Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

Varies a lot. The companies I worked for, they mostly did the standard hours (something like 8 to 5), but then would have rush times where they needed to work a lot of extras.

If you are doing consumer panels or similar types of research, you will likely have odd hours, as these panels often need to be scheduled when convenient for your target consumers.

The job has several 'crunch times' weeks with important deadlines (eg around new product launch or a major marketing budget shift to online), during which people may work up to 70-80 hours. Typically though, 45 hours about covers it.

If you are working on the fieldwork end of things where you are actually collecting the data, there is a great deal of variation, depending upon the type of fieldwork, client needs, etc. It can range anywhere from a regular work week (40 hours) to 6 or more.

If you're on the analytical end, the work tends to be more steady (40-50 hours per week), but when you are working on a deadline for a report or presentation, it can range 60-70 hours per week.

Hope this helps.

Dear pokeronomist,

Let me ask you this: what do you want to do? A few days ago you asked a great question about dropping out of grad school and I'm just wondering what it is you see yourself doing, perhaps in two to three years time?

I don't know about market research hours, but I know about my hours, and normally, my working week is part time, half days.

But the bigger question to ask yourself is which half of the day do you want to work? The 12 hours before midnight? Or the 12 hours AFTER midnight?

Because at the moment, that's my work week: roughly 80 hours per week. This excludes family time and having a social life, but it INCLUDES building a business and working a full time job. The thing is, that most of it, most of the writing and speaking about marketing (which I'm doing more and more of), to me, it isn't work: it's a passion.

And when something BECOMES a passion it ceases to BE work and your financial compensation becomes less important. And when money becomes less of an issue, suddenly, there's more of it.

Lots more.

You're looking for a typical week estimate? Why? What do you intend to do with the remaining time? Piece of advice for you: It's not about the time, it's about your FOCUS, it's about your INPUT, and it's about your RESULTS.

Know why? Because these are the things that create the payoff. They are the things that make all the hard work worth while.

The sooner you stop trading hours for dollars, the sooner you'll
be free of constraints and the more productive you will become.

How do I know this? Because up until six months ago I'd been struggling to write a book. There were holes all over its flow and
I was getting nowhere because I lacked passion and a plan.

In total it took me nine months to write just under 55,000 words. Know how much I've written in the last six months? Over 300,000 words. Why? Because I discovered my passion and because I stopped looking at the clock. 300K words isn't just one book. It's four. Now, the editing begins.

I hope this helps.

Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA
Follow me on www.twitter.com @GaryBloomer

Dear pokeronomist,

Thanks for your response and I wish I knew your real name.
I think last time I nicknamed you Bubba, so, let's start again:

Dear Bubba,

When it comes to passion, and SPECIFICALLY when it comes to apportioning TIME to one's passion, one needs to make certain promises—certain commitments—both to one's self, and to one's love ones.

To find or identify your passion, it's often necessary to do a good amount of soul searching. I used to believe my passion was branding and copywriting. I was wrong.

A year and a half ago I learned that branding and copywriting were just tiny bits of my passion and that in truth, the whole thing had been staring me in the face for YEARS! I simply hadn't recognized it.

It was a slow realization, and perhaps a little painful to admit and yes, I learned some important lessons. But rather than just letting my dream go and getting on with being average and dull as way too many people do when they see their dream fall apart, I took what I'd learned and I thought: "Why not apply it? Just to see what will happen. What the hell have I got to lose?".

So that's what I did: I started applying it, just to see what would happen, just to see what would stick.

And so, 870 questions on this forum and six months later, and
with an accepted answer to question rate of between 75 and 84 percent, here we are on MarketingProfs: my passion is marketing, and in helping other people (as and if I can) with their marketing questions.

Not long ago a client (someone who found me through this forum) asked how I do it. She said "I see you everywhere! On Facebook, on Twitter, on Marketing Profs, on other blogs: HOW DO YOU DO IT?"

