Flash Indie Developer Part 3: Short list of risks
The last blog post Flash Indie Developer Part 2 dealt with idealism and requirements. In this blog post we will discuss the most dangerous risks for your daily life.
A smaller or a bigger problem could be diseases. If you get sick you might not be able to work for short or longer periode. You have to pay some bills for the treatment and your income will normally decrease. You can reduce this risk with a health insurance. In Europe it is quite normal or it is even obligatory to have a health insurance. I think health insurances are the most important insurance you should have! For other important insurance please check some web-portals about "how I should start my own company" or something similiar.
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<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>OFF TOPIC</strong></span>: <em>Everytime take care if the goverment would support your <a href="http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2009/10/09/running-a-game-studio-from-start-up-to-sustainability/" target="_blank">new business</a>!!!</em> |
Furthermore, a creative trough can become also a serious problem. You as an (Flash) Independent Developer have normally a great creativity and this is one of your strong USPs compared to a normal Flash Developer employee. But what should you do if you run in a creative trough?!
- Keep cool! It is normal to have lack of creativity for a moment
- Relax! Do other things which don't have a strong connection to your work
- Try and use some creative methods (Brainstorming, Roleplaying or Six Thinking Hats)
- If you are still in a creative trough -> Keep cool!
- Find other opportunities which generates a new income, for instance: doing lectures!
- During the process of preparing a new income possibility, talk with many people.
- I am sure your creativity will come back after a while!
For me it is totally normal to have high creative periods and very low creative periods It helps me a lot to write down all my ideas in a book, and everytime I have a creative trough I can look in my book of ideas and get some new inspiration. That is the reason, why I highly recommend to manage your ideas. In this way you will be able to use perfectly your high and low creative periods.
The last and in my opinion a very often underestimated issue is the topic of inefficient working. Nobody or no person put a real pressure on you, and because of this situation we can easily appropriate inefficient working routines. Especially, for doing a research in a special topic, we can easily lost in the huge space of the web. Another point is the managing your daily life. For instance, you have to go shopping (buy some food or something else), after this you do a sleep, because shopping was so exhausting ;-). After the sleep you are little bit tired and you decided to watch a movie or a episode of nice TV-serie. Finally, after all these nice chill activities you realize, that almost nothing is done and the day is also almost gone... That is one example, the pyramide of digital distraction describes very clearly one of our other biggest risk of inefficient working. I don't say that you should not use social communities or chat systems (skype, twitter), but please define a outline for you! For instance, you spend the first hour of the morning for reading blogs and answering / writing e-mails. Then you started programming or working on complicated tasks. After that you will go to lunch. After lunch you start checking your e-mails for 30-60 minutes ones more and after that you go ahead with your complicated or less complicated tasks... Porter wrote a nice blog post about being your own boss and the problems with the motivation. Please feel free to read it!
Thanks and congratulation, who stayed until this end of the blog post. The next blog posts discuss the really interesting topics of an (Flash) Independent Developer life. Therfore, the next article will discuss our product portfolio and what is possible with each product. The blog articles after this article describes the topic "how you can use these products for generating your income" in a more detail. So stay tuned!
Very nice read, thanks for the link to my article. The issues mentioned are definitely real, and most don’t realize they exist until they’re already victims of the above. Good read, definitely informative.
Hi Porter, thanks for Feedback! nice to see, that you agree with my points!