Here’s the thing about a job that meany people overlook: everything ultimately needs to lead back to some kind of measurable, fungible value. Ah capitalism, you nasty freak.
I managed a team of web developers for half a decade and as manager I had a lot of tasks—but not the least of these (and in fact arguably one of the most consistent and time consuming of these) was tracking metrics.
I had to put numbers to productivity. I had to match quantifiable costs against measured returns, make graphs of employee time spent per tasks, public page interactions, project cost recovery models, marketing investment return projections. Everything had to to be tracked, measured, plotted, and understood.
Now that I’ve been create something of my own, for the sake of art, it has been too easy to fall into this same trap: measuring word counts, tracking web stats and search engine placements, allocating resources to audience building and working to balance effort with return based on numbers, even if some of those numbers are only tracked in my head.
When your profession and passion collide, what is there to do?
How do you stand arms length from the quantifiable measures of your art, words, and music as demanded by the professional side of the craft—often inseparable and important—and yet still find the mental space to think of it as a qualitative act measured in vibes and feels and beauty?