You’ve been working your ass off for what seems like weeks and weeks on end. You can’t remember your last day off. It’s been non-stop since you can’t remember when. And now, you finally have a few days off!
What to do, what to do…?
If you’re a photo assistant, there will come days, inevitably, when you’re not working on set. Yee-haw… you have a day or two off! Maybe you’re booked three or four days next week and you just want some time to chill, hang-out, and relax… great. But what if there’s no other work scheduled after next week? Awww… no worries, someone will call. But wait, what if they don’t?
The ebb-and-flow of the photo biz is unpredictable, at best. There’s times when the work is flowing in, and other times when you wonder if you forgot to pay your cell phone bill. So… yes, here it comes… don’t put off til tomorrow what you can do today!
So you have a couple days off. What Should I do? You want to enjoy some time off to decompress, yet, you know you should probably take care of some business stuff while you have some time that you can focus on it. Where do I start?
The trick here is to prioritize, based on your goals. If you’re new to assisting, you probably want to focus on gaining knowledge on-set. You should probably be reading some books like The Photographer’s Assistant, by John Kieffer or The Photographer’s Assistant Handbook, by Matt Proulx. Or finding some blogs and websites that can help educate yourself to be more comfortable on set.
If you’ve been assisting for awhile, you might need to do some shooting for your portfolio. Then you need to send off some invoices and work on your website. Maybe you’ve been putting off the design and layout for a new email campaign.
And no matter what your experience, you should always be looking for ways to network and market yourself, whether as an assistant or photographer, so that work will continue to roll in and there will be less down time. And this is the trick… always keep marketing, whether you think you’re busy or not. Once you are used to it, you can easily pick away at those daily marketing tasks, sending out a few emails and mailers here and there, and always have more work to choose from.
I set small, achievable goals. One thing I do consistently, is add at least three new photographers, or other contacts, to my database each day. I can easily get online and search for any photographer in a particular city, research their website and work for a few minutes, and add their contact info to my address program. That way, I have an always growing email list to send my emails and newsletters out when I’m ready.
The bottom line is to always be searching for ways to progress your business in small, daily chunks. Determine your short term and long term goals, and break them down into daily item actions you can do every time you ask yourself… What to do, what to do?
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