Hi all, I am busy getting ready to go on holiday for a week and a half down at the beach with my family, so posting may be less frequent for the next 10 days or so as I get a bit of much needed R&R.

I have been thinking over the last few days how easy it is to fall back into bad habits after you make a change, even if it is a change that you really want to make. For instance, at the start of last year I made the commitment to myself to check email only once per day, in order to limit lost time from constantly checking the inbox, and the distraction of answering mail that really, when you think about it could have waited until the evening.

Email, while a fantastic tool, is a real flow killer. What I mean by that is the constant interruptions, the sense of “this is urgent, I must answer now” that most messages have breaks your attention away from the things that you really should be getting done. I used to find myself checking it perhaps 10 times a day, which is not as bad as some people that I know, but when I look at how I want to be living my life, feeling like “I have to check email” is one of the things that I don’t want to have constantly buzzing in the back of my head.

So the year started of well, I would check my email at 9am, and then just leave it for the rest of the day. I am not going to lie to you, at the start it was a painful experience. I thought I was missing out, I thought that life was going to pass me by. The big surprise is that it didn’t. The worlds turned without me pushing send receive every 10 minutes, and I found that I had at least an hour of productive time more during the day. The one thing that I did learn is that even if you make a minor discretion, it’s not worth throwing in the whole process and going back to your old ways.

Habit Creep, where the old habit slowly starts to worm its way back into your life is always going to happen. It can happen easily. First it’s a check in the morning, then one at lunch, and one at night. And that’s fine. But then its also one at morning tea, then at 11am and so on, until before you know you are back hitting send receiver like a rabid monkey. The important thing is that when you become conscious that you have fallen back into an old pattern to not mentally punish yourself or give up. Just start again and continue.

So If I beat the email demon you ask, then why has this been on you mind for the last few days?

Glad you asked, this has been on my mind because I have become aware of a new, more insidious terror that has crept into suck time from my day. The name of this demon is RSS.
I have got into the habit of checking and rechecking RSS feeds, even when I know that they probably haven’t been updated, even when it is distracting me from more important tasks. It has been my mission over the past few weeks to work on some simple tools to beat “Habit Creep”; the following is what has worked for me.

Top 5 ways to beat “Habit Creep”

1. Write down the permanent changes that you want to make and look at the list once per week. I know that this may sound really pedantic or a bit too much trouble for some, but it really does work. An ingrained habit is your automatic response to a situation, and it will take a lot of work to change it.

2. Only make a change if it is reasonable and increases productivity, not to make a point. If checking email 10 times a day is a real necessity then continue on. Only make a change if it will make a real improvement.

3. Cold Turkey doesn’t work for everyone. A conscious decision to slow down or reduce the amount of a habit can work, if you give yourself a daily reminder. Any change is a step in the right direction, and the only person that you need to prove anything to is yourself.

4. Don’t overly chastise yourself for indiscretion. As I said above, you haven’t failed if you make a slip up and go back to old ways. Just take it as a learning experience on the path to the lifestyle that you want and continue from where you left off.

5. Remind yourself of the positives, not the negatives. On your list of permanent changes, write next to each one what the benefit is. The benefit of not continually checking RSS would be at least an hour of extra time a day, time that could be used to get more done, or to knock off from work early and spend time doing what you love

I downloaded an interesting document last week which I have been reading slowly over the past few days. It’s a book from 1988, written by the guys from the 80’s house/hip-hop group the KLF. It’s called then manual, and what it sets out to be is a manual for how to get a number one single.

They wrote it from experience, as it came out just after their big hit “Doctorin’ the Tardis” went to number one. It is a fascinating, tongue in cheek humorous look at the music business, but with a serious cynical insightful side that offers up some great truths and strategies for having a number one.

All through reading it I kept being reminded of how different things were in the late eighties, early nineties to today in the way of music production, and in general what you can do at home. There is a whole section of the book that deals with booking a studio etc that could be avoided with the right computer equipment these days, and the internet has revolutionised the last third of the book that discusses distribution and promotion.

Here are a few passages that I found memorable.

The basic Golden Rules as far as they apply to writing a debut single that can go to Number One in the U.K. Charts are as follows:

Do not attempt the impossible by trying to work the whole thing out before you go into the studio. Working in a studio has to be a fluid and
creative venture but at all times remember at the end of it you are going to have to have a 7? version that fulfils all the criteria
perfectly. Do not try and sit down and write a complete song.

Songs that have been written in such a way and reached Number One can only be done by the true song writing genius and be delivered by artists with such forceful convincing passion that the world HAS TO listen. You know the sort of thing, “Sailing” by Rod Stewart, “Without You” by Nilsson What the Golden Rules can provide you with is a framework that you can slot the component parts into.

The basic process that they outline in the book is as follows :

1. Listen to as much top 40 music as you can, and as much up coming dance music as you can

2. Hire a studio, an engineer and a programmer

3. Loan $20,000 from the bank, tell them that you are a small business owner starting a label

4. Pick some grooves (drum and bass riffs) from the albums, give them to the engineer and programmer, say you want to have something just like that

5. Manage the engineer and programmer through the creation of the track, if they are any good they will take the component parts and mash them together.

6. No matter how cheesy , gimmicky or hook laden the Frankenstein beast you create, just go with it. Push through it and go there.

7. Professionally master the finished product

That’s all I am up to at the moment. Interesting how with the advent of better digital audio workstations and software, the engineer and programmer parts are now the musician. We really do live in a golden age of music if you are into the process that goes into making it. The next stage deals with getting promotional and distribution support for your work.

I will keep you posted on what they have to say…

By the way if you have the time read the wikipedia entry on the KLF. Interesting characters, did some crazy blatant sampling which made them have to burn the whole pressing of one of their early singles. And they also dumped a dead sheep at an awards ceremony once… classy.

I am having a little bit of a change of direction for this site going forward, with more of a concentrated effort to showcase my work as a writer of fiction, non fiction and free thought. As I have said here over the past few weeks, there are enough blogs out there about people making money online, internet marketing and blogging in general. All are fine topics, and there are some pearls of wisdom to be found in the other 100000000 sites out there that talk about there subjects.
BUT, 95% of internet marketing is marketing in the pure sense. What they are marketing to you is products that allow you to market the concept of marketing to others. If that sentence doesn’t make a lot sense, the reason lies purely in the reality of the situation, and not my grammar. It is a pure caste made of air, a house of cards, the emperors’ new clothes. People telling others how to basically sell nothing. MLM pyramid schemes, get rich quick sales pages, too good too be true offers. Not for me thanks…

With latest Google page rank fiasco, I don’t really see the point of building a business who can have its profits halved, quartered or decimated completely by a giant corporation. That is not building an asset or a legacy. It’s a ticking time bomb, being fuelled by the time you put into it.

Sure if you love it, then do it. But do what you love, express the ideas that are in your head, the ideas that are yours alone because you thought of them. Create, don’t chorus with every other opinion or business plan or genre that you feel everyone wants to hear.

What I will share with you are ideas of how people can make money from their creative works, from their songs, novels, short stories, designs, graphics, games and un-categorisable projects. I will also detail my journey from unknown writer to hopefully known writer. I know that inside every blogger out there flogging some useless affiliate program (Hey that’s a new word… flogger : someone who writes purely for the commercial aspect online to sell ads) is a novel, or a screenplay, or a killer new bit of software just bursting to get out.

That is the revolYOUtion, letting that creative bit of you out, and making the systems of the internet and the commercial world work for you, not mindlessly selling your talented self after 10 cents of adsense dollars every day trying to make it rich, writing content that every other person is hashing out pursuing the same goals.

I think that I have made my point.