Stop taking pictures – OK – I assume that that headline grabbed your attention – and that was what it was designed for. (I have to say that I’m only half-joking about this – I’ll explain…) Recently I realized that – that for me as a photographer – one of the most effective and valuable things I could do with my time is NOT taking pictures! I have to admit it was a bit of a shock when the reality of this started to sink in but now it makes absolute sense to me.
What, you might say – You’re a photographer. What’s going on here?
I’ll explain… Since you only have a limited amount of time each day you need to prioritise and figure out what actions brings you the “biggest bang for your buck” or the highest lifetime value (you can use the term ROI [Return On Investment] as well).
In our every day we are juggling a lot of roles and I dare to say that most of us are running around “putting out fires” as they flame up instead of working on the really important stuff. The really important stuff are the things that will bring us a lot of value for a limited effort. I’m sure you’ve heard about the 80/20 rule (the Pareto Principle) – this is it!
Photographers – Stop taking pictures #photography #GettingThingsDone
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Surprisingly taking pictures does NOT bring me the highest life-time value. Building processes and workflows for my photography brings me the highest lifetime value because once they are in place they run on auto-pilot, automatically. You spend some time on it but after that the process will just run and run and run… See what i mean? Taking pictures gives you some money – but you have to repeat it – over and over again…
And here is the beauty of the whole thing – When you start putting processes and effective workflows in place for your photography you will increase the ROI on your work because the new processes will add value to what you do – automatically!
IMAGE SOURCE:
Feature image & image 1: courtesy of Per Zennstrom
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