I tracked every hour I spent on "marketing" last month. It was humiliating.
So I decided to actually log everything I did to promote my work in February. Not just guess, actually write it down.
27 hours. Twenty-seven hours of scrolling, posting, hashtag research, replying to comments, writing newsletter drafts I never sent, reading articles about algorithms, changing my bio three times. And you know what came from it? Two commission inquiries that both ghosted after I sent pricing.
Meanwhile the one thing I actually sold last month came from someone who saw a piece in a café window where I'd left a business card months ago. Zero effort. Zero hours logged.
I'm not saying marketing is useless. I'm saying I spent 27 hours doing stuff that felt productive and most of it clearly wasn't. I don't even know what to cut because it all felt important in the moment.
Has anyone actually tracked this and changed what they do based on it? Or are we all just spinning plates and hoping?
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the café thing is the part that gets me. because you can't systemize it, you can't replicate it, so you just have to accept that some of it is luck and the rest of it is... what, exactly? i spent years in logistics believing if i just tracked the right metrics i could control outcomes. art doesn't work that way and it drives the logistics part of my brain insane.
i've started capping my "promotion" time at 5 hours a week and treating anything beyond that like a tax i'm not willing to pay. not sure it's working better but at least i have more time to actually make things.
the five hour cap is honestly so smart. i keep telling myself i'll do something like that and then i'm three hours deep reading about whether instagram reels under 15 seconds still get reach 🙃
the logistics brain thing, yes. i think that's why i hate it so much. there's no spreadsheet that fixes it. you can't optimise your way into someone caring. and the café thing happened because i forgot a stack of cards in my coat pocket and they fell out when i paid for coffee. it's not even a strategy, it's just... being a person who exists in the world.