help focus on specific things on specific days. Of course I'm always going to want to go out and take more photos :).

It always feels like there is always SOMETHING that I could be doing to improve my standings. Never ending like Michel said.

LOL Edward I forgot chopping wood and laundry.

Abbie I'm sorry to hear about your back- I hope it's better soon.

I start the day with a list of things I want to get done and end it shaking my head at how little got done.

@ed -- you don't do number 2? that might save some time but in the long run it will be hard to sit down after a while....


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

The way I live my life as a musician and free lance whatever does not lend itself to schedules, so instead I keep lists and make priorities.

Now before I say anything more, I would never suggest that anyone stop being passionate about their art and start spending all their time working on making sales, even though it is easy to do that. To that end I set aside some time to do some enjoyable and creative and fun photography. I also have long term projects and it is not always fun to get up before dawn and get on location but I know I need to be there to further my projects and income. It's the life I chose and I need to live it.

My priorities shift over time. At this point I am fairly well caught up on going through my DSLR images and have processed what needs to be processed. This was actually a task that took several years, because my priorities were to travel and shoot and I only processed what I needed at the time. I still have a backlog of very old film and slides to be cleaned and scanned and I have a backlog of iphone photos that I took for a long term project. Those are low priority.

As for keywording, I went over my images again and again. I research every image. I am on the alert for new words, but for the most part this is done. If you already have good images, this is probably the quickest and easiest way to boost sales as once you do it you rarely have to do it again. My descriptions need some updating, but they all have descriptions so it is low priority.

As for social I have a youtube video with some 8,000 views now and i suppose some of them follow links to hear. I promote it on Twitter. My social media focus now is on getting views and followers. I am not going to post the same images over and over. I do a little every few days and post my sales and new uploads.

I mostly upload here and to one stock site. I try and get it done within days or weeks of the shoot. I have no plans now to expand my portfolio beyond that.

For now, making shoot lists and then following through when the opportunity arrives is my biggest priority. I try and get out every day for a look around by the beaches, docks and parks, and other areas, but more often than not do not shoot anything. Sometimes I make a note to come back at another time and take a shot as a reminder.
For making sales I have my "Checklist for Success in Print Sales" , which has 2500 views now. I made that list one morning for me to use as well as share on the forum.

http://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=2567813
Bradford Martin
Bradmartinphotos.com

Alright, in order.....

1. Go out and shoot new stuff, edit those photos, and upload some of them.

These are three different things BTW. First and foremost, shoot shoot shoot while the weather is good or while you are on location. Editing can be done later though I will usually do at least a couple that night unless of course I am shooting at night. Uploading may or may not happen that soon after edit. If I have a bunch and they will have similar keywords I wait until I get at least a few edited then upload.

2. Create variations of existing images (BW/Sepia/Different treatments)

Sometimes I do it as I edit. If I think it is a strong BW candidate I do it right then. If it is not it can wait until I am not shooting at all and have edited all the recent shots. For those that don't do it you are likely losing sales because of it. Even images I don't think work in BW sometimes generate requests for BW conversions. I had one of my best sellers that I missed doing in BW and fixed that years after the original had been selling and it started selling within a couple months.

3. Go back over old listings and improve tagging/descriptions

IF I see them as they either sell, generate a comment or any other reason. Trying to find them would be a full time job if I tried catching them all.

4. Spend time advertising listings/pushing to social media

I pin it to Pinterest as I upload it. I post some to FB though it rarely generates sales it does at times. I do this when I think about it. Effective advertising I am always on the lookout for. Right now, I have one paid ad in two local publications so after the initial meeting with the publisher's advertising agent it is pretty quick. They send me an email reminding me when it needs to be in by, I pick the image and attach it to the base ad or change the wording in the base ad and email it back. I also print a large metal print of the ad image and hang it in the gallery on the first of the month when the ads go active. (just the image not the ad)

5. Dig through hard drive looking for older stuff that you may have missed the first time around

Whenever I have nothing left to upload.

6. Expand your inventory to other online stores- extremely time consuming if you have a large portfolio. Especially since you have to manually create the variations on some sites (which could be an entire topic).

Never, I only upload here.

Now, in addition to that I have to gallery sit two 7 hour shifts a month. I make sure I am welcoming guests at the gallery on the monthly Gallery Night in downtown Pensacola.

I tend to drive to pick up my son in Kansas then back to Florida. Even though I fly free, (wife's job benefit.) Since my son is also a photographer it takes us a while to get places but it is an adventure and also productive.

(in a proud dad moment one of his latest images is below.)



Then there are the photo trips and managing your SO's expectations. I know how many times I can stop and or change plans because of a good subject or good light/weather. Three hours to get dark skies? No problem but I am doing it by myself. Great sunset with a bunch of combat aircraft at my disposal? She came but that was two hours total shooting. I have also learned to bribe her with dinner. Make sure you plan AROUND the good light. Don't let her get hungry as the sunset is about to happen. (That cost me some good images on Sunday.)

Speaking of my last post.

Wife is looking at flights to Saint John Virgin Islands for her niece's wedding. She quotes a price. (You don't want to fly standby to a wedding BTW.) She quotes X dollars. I say let me do some research.

15 minutes later she asks what prices for flights I found. I said, oh, I wasn't looking at flights I was looking to see how saturated the Saint John art market was to see if I could pay for flights with photography. She threw something at me!

Strangely, I do not think this way.

I have never had an attitude of "managing" my time.

I manage my actions, and measuring these via time happens, whether I would want it to or not. ... I have no say in this.

Beautiful photo! It's great that you and your son can share photography!

JC I made a few hundred bucks off a print based on someone requesting a black and white version of it. The requester wound up buying it then the next month someone else bought a large version of it. I probably wouldn't have made the second sale if I still only had the color version up. TBH the print itself didn't scream B&W when I first looked at it but when I did the conversion it looked great. Now I will try almost anything in B&W even if it doesn't strike me by looking at the color version.

I actually started on another site and later joined FAA... Besides here I sell on two other platforms. I've been lucky enough to make fairly big sales on all three over the last few months. I'd say FAA is about 40% of my art sales income at the moment. I don't sell as many individual pieces but when I do it's usually for a bigger profit margin. It tough deciding to go full out on one site or spread your stuff over a bunch of different sites. I figure they probably have audiences that don't overlap so you have more potential buyers, but at the same time you're spreading yourself a little thin as far as the time you have to give attention to each platform. So who knows?

LOL good tips... You definitely don't want a hungry SO at sunset :). Even better if you can get through the blue hour.

Nice Brandon I've been contemplating creating a YouTube channel companion to my shop... Maybe local Boston videos, going out on shoots, that sort of thing. Stuff to drive traffic here plus it'd be fun to do.

I have a shoot list too - major ones like all the local areas in New England I want to hit (at what season, what time of day etc). Also, I see shots all the time that aren't at the right moment and I often forget about going back to them later. I really need to put a memo in my phone right at the time I think about it.

JC I do the same thing except my better half is a step ahead of my conniving ways. :)

Me: Hey honey, how about (insert artsy/touristy location of choice here) for our 10 year anniversary?
Him: Do they have good galleries there??

@Toby and Jc one of my best sellers here is a B&W that a fan found on my flickr (in color) and asked me to crop to square and convert to black and white and I have sold it a bunch of times since, and I never considered in monochrome.

As for how I manage my time, usually I waste it. I have the best of intentions when I get home from the real job but then look flashy light, whats that on the TV? What was I going to do tonight?