My answer was the same as it was over 15 years ago when I was asked to come up the the title of a presentation on design and exhibition work. The title I picked (on the fly—not always a great idea but sometimes, the planets align in exactly the right order) was "Making It Look Easy".

That's the trick: making it look easy. The hard part? That, to paraphrase T.E. Lawrence (aka: Lawrence of Arabia) when he
was asked what the trick was to holding his hand over the flame
of an open candle. Lawrence replied "The trick? The trick is not minding." (It's said that G. Gordon Liddy said the same thing).

Am I comparing myself to Lawrence? Certainly not. But what I am saying is that's what it takes to build your passion: it takes effort and will to make it look easy. I make it look easy by doing it. I do it by working long, long hours; I do it by taking ideas and themes and by heating them and hammering them, by compressing them into as tight an edge as I can and then—THEN—that edge gets pushed back into the furnace and reheated and re-hammered even more.

Is this hard work? Hell yes. So why do I d it? Because it's my passion.

I've been doing this for almost a year, and I was doing it before
I heard of a new book, by someone I'd only vaguely heard of: his name is Gary Vaynerchuk and his book is called "CRUSH IT! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion". https://bit.ly/CrushItByGaryVaynerchuk

It's a short book.

Only 134 pages or so.

It's an easy read.

But it's a very BIG read and it contains a HUGE idea: to identify and then chase the one thing that really, TRULY lights up your life—the thing you think about constantly, the thing that wakes you up in the middle of the night, the thing you find yourself pounding away at a computer keyboard about at 3 am because it's woken you up, yet again, and the thing you talk about day in, day out because it matters, because it's significant, and because it demands your all consuming attention.

THIS is the thing behind the book and this thing has a name: PASSION.

How do YOU—Bubba—find time to identify or build YOUR passion?
You cram it. You go without sleep. You get up early and work on it before you go off to your "proper" job. You stay up late and you work on it before you grab a few hours of sleep and then you repeat the process over and over again. You connect. You link. You build relationships. You read (you'll do a LOT of reading), and you write. God, how you'll write!

And every step of the way, you'll be learning, expanding, and growing as a person, and you'll be building a following, an audience who read what you say and who LISTEN. And the more your audience listens, the more you're compelled to learn more in order to TELL more. And the more you learn and express, the more the weight of your opinion builds, and as this weight increases, your audience listens more and slowly, and by degrees, your audience begins to grow.

And where there's an audience—even if at first it's just ONE
person that then becomes two people and so on—where there's
an audience there are ways to create connections and form relationships. And where there are relationships, there will eventually be sponsors, and requests to speak at meetings and conferences, and there will be advertisers. And where there are advertisers, there is money. Lots of it.

THAT's what Gary Vaynerchuk's book "CRUSH IT! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion" is all about. https://bit.ly/CrushItByGaryVaynerchuk

When I read CRUSH IT! last weekend I thought I'd won the lottery.

I'm serious. On pretty much every page I thought: "I'm already doing that!", or: "I've got that experience!", or: "I've been doing this for the last six months!", or: "So THAT's what I need to do next? I can do that!", and: "I need to do more of this (a lot more) and much less of that, And I need to buy one of those and figure out how to do that? OK!"

CRUSH IT! does NOT tell you WHERE to go or WHAT your particular passion ought to be, only you can do that. But CRUSH IT! does tell you how to GET there, what steps to take, what tools you'll need, and how to use those tools.

As to the rest, as to doing the work? Well Bubba, that's up to you.

But I've found that the more I've extended my reach, the wider my opinion has become. And as our opinions widen, our experiences broaden. And when this happens, the number of people LISTENING begins to grow too.

As you invest in yourself this way—as you invest in your passion, it becomes less and less like work. It becomes your calling.

https://bit.ly/CrushItByGaryVaynerchuk

I hope this helps you Bubba, I really do. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA
Follow me on www.twitter.com @GaryBloomer