Increasing Productivity By Clearing Out The Fluff

For the past year or more I have been clearing out things I do not need from all aspects of my life.

I guess you would say it’s a lifestyle?

When I moved around this time last year, I knew I didn’t want to take ALL the ‘stuff’ I had with me for multiple reasons. Sold of some of it, trashed some of it, and even after we moved, continued to get rid of things I no longer needed.

What I have now is a very lean ‘stuff’ inventory, and more space in my mind and my physical location to think and get things done.

I’ve been applying this same mind set to my ventures, here’s how.

Fixing The Hijacking Music Identity Crisis

At the turn of the year, we as Hijacking Music had been going through an identity crisis.

Up to this point, we have been a collective of musicians and friends helping each other out with the resources that we have.

Between all the members of all the bands, there are some pretty serious skill sets. These skill sets could allow us to do all kinds of things.

Our intention is to monetize this ‘collective’ somehow, but without a true focus, it had been proving to be difficult.

Without knowing what we were, how could we do it better? We needed to find out and make a decision so that we could stick to it and see more growth faster.

It took us about a month and a half but we did it, ready to know how?

Find Out What Works

I am not exactly sure which book or blog or person set me up for this, but what I wanted to find out was the following:

• What have we done as Hijacking Music? List EVERYTHING.
• Of that, what were the most successful?
• What were the biggest failures?
• List any possible business ideas based on our resources.

By doing this, we were able to take a high level look at all the things we as Hijacking Music accomplished over the several years we’ve been working together. This really opened our eyes to how spread out we were.

Looking over our successes, we started to notice a pattern. This was very important.

Also, finding out what our biggest failures were let us know two things.

1. If say, one part of something failed that we found on the Success list, we knew we needed to fix that.

2. If something failed completely, we know not to do that every again.

Lastly, listing out all the business ideas we had based on the resources available to us gave us a look at what we are not.

What We Are Not

Digging this far down to find out what we are not, eventually gave us a much greater vision of what we are and what we should be focusing on.

We are not a record label, a recording studio, a music school, a venue, a booking company, graphic designers, web developers, and SO MUCH MORE.

Knowing this allows me to immediately toss out the idea of working with someone in those capacities. This does not mean I can not point them in the right direction, it just means that if Hijacking Music is approached in such a fashion, we can say no.

By saying no, we are able to say yes more to the things we are good at and do well.

What We Are

What we are is a promotion company. We find talent, put together events, and promote them in an effort to showcase the talent.

In order to continually give back and help grow our community around that, we also act as a resource for DIY musicians.

If someone comes to me and asks “Can you teach me how to play this instrument?”, I can say “NOPE!….but, I know a bunch of people who can, here’s their contact info”.

Pass it right through, and not think about it again.

How Does This Help?

We’ve stripped away all thoughts and wasted energy on the things that we are not. As more distractions come at us each and every day, we are now fully equipped with the knowledge of what we are, what we should turn down, and what we should take on.

Being able to spend that extra energy thinking about how to do what we do better, instead of how to build something additional to become all encompassing, will help us see growth faster.

The Wrap Up

I fully intend to continue ‘clearing out the fluff’ in every thing that I do in an effort to become more efficient as well as spend more time focusing on the things I enjoy and am good at.

I encourage you to take a look at things in your own life that you can start to remove, giving you a clearer picture of how to increase your success rates at whatever it is you do.

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