"Can the man project..?"

When Miles Davis was interviewed by Alex Haley for Playboy magazine in 1962 he was asked what qualities he looked for in a musician. Davis replied: "Can the man project? And does he have ideas?"

When you are self-employed you often find yourself thinking about how best to project. Ideas on their own aren't enough; you have to find ways of getting your ideas "out there". And - in common with a lot of other business owners - I get advice on how to do this landing in my inbox every Sunday morning from a man called Chris Brogan.

Chris Brogan has co-authored (with Julien Smith) a book called The Impact Equation, which basically tells you that you need to get four things right if you are going to "project" successfully. You have to have ideas. You have to have a platform from which to present the ideas. You have to be good at the human factors side of things (building and developing relationships with clients). And you have to set clear goals.

Here is the problem. I think that being idea-oriented and goal-oriented at the same time is very, very difficult to achieve. I think that ideas get generated when you wander off the beaten track, when you're distracted, when you're basically doing anything apart from focusing on goals.

So here is my plan. I'm a bloke. I can't multi-task. So I'm going to do goals on days that are even-numbered. And I'm going to do ideas on days that are odd-numbered.

Let's see if that works.