Congratulations, you made it, welcome to 2012! It’s now January, the first month of the year and time to set the tone for the rest of it, by planning and preparing your band for a totalworld take over in 2012.
- Your first step is to figure out what taking over the world means for you and your band, what exactly is it that you want to achieve? Do you want to release an album? Get signed? Tour Europe? Start a street team? Play a show on the moon? All of the above? Brainstorm this with your band, or alone if you prefer and write down anything that pops into your heads, even if it seems grandiose, crazy or just plain silly, in this very first step there are no wrong answers, no bad ideas, just write them all down, you will sort through them later.
- If you are having trouble generating ideas, you might want to conduct a 2011 year in review to see what you did last year that worked and didn’t work, sometimes we have no idea what we have achieved or what in our heart of hearts we might really want to achieve until we look back on it and catalogue it.
- Once you have a list of potential items on your world take over list, the trick is to go through and choose the items that are the most important for you to achieve, and to achieve now. You can prioritise them numerically if you choose, you don’t want to overestimate how many things you can achieve but you don’t want to underestimate yourself either. A good idea is if you have a list of things you achieved the previous year in your year in review, then choose one or two more items to aim for than last year.
- Next you want to workshop your items on paper with the band (or with your own fabulous brain if you’re going solo). You don’t have to get too deep on it, just something as simple as writing down ‘release a CD’ and the steps necessary to get this done – you want to break each item down into smaller actionable pieces. So you’d write something like ‘write four new songs, record album at friend’s studio, get custom cds made, have a release party’ and then add in a timeline for when you want it completed by, so if you want to release your album before Christmas then you might write November as your targeted date for delivery next to this item.
- The final step once you’ve broken down your items into smaller tasks with timelines is to grab a 2012 calendar, print one out from your computer or use one on your computer to add these tasks starting with the end dates into each month. So for our CD example, you’d put CD officially available on a date in early November and work backwards from there putting in when you intend to have a cd release party through to when you would need to start recording etc. Fill that calendar up with all your tasks, and then you have a blueprint ready to help you and your band take over 2012. Keep it somewhere handy, review it often and actually put your plan into action and the world will be yours.
