Stitchery Stories Wk3

Stitchery Stories Wk3 Easy Project Plan

So here we are week 3 of documenting my progress with creating & launching my textile art & embroidery inspired podcast called Stitchery Stories.

It’s school half term holiday this week too – so I am busy juggling between keeping my 12 year old entertained and busy, AND still trying to move my work & projects forward.

I find the BEST way for me to keep my projects moving forward is by following the processes suggested by the really great book “The 12 Week Year” by Brian Moran & Michael Lennington. And to organise, follow & monitor what I am doing, I use Trello. What is Trello? “Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.”

For more info on how I use these 2 ‘tools’ check out the link at the end of this post.

My Project Plan

I have set up a Trello board for Stitchery Stories. It was quite an easy task actually because I copied my ‘Podcast Launch Planning Kit’ Trello board which has all the steps & tasks on it already that I needed to think about and do to get my podcast launched strongly and continue growing. So all I had to do was put some dates against each of the cards and lists and Voila! my plan was done.
You can get your FREE copy of Podcast Launch Planning Kit here https://podcastprogress.com/podcast-planning-kit/

I have also set my launch date.… gulp … for week commencing 9th January 2017. There I’ve said it – it’s now on the internet so it must be true!
The other thing that I did was to work backwards from that date in each week of my good old-fashioned paper week to a view diary, writing ‘1 week left’, ‘2 weeks left’ etc. Taking the 3 weeks school holidays out from the time available as well, gives me 8 working weeks from Monday 31st October. How time flies… those 8 weeks will soon pass.

My Guests & Being Organised

One of the major things I have been able to make a start on this week has been starting to identify potential guests, and making contact with them. The response so far has been fantastic. Doing this has also raised several FAQ’s already so I have created an FAQ document for now that I can send or copy & paste when chatting with potential guests.

I love being organised, but creating something like this is very important for a podcast host. It supports your guests so that you make the process enjoyable and stress free for them, and prepared guests make your job as host easier, and your podcast better. You probably don’t know that my professional career started as a mainframe computer programmer at the Nissan car plant in the North East of England. My love of standard processes, standard documents, and plans, comes from those early days. It makes everything so much easier to cope with. I hate chaos and confusion. It “does my head in!”

Things to think about when having guests on your show:

• structure of show – objectives and ‘tone’ of the show
• structure of show – standard questions you will hang the conversation around
• logistics – recording dates & times
• logistics – does the guest have headset or microphone for example?
• logistics – what will happen on recording day
• logistics – how the guest will join the conversation & be recorded – tips to help them achieve their best audio quality
• logistics – having a show production calendar with recording dates and ‘go live’ dates, and production milestones in between.

This information will be added to my Stitchery Stories website when that gets built. That work starts next week, and I hope to get my initial guest line up sorted out and interviews scheduled next week too. The beauty of having a plan!

So those were the main things of note this week, in amongst doing some half term activities with my son.

Oh yes! Here is the link where you can get FREE information about using The 12 Week Year and Trello to make sure you achieve the important projects and things in your life.
https://podcastprogress.com/trelloexamples/

See you next week.