Preparing To Produce Products

Friday April 2nd, 2010 - Chicago, IL/Vernon Hills, IL

What better place to start than the beginning? If I intend to finish a couple of significant projects in the next six months, and I do, the first thing I needed to do was put a picture in my head of what the finished products should look like and then work backward from that to actually create something that’s as close to that image in my head as possible. So I did.

The two main projects on the docket are a book of essays about Milwaukee which I will use to create the one man show and also an online recorded version of my comedy classes that can make me money when I’m sleeping. I can tweak them later, for now I need a first run finished product of each to get the ball rolling. I want customers to rave about both.

Jerry Agar is in town this weekend from Toronto, where he’s working on the air as a fill in talk show host for a major radio station there. He has bills to pay and nobody’s angry at him, but it looks like Jerry’s Kidders aren’t going to last much longer. He may or may not get a full time job there, but it doesn’t look promising at WGN at all. He’s in a tight spot.

That’s why I’m working on my projects with such a renewed vigor. I know how it feels to have to do something for the money, and I’m not fond of it. Who is? Jerry asked if Tim Slagle and I wanted to meet up for lunch. Ken Sevara’s father is very sick and Ken’s been attending to that the last few weeks. The rest of us wanted to discuss the Kidders’ status.

On the way home I stopped at Target and bought some three ring binders so I can make up prototypes of each project I’ll be working on. For me, it helps to see a physical product in my hands that represent what I want to create. It narrows everything down into a single source, and I can cut and paste and switch things around in a binder I can’t in a notebook.

At home, I dusted off the cork boards I hung on my wall over a year ago but haven’t put to use as of yet. That’s about to change too. I quartered one off so I could use it to remind me of things I’ll need to do daily, weekly, monthly and what my finished products will be on October 1st. This is all very basic but I’m starting all over again so I needed to do it all.

I can’t stress enough that my goal is to get both of these projects DONE. I can’t waste a minute on either one, and I’m not looking for perfection. I’m looking for something that I can keep improving in the future, but will still do the job for customers now. Perfection is not the goal here, that’s unrealistic. I just want to crank something out I can improve later.

I need to SEE it every day, and use that reminder to keep me working on it consistently. I will take the binders with me in the car, so every time I get stuck waiting for a train or in a traffic jam I can haul it out and put a little more time in. I will do this until it’s finished.

The Milwaukee show will make money the fastest, so I decided to set aside mornings to work on that one. The comedy classes will be a long term source of revenue so that one is my afternoon focus. The main income from each will come from a single book to start off with, so that’s where I’m starting. First the outlines, then flesh them out. I see it clearly.