← A VO's Journey: Voiceover and more voice over
A VO's Journey: Voiceover and more voice over
Ep. 239: How To Organize Your Day As A Voice Over Artist
00:20:44
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Anthony Pica
Hello and welcome to Avio's Journey podcast. My name is Anthony Pica. This show is all about helping the new and upcoming voiceover artists grow their business and sidestep all the crazy things that I seem to step on. It is Monday, May 9th. Wonderful to be talking to you. This is episode number 239. We're getting close to 250, and today we're going to be talking about. And since it's Monday, I think it's a really good day to talk about key strategic indicators. All right. Or for people more like me, who likes it simpler, a good schedule to work off of to ensure our success. All right, how do we put together a really good, successful schedule to get things done? All right, we're going to talk about that today. Let's do it. This is vo's Journey with your host, the incomparable Anthony Pica. All right, so it's good to have you guys back, and it's nice to be doing another podcast. Thank you guys so much for, again, your amazing continued support. It is amazing. I went back yesterday, and on a side note, if many of you have ever wondered, if you have listened to me on itunes, you'll notice that after, I think it's like episode 17, 16 or 17, it jumps to episode 44. And basically people would contact me and I'd be like, I have no idea why it's doing that. Well, I finally went back in. You think I could have. I could have done it sooner, but I finally went in yesterday to find out what was going on. And apparently when you create podcasts, right, you have the option just like on YouTube or anywhere else, to click whether your content is explicit or not. Right. I guess, you know, has content that, like, has cursing or maybe is adult. You know what I mean? Something like that. And for some reason, and I don't know, maybe it was when I transferred over, because if you. If you just started, you'll. You'll. These episodes, they're all live now. So if you have not now, if you followed the podcast through the website or through the actual, like, buzzsprout, which is where I use to stream the podcast, you. You've probably listened to them. But episodes like 17 through 44, that's a big meat. That's like the meat of. Or a big chunk of my voiceover journey before I went full time. And there's a lot of information in there, and you'll hear some things that you might not have known. Like, for example, we started out on SoundCloud. That was where I started this, it was free. But then as we started to grow we, you know, I went to the paid version which SoundCloud is not bad. SoundCloud is not bad at all. Many of us use SoundCloud to, you know, host our demos and stuff. But I found that, and one thing I loved about SoundCloud was that you could get feedback like people could like directly there. They could leave comments on your, on your episodes. And that was really nice. But as we grew more, I found that there was a lot less options to do things with, whereas. So I searched around and that's where I eventually came to Buzzsprout. But anyways, all that episodes are on there. I just thought that's interesting. If you're interested in checking that out, it definitely shows some more insight to the journey and how things were while I was still working a full time job. So anywho, I just wanted to give you that take. And real quick as always, make sure you check out Aveo's Journey Elite Academy. We've got that 50% off the first month special right now. Love to have you guys. Tonight we have Susan, who's teaching her acting class. So there'll be a link below to check that out and we'd love to have you. We'd love to have you. It's really been a wonderful opportunity for us to help a lot of voice actors. And if you're looking to start and grow your voiceover business, it is the place to be with tutorials. We have six classes a week and everything from, you know, we have a couple of voice acting classes, marketing classes, tech classes, we've got processing and we've also got audiobook classes. It's really wonderful. You'll love it. Check out the link below. All right, so any hoosers? Let's dive into this scheduling. One of the things I remember doing when I first started was just audiobooks. That's all I did. I just put up my booth, auditioned on acx. Did audiobooks from ACX take down my booth? That's what I did every day, every night rather, you know, from 10am to 2.3p or from 10pm to 2 3am in the morning like every, every day for like a year and a half. Then as the business, my business started to grow and there was multiple things that I really wanted to accomplish, I needed to accomplish. I had to set up some sort of daily schedule, something that would help me weed out the things that were unnecessary for me to do and the things that were really necessary for me to do. And I want to talk to you guys about that today because it is so easy. I literally, even still today, I can still easily get sidetracked and, you know, just down a rabbit hole, I like to call them, of places where I'm gonna get just swept away and thinking of something or trying to accomplish something that really has little to do with actually getting any work or getting the net, you know, getting my next booking. Right? Like, that can be whether I'm looking up how to make an image look better or how to, you know, make a video, because I want to do video demos and things like this. And the thing. The crazy thing is none of these things that we get down a rabbit hole are bad things. They'd be great things if we could snap our fingers and get them done. But the problem we run into is that, you know, it becomes an entirely new craft that we have to learn, and it takes away from all the things that we really need to be doing, no matter what. So what I did was, is I created. Well, as always, I like to read. And, you know, I was reading books