How many voices do you have?

If you have begun your new channel, the whole world can get to your voice. Here’s someone who demonstrates a voice can get to the whole world, in english that is. I never knew where Kate Hepburn’s accent came from, until the last accent in this video. Transcontinental! Where do we sign up to speak with that kind of clarity.

Ding! Killing Tasks with an Egg-Timer Hat.

Here’s my addition to getting things done. Tedious, odious, omnivorous tasks which require extra gobs of stick-to-it-ive-ness. If you are facing a day of digital drudgery (organizing files before a back-up, proofing long copy, tax receipt entry, etc.) try my “egg timer hat” solution.

What you’ll need…

Materials: Duct tape, a sixty second egg timer, and a cap of some sort.

A Prediction

Some kind of reward/treat/incentive

What to do…

Duct tape the timer to the top of your hat. Ideally you shouldn’t be able to see the timer at all. Ball caps work best. They are sturdy and have a blinder above your eyes in the form of the bill. You may want to curl the outer edges of the bill to the side, thus creating side blinder-like visual barriers. This helps focus.

See below

Then, take a good look at your task. Whether it is vacuuming, email sorting, roto-rootering, or tedious SEOing you need to make a time-based prediction as to how long this task will take. It can not be over an hour. I rarely do anything over 55 minutes. Make the best estimate. Stretch your will. Guess the fastest possible time you can imaging getting this task accomplished. Hint: Have some fun with the predictions; guess 47 minutes instead of 50 or 33 instead of 30. Really challenge your precision. No peeking at mirrors, you’ll spoil the fun.

(if the task is way over an hour, break it up into small pieces)

Finally, dangle a carrot. What small reward will you give yourself? What fishy-flavor does the seal get today? What kibble does Fido fight for most? I know this is dangerous, but have some fun. Use food, spa pedicures, an hour of favored TV programming, a bath, a round of TIger Woods Golf on the Wii. Whatever. But it too, cannot take more than an hour.

Don the hat, wind the timer, and GO!

Let the tick-tick-ticking of the timer, and the suspense of not knowing if you are going to finish your task before the buzzer goes off, drive you through to your external reward

When external entities, i.e. girlfriends, boyfriends, spouse, UPS delivery person, mother-in-law, etc. appear, they are to be treated as non-existent. You are in the egg-hat zone. You are invisible. You are on another plane of reality. Looking up, or acknowledging another non-related task/person, is the equivalent to Christipher Reeves looking at the 1979 penny in Somewhere In Time. All chances of completion will spin down the swirling vortex of doom.

Try it. But don’t do it any more than four times per day. Diminishing returns set in.

My Decent into and out of Reality Television – Part 6

Television, and Hollywood for that matter, is run by accountants and lawyers. Oh some of them go by other names…agents, business managers, etc., but when all is said and done, big entertainment works like the contract you sign when you rent a car. You see the shiny red mustang convertible at Hertz. You plunk down your credit card. They ask you to sign the contract. You sign, eyes on the road ahead, mind on the hair blowing and the sun shining. You throw the contract in the glove compartment. Next time you think of that little piece of paper, if nothing of note happens while you drive, is when you turn the car back in.

But!

If something does happen, like spilling ink on the seat, or cracking the window, or wrecking the transmission, or a slight fender bender. THEN! You’ve entered a new realm.

Pull out that contract NOW! First thing you notice is the quint-fold-out form. (yes five panels unfold from what looked like a simple flyer) This petite paper is actually a 20 page contract were it on regular legal paper. This simple car rental envelope, turns out to be an origamied contractual masterwork, distilled by 90 years of legal and actuarial minds from the best universities in the world. The entire case history of every car incident is assumed, right there in your finger tips. Incomprehensible legalese flows off the page like a heaving, beating, throbbing thesaurus with teeth. The smallness of the print, 3 point at most, strikes you as being too small for hope.

You get a sinking feeling which turns into a panicked urge to yelp, “someone should have explained this to me”! But you quell the yelp. You realize the utter impracticality of having had a lawyer come down to Hertz to apprise you of all possible scenarios the contract subsumes. You realize who is your daddy. Lawyers and accountants. You are simply inventory.

Hence the comparison to TV. Only instead of wrecked cars triggering legal action, in television it is “green-lit” shows. Every contract is written as if a show goes on to become American Idol. This makes sense. But you in fact do have to have an attorney come down and look at the Hertz contract the television channel unfolds. They want to drive your show. They want to OWN your show. They want the right to claim it is their show! And if they want, they’d like to warehouse your show. It costs ten thousand dollars to have a lawyer spell this out.

My partner and I have two green-lit shows. My partner, it turns out, doesn’t have 10k. This hertz.

He might be sleeping in the convertible mustang…

If NBC showed up to Broadcast your Little League Game…

Improv Everywhere just posted a dream “channel”. Your kid’s little league game.

My Descent Into and Out of Reality Television – Part 5

More on the creator of Room Raiders.

We’ll call him Mr. T. T was sent to the US by his British production company to establish a beach-head in reality television. He turned one sheet of paper into about 10 million dollars with Room Raiders.

He pitched RR to MTV. They loved it and developed it over a year. Three versions of a pilot. We went to the launch party. MTV loved it, the audience loved it, Graden loved it, all was well. They ended up making over 100 episodes.

Mr. T. was and is a class act. He was the best memory of my TV years. Some time before the RR launch, my partner found out about him, called up, set an appointment, and boom! there we were, in Mr. T’s office. We pitched him our bag of shows. He loved a few, enough to have us back to explore ideas numerous times. We would have great meetings where we brainstormed the most outrageous shows. He whittled his wit in London on Monty Python, Beyond the Fringe, Faulty Towers, and the other Brit TV as a kid. He is, I’m guessing about 57. Mind of a 23 year old. Quite an incongruous experience seeing his proper demeanor and hearing his out-of-this-world show ideas. (Mr. T has recently left Granada after successfully launching about half-dozen shows.)

It was quite a head-trip to know, if any one of our show ideas took root in our minds, we could nurture it into an actual television program. Thinking up reality television is quite silly, almost like an adult party game. No script. Just an idea that has to be able to hold water past one episode. If anyone with a great concept can get in front of a production company, boom! Oil! Ask Mark Burnett of Survivor fame. He was a nanny when he thought up Survivor.

I really enjoyed conceptualizing the future of television. Nevermind that I never watch reality TV. Not much TV at all really. But I love the interplay of ideas and the creative process. From this perspective, riffing with Mr. T. was nitrous oxide.

After many meetings, we would go on to develop a new show with Mr. T. taking the lead as we pitched it everywhere. Our new show was kind of an animated “celebrity blender”. A comical riff on pop-culture. What would happen if an episode of “24″ was about Jack Bauer saving the world from Britney on the loose. What if Paris, Britney, and Lindsey did High School Musical 3 from a rehab facility, etc. You get the idea. After two pitches it was picked up by VH1. We now had two shows at Vh1. The Iron Chef Fashion thing, and now the celebrity blender thing. Now all that had to happen was to get it past legal. Get the legal ducks in order and we’d have two development deals. Not bad for two guys with overactive imaginations.

Legal…Don’t get me started. At least not today…