I’ve devised a cunning way to
spread my backlog of work out a bit so that I am no longer intimidated by
ridiculously large list of things that need doing. My list of outstanding jobs
is divided into realistic chunks of do-able tasks, and once I’ve done them all,
I stop working. This list also includes writing the blog for the day before
(although not technically part of my job although it does make a little money,
find out how below), so hopefully that won’t keep falling behind. On my list
for yesterday was to handle my emails including contacting all the bands I played
on the podcast as a bit of social media whoring from the bands and artists can’t
harm where listening figures are concerned.
I have fallen back into the
habit of working quite late into the night, which leads me to feeling sluggish
and punchy in the morning. My work has been keeping me awake and even when I
attempt to go to sleep I am kept awake by script deadlines and budget worries.
By only giving myself a small amount of work I am hoping to be able to get on
with other stuff such as going to gigs more often or even the enjoying the
simple things such as reading a book or listening to music for the fun of it
instead of it being part of your work. When I was younger I used to sit in a
chair and listen to an LP with headphones, all the way through and that was all
I was doing. Not reading or writing at the same time, but listening to music
for the sake of listening. When I listen to new music now I am making notes for
whatever radio show or podcast it could be used for. This isn’t to say that I
don’t enjoy listening to music anymore, because music is something I can’t do
without but nine times out of ten it becomes work. There are DVDs in the living
room that still have the cellophane on and documentaries recorded on Sky that
have been sat there since Christmas, so I’m going to be able to free up some
time for those things too.
My biggest pressure and I’m
aware that nurses and the fire brigade probably have much tougher days at work,
is The Sound of Nottingham UK. As much as I
love doing it, it is something that I seem to leave until the very last minute.
My list has ‘start sorting music for USA’ every day now, so I can record it on
Thursdays instead of Fridays and I will have to keep The Sunday
Alternative as a fortnightly show at the moment as I don’t want the
pressure of a weekly show to creep up on me.
Talking of which, listening
figures for The Sunday Alternative are continuing to
rise, for which I am very grateful. It was a good move putting the podcast
player on the blog page as I can keep an accurate account of the figures. On
Trent Sound we weren’t given the listening figures and they weren’t that easy
to gauge. The figures for Trent Sound were based on computers being tuned in to
the website; this didn’t tell you how many people were sitting around that
computer so it could have been one or twenty people. As more and more people
started using different smart phone applications it became harder to monitor,
so now I know exactly how many listeners it gets through visits. Of course it
might be listened to by more than one person at a time, and it might even be
emailed around privately so even the blog statistics aren’t 100%.
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