and organization and things, and, you know, I came across the. This book. And the. The book was about the four processes of getting, you know, getting stuff done, basically is a nice way of saying it. And it's talks about these things called key strategic indicators. Right? And there's. These key strategic indicators are things that we identify that we absolutely have to do. Okay, we absolutely have to do to be successful in our business. Then there's things that we don't have to do. Okay, well, things that might be necessary evils that we have to do, but they're not things that we have to do every single day and that we need to really focus on. Of course, the book is way better explaining this, but I'm just simplifying it, that we really need to focus on those few things that really are going to help our business move forward the fastest. Right? So if you strip away everything that we do as business owners and voice actors, the biggest job we have, all right, is getting business. Now, I want to point out, right, that working on our craft and becoming better voice actors, that is a necessity. That is always something that's a part of our daily work. Okay. However, I. You know, when we talk about philosophies, I've been my whole life, I was this guy who wanted to accomplish. I wanted to go to the moon and back, But I always was not cautious per se, but I always wanted to study real hard, figure it all out, make this incredible plan, make it flawless that I would never have to make another plan again. Everything was going to be perfect, and it had to be perfect. And what ended up happening was I never started. I never got anything going. And by the time I got to that point where I finally was about to get something going, I had, you know, just complete analysis paralysis, right? It was just. It was. It was utter paralysis. And I would never really accomplish anything. So I. When I started this business, and this was just a completely a personal thing for me, I was like. And I had done that, you know, Remember? I. I had many businesses. I. Well, you know, I had a. Many businesses before this, you know, side hustles that I tried. You know what I mean? I had a cafe at one point. I tried a lot of other online businesses, but none of them had anything to do with my passion, right, or what I went to school for, which was, you know, acting. But I was trying to, you know, and I've talked about this in previous episodes, I was trying to fill some void, right, that I had. But anyways, so the point was, is I decided, I made a pact with myself that instead of me analyzing every single little move I did, that I was just gonna, like, be a bull in a china shop. Which is funny, because if you remember when you were young, I mean, that was the absolute opposite, right? Don't be a bull in a china shop. I was just gonna go for it. I was gonna go for everything I could go for, whether I knew what I was doing, whether I was the right person for it, whether I even had a clue what it would lead to. I was gonna go for it. You know what I mean? And then I realized, well, the most important thing then, if I decided that I was gonna go for it, was to figure out what were the main things that I needed to go for on a daily basis that would ensure some success. And the things that I realized were paramount, right? Were auditioning, were getting up, you know, more gigs and offers, being on different platforms, putting posts on social media, you know, like, I know for a fact, for me, right? Like, things that are really important. I mean, I want to make sure that I do some things every single day, every single week, no matter what, to make sure that my business is successful, right? I've got to put more content out there when it comes to voiceover stuff. I need me and my business. I need to put up. Put out podcasts, I need to put out videos. I want to help people, I want to give out information, and in turn, I meet new people who need help. Too right? We have to do things. For my voiceover business, I am constantly putting out work. I'm constantly putting up all the samples and the stuff that I do, right? Putting up new, new samples. Whether it's on Voices, whether It's on voice 1, 2, 3, whether I'm doing auditions on the Voice Realm, whether I'm putting up a new gig or trying new stuff on Fiverr or Upwork, I'm always doing something on a daily basis to get work or get myself out in front of other people who could possibly need to get work from me, right? Or, you know what? I'm. I mean, to get jobs or to book me, right? I mean, that's. That is what I am trying to accomplish on a daily basis. So when we go to set up your schedule, you have to take in consideration, are you focusing on those things on a daily basis or do you look at your schedule and you've got this beautiful schedule set up and then at the end of the day or the end of the week, you realize, well, crap, I didn't get anything done. So I'm going to give you a little tip. This is something that I used early on that will help you. I mean, it'll blow your mind. So what I want you to do is over the next two weeks, I want you to keep a simple time journal of the moments of work you were doing when you're working on your voiceover business. So basically, what I mean is every time you start and stop something, I want you to document the exact time. Not don't round up, don't round. You know, don't, don't. If you start working at 10:38pm right? And then you are, you know, you start working at 10:38pm watching one of my YouTube videos, right? And then you, you end at 10, you know, 46pm that's great. Put that down. Then at 10:47pm you know, you go on, you know, you're starting work on Fiverr to do a couple of voiceovers. You finish the voiceovers at 11, 11, you know, 53pm and then, you know, 12, 11:54pm you start doing some buyer requests. You see what I'm saying? I want you to actually write down what you are doing. And after two weeks, the reason why two weeks is because we want