Hey everyone welcome to the site!
Focusing Work is a project I’ve been thinking about most of the year. Since today is the last day of the year I figured I’d go ahead and go live.
So what on earth is Focusing Work? It is a blog where we talk about all things related to work. What does that mean? Let me start by telling you about me and why I started this project.
I work by day as a photographer and media producer. The media part of that means I do a lot of video related projects so the whole “focusing” work thing relates for my idea of doing a project that deals with the actual work side of business. I spent almost 10 years teaching college and loved every minute of it. The idea of teaching is attractive to me because it forces me to really know my subjects inside and out if I’m going to help students problem solve and master the material. I love teaching because its a great way for me to learn as well.
In short, I quit teaching this last year because the school was canceling my physical classes and scheduling me to teach everything online. Sounds right up my alley, but it was a joke. You have to use a CMS that looks like it was done in the 90’s, its behind a firewall for obvious reasons and the students, I felt, were getting a complete disservice by limiting the ways of learning online. I realized I wanted to drop my association with formalized education and become more active with my side projects such as my online photography tutorials that I do over at TheArtofPhotography.tv
I quickly found this was the right move. Its complicated running a business, but I’m okay financially (I obviously gave up the paycheck that comes with teaching) even though my expenses increased.
But what’s really been on my mind is how to market what I do on the internet. Marketing has changed so much in the last 20 years and its a topic I’m really pretty bad at. But I realized that its futile to create great content and then nobody knows its there. So last year I decided to jump in and research.
Well the online marketing world is full of more snake oil than I’ve ever seen in my life, but there are some gems and legitimate people out there. But still there is a pretty big void for honest information that actually helps people rather than try to sell to them. This is when I realized I should start this project. To learn and to share.
So here we are. I know its only one post, but its a start!