Efficiency
As I've said in the past, I subscribe to a lot of magazines. At the moment, I have so many magazines, I'm actually stressing out about reading them all. I wonder what kind of information is sitting there, just waiting for me to read it. Will it be out of date or irrellevent by the time I get around to picking up that magazine? Is there something that I totally need to know about that through some strange twist of fate never found its way onto the internet? I doubt it. But I still want to read them before they get too old.
While I was watching the Creativelive broadcast of Jasmine Star , something she said struck me as quite insightful and important. She was talking about how she made a decision early on in her career to outsource her photo editing. Because there's only one of her and she'd rather be taking photos than editing them, she decided it was worth it to her to spend money paying someone else to edit her photos, while at the same time she was out making more money taking more photos.
I didn't have my epiphany at that moment. I just thought, "Makes sense," and kept watching. Later that evening, though, when I was reading a magazine and came across an article about a large format printer or something like that, it struck me. I. Don't. Care. I don't care about large format printers. I don't use them, I don't plan on using them, I don't need to read an article about them. Sure, someday I might care about them. When that happens, there will be new ones on the market and I can read about them then.
Then I started flipping through the articles in the magazine and found a few more that just did not apply to me. Review of a new Canon lens? I shoot Nikon. Next! Aperture techniques? I use PCs and Lightroom. Next!
It was so liberating to not feel like I have to read something just because it's in a magazine! I was done with that magazine in record time. I don't feel like I missed anything. I don't feel guilty. I feel like I was just given 30 minutes to do something else I enjoy more than reading articles about gear that I don't care about and am not considering purchasing in the near future. Instead of reading an article out of some obligation to a magazine that cost me $10, I should instead be using a camera and lens that cost me a whole lot more than $10. Or I should be editing photos from a recent photo shoot so that I can make some money. Or I should type a blog post telling you all about my epiphany. Yeah, that sounds good.
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