The First 30 Days

As of today, Samurai MK has been in existence for thirty days.

I'm still laying groundwork, but at it's definitely coming together by degrees. Regardless, I haven't let that stop me from getting work done, developing a slate for the spring sell season, getting a script out to a director, and shopping a novel. I don't expect to make sales during the holidays, so I'm not fretting that part... this is the build-up time for first quarter 2010.

Some lessons learned:

If you think something will take an hour, it'll take a day.

If you think it'll take a day, it'll take two days.

If you think something will take two days, it'll require a week.

And if you think something will take a week, odds are you'll still be futzing with it a month later.

The trick, I've found, isn't to sit around and cry about how mean and inefficient the world is... it's a matter of being productive in the interim so, when you are back on track, your focus is 100% on the tasks at hand.

But the major thing I've learned is the doom of the entrepreneur: I have so much stuff to do - all of it important and time-intensive - that, even if I'm doing one thing, I'm feeling guilty about putting everything else off while the task in front of me gets handled. There's no such thing as priority... it's all priority in some way. The only way to be truly happy would be to have a gang of Jango Fett clones all doing everything at once.

Meanwhile, I'll just have to made do with what I have every day: two hands and twenty-four hours.

On the massive plus side, since I'm no longer bound by anything like official office hours, I'm actually getting a healthy amount of sleep. I'm getting to the gym almost every day, because doing so no longer requires getting up at the crack of dawn or lugging my ass over there after a twelve-hour day, still thinking about the writing I need to do.

This doesn't sound like a huge deal, but I think this attention to baseline quality-of-life will have further repercussions in my work and productivity. Being able to hit the gym at noon gives me a clarity throughout the rest of the afternoon when, before, I'd start to lag at four or five. Getting sleep means I don't have to prop myself up with caffeine in the morning (though I still do, because I like black coffee).

And, outside of technical difficulties, there's nothing getting in the way of focus on projects in which I believe. I'm only signing projects I 100% love. Every title on my slate is a high point.

Thirty days in, and I'm loving it more every morning I wake up and realize my destiny is within my power.