Ideas to Action

More and more I find myself discussing with friends online ways in which we can interact and structure our time around supporting each other’s creative and business endeavors. 

When I am not under undue stress from work and life responsibilities, my mind is a fount of ideas. The challenge I face is how to bring those ideas to fruition, how to lay out a plan and organize the work. I am constantly saying, one day I’m going to make a film, write a novel, build an installation project. The ideas are there, but the structure and accountability is not. 

Several methods we’ve identified recently that I think will motivate and give the proper push from idea to action include:

1. Establishing a weekly meeting time to work on individual business activities with a like-minded friend. 
2. Scheduling a weekly virtual writing group to alternatively write at the same time for 1-2 hours, checking in on FB/Gmail/Skype, or to vet our work with the group when we’re ready for critique. 
3. Starting an Action Cafe like the one Claire Mulvaney describes. I love the notion of a semi-formal but mostly informal space for sharing ideas and challenges, and soliciting potential solutions from a group of relaxed creative thinkers. This approach can involve some gentle structure, such as brainstorming on giant paper with bright markers, giving the beneficiary something concrete to take home and work from. Unfortunately, it looks unlikely that I’ll be able to join the Action Cafes taking place in Ireland any time soon, but perhaps I will work to evolve one in my neighborhood!

What ideas do you have to evolve from ideas to action? 

“Click to Tweet it!!” Um. No.

I’ve asked these linked questions a number of times: how do you manage your social media? how do you use it to your advantage and prevent it from getting in the way of doing what you do?

Lately, as I’ve been populating my Etsy shop and cross-posting on Flickr, I have found that many people think the key to sales is clicking. This activity is couched as adding other Etsyians to your “Circle,” “favoriting” shops or items, and participating in Teams. Some Teams are active, but others have hundreds of members and no responses to threads in the forums. It’s easy to click the day away and think you are participating in groups or teams or pools, but does it lead to anything?

I’ve also been reading some blog entries about starting a business from the perspective of offering yourself and your personal genius to the world – yes, sort of self-helpy, but hey. So I want to take them seriously and internalize the messages and attempt to use them to my advantage.

But it isn’t easy to do this when a sentence that could have been full of meaning is followed immediately by a hyperlink to “Click to Tweet it!!” Um. No. I’m not here to click and Tweet. I do Tweet, and I enjoy it, and I think Twitter is a good networking tool along with other platforms, but to simply consume and spit out again is not furthering my business. In fact, that approach, to me, is the antithesis of what the new business builders and coaches of today claim they are promoting.

At this stage, I’m in it for me, and I know there is a certain level of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” that goes along with this type of endeavor. I suppose I’m resisting just being someone else’s pawn, though. I’m not feeling my back being scratched so much.

So once again - how do you manage your social media? how do you use it to your advantage, and prevent it from getting in the way of doing what you do?