to get a nice little flow here. You are going to see, I've done this with all of my mentor students. It works incredibly and it worked incredibly with me. When I did it to my. When I was watching myself, I realized that I was spending so much time doing things that weren't necessarily helping my voiceover business actually move forward. Like if I spent. Like if you spend eight hours a day working on your business, right? But only two of those hours were actually hours that you spent physically trying to get work, meaning physically doing auditions, physically putting out more content and samples, reaching out to people. And the other six hours you spent trying to teach yourself new skills. Now, remember, don't get me wrong, teaching yourself new skills is important, and you should build that into your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly business plans. However, those should not, at least in my opinion, in my humble opinion, those should not overtake your job to get work. Right? Like, it should not be that you're spending like 70, 80% of your time trying to figure out how to find stock footage for, you know, a video demo that you want to make. But you realize I don't know anything about mixing video or, like, footage and everything. And I've got to learn. I've got to teach myself. There's a tutorial. I found a class. You see where I'm going with this? I don't know if you've been down this road, but it can take many forms, okay? So it's really key that you focus, that you do this, this little exercise and then take a look and add up and stuff, say, holy crap. I actually only really spend a small smidgen of time trying to get work. And look, it can be anything. It could be, how often are you contacting agents, right? How often are you sending out, you know, emails? How often are you making phone calls? How often are you checking, you know, Craigslist? Wherever you're doing it needs to be set in your schedule that you are going to use the majority of your time to get work, Period. And if you do that, if you schedule that and stick to that schedule, you're going to see a drastic change in your business. Most of us, we lose our time trying to do things that are semi necessary, but we're forgetting that the majority of what we should be using with our time is trying to get work. And I mentioned the bull in the china shop thing earlier because for me, you know, you could say, well, Anthony, I need to train. I need to train for a couple of years as an actor in order to really be good in my craft. And I'm gonna say no, you need to train for the rest of your life. Like, you know, when I was teaching stage actors, you know, listen, we people, we train for our entire lives. The training never stops, right? Practice never Stops finding new teachers, never stops. So that's a part of it. But in order for you to be able to even pay to learn, you've got to get work. This is the catch 22 that so many people don't want to talk about. They want to talk about how you should learn voiceover and how you should pay for coaches and you should. But people don't want to talk about, well, how are you going to make money in order to pay for that? Those aren't free. And I think that for me, like I said, I made the decision myself that in order to accomplish this, I was going to barrel forward and do the best that I could and learn along the way. And then as I earned, I would be able to pay for more help and coaches and better equipment. That's the path I took. Not everybody takes that path. And that's okay. But using this schedule, this idea, you'll learn a lot too, by your own failures. You'll learn a lot too, by your own mistakes. But I always love that saying, luck. L U C K. Luck stands for laboring under correct knowledge. I love that saying and I really think it's true. You say you're lucky, but the reality is you've been working under the correct knowledge that you should be working under, and all of a sudden you're lucky. Right? So listen, I really want you. I was going to say, I hope today's podcast really helped you. Think about your scheduling, keeping track of your time. What can you do to better affect your outcomes with your actions? Okay. So, so important. And remember, do the right things and the right things will hap. Come back to you. Get caught up in a bunch of stuff that is not actually going to yield you any benefits. And the short term benefits, you could even divide it into what are short term things I have to do to be successful and what are long term things I have to do to be successful. Okay? And it's always the chicken and the egg. Well, which one comes first? Do I have to be this amazing voice actor or do I have to be really good at getting business? Okay. And you know, the reality is, is that you have to be both. You're gonna be you. You need to be amazing at voice acting and amazing at business. But when you're first starting out, you're not amazing at voice acting and you're not amazing in business. That doesn't mean you quit and give up. That means you start your journey. All right. And start fumbling forward. That's what I like to do. All right. And hopefully it's something that you can think about to integrate into your journey. All right, you guys, I gotta go. Thank you so much for listening to today's podcast. I appreciate it. Make sure again, you check out the link for the academy and try out that two week scheduling that I was talking about, the two week recording your time that you spend and what you spend. And remember, the key to that one, though, is be very particular about the time you're actually spending. Like, make sure you write down. If it's 1106, write down 1106. If it's, you know, 3:18, write down 3:18. Don't write down like 3:15 or, you know, don't write down 3:30. Right. You know, don't round up or round down. Make sure it's actually accurate. All right, gang, you have a wonderful, wonderful rest of your week. I'll be back later. All right, See you later. Peace.