The business side of a successful photography career has both an inner and an outer game. In my consulting practice, I most often work with clients on their outer game business skills (marketing, sales, etc.). But I sometimes find that a client’s inner game isn’t getting the attention it deserves. I’ve noticed over the years that the most successful shooters I know make sure they pay as much attention to their inner game as their outer game.
What are “inner game” skills? Creativity. Focus. Attitude.
Here are three apps I like that support each area.
1. Creativity. The often-mentioned and much-raved-about app, Evernote is a great creativity support. It’s a digital field guide that can record your portfolio shoot ideas while on the fly. Quickly and easily make text or audio notes, shoot an iPhone reference photo, create a Notebook of your ideas, tag your notes, and even share a note or notebook with your creative team.
2. Focus. Being able to keep on task without yielding to distractions is one of today’s biggest challenges–for everyone! Setting the timer on your smart phone for 20 minutes or using a dedicated timer app yields amazing results. Three totally focused 20-minute sessions followed by a 5 min. break will usually yield way more results than a 60 min. multi-tasking session. You can read more about this work style which was made popular by the Pomodoro Technique time management method. There’s a PomTimer timer app in the iTunes store that’s good. I just use my native iPhone timer.
3. Attitude. When photo business news arrives that could dampen your spirits (e.g., Getty releasing 45 million stock images for free usage comes to mind…) nothing beats a gratitude journal to keep you in the a good mental frame of mind. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, fear and anger aren’t the best attitudes for supporting your muse. The app Gratitude Journal by Happy Tapper is one I’ve been using. I love their daily inspirational quotes. E.g, this was yesterday’s quote= “Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed.”