Sundancing

For people in the film industry, people who know people in the film industry, and people outside of the film industry who’ll nonetheless be braving the cold and crowds of Park City:

I will be at Sundance this Saturday through Thurday, looking for:
– Excellent projects in need of production funding; Cyan can now fund up to 30% of the budget of films sized between $500k to $10m.
– Excellent finished films looking for distribution; Cyan can now throw down real P&A commitments, backed by an innovative best-practices release infrastructure tailored to indie films.
– Excellent parties with open bars.

All leads appreciated.

Also, as my points from last year still hold, allow me to repost:

“This Thursday, I head off to the Sundance Film Festival, during which I will not be blogging at all. Before each such film festival, I usually say that I’ll be covering things online, day by day. And then, I get there, post once or twice, stop posting completely, and end up guiltily summarizing the rest of the fest after the fact. So, lest it be said I never learn from my mistakes, this year, I make no such promises. If I post something during, consider it icing on the self-aggrandizement cake.

But, to set the stage for any possible though certainly not promised posts, allow me to repeat an observation I make yearly: by most counts, Sundance, Slamdance, and the other concurrent festivals bring some 80,000 people to Park City, Utah. And while that’s not far off from the numbers the Toronto or Tribeca festivals attract, dropping 80,000 bodies into New York or Toronto barely makes a dent. Whereas with 80,000 people added to a city of 7,882, like Park City, the infrastructure is completely overwhelmed, everything starts falling apart, and life more or less grinds to a functional halt.

That, along with countless other factors – certainly not the least of which being the nature of all too many of those 80,000 attendees – similarly leads me yearly to the same conclusion about Sundance: it’s everything I love about movies, and everything I hate about the movie industry.

Should be ‘fun’.”

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Exactly

“There cannot be a stressful crisis this week. My schedule is already full.”
– Henry Kissinger

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Productive

As a handful of people wrote in to protest my prior post, just wanted to clarify that I’m not done with posting about productivity, just done with doing so when Jess is making fun of me in the background.

Fortunately for you, I’m in the office today, so I can point readers towards Mark Forster’s beta test of his new “Autofocus Time Management System”.

Mark’s books, Do It Tomorrow and Get Everything Done are in my productivity ‘top three’ (along with David Allen’s Getting Things Done).

Forster, unlike Allen, acknowledges that in real life, most of us fall prone to procrastination, and that a lot of the challenge of work isn’t just making a list of what you need to accomplish but actually doing things on that list. And, also unlike Allen, Forster is willing to keep changing and improving his system over time, based on what works for him and for his clients in the real world.

His new Autofocus approach seems almost stupidly simplistic, but it’s producing great results thus far – for me, and for the thousand or so people in the beta test. But don’t take my word for it; head to his site, sign up, and try it yourself.

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Jess

just said I always write about productivity and that it’s boring. So, while I had started a different blog entry about momentum and how what I do in the first five minutes of my work-day determines what happens for the entire day, I’m scrapping that and posting this instead.

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