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Have you ever struggled to finish a creative project? Felt disorganized, uncertain, or unmotivated when it comes to making progress on a single song or even finishing an entire multiple song album release?
As a musician and songwriter, I know how challenging it can be to manage a creative process that involves multiple stages and tasks. As creatives, we often think organization, productivity and project management goes against what it means to be creative. We’ve been told and tend to believe that disorder fuels creativity and that structure and “productivity” might even stifle our muse and genius.
As an independent artist, I am responsible for every aspect of my music production, from songwriting to mixing and mastering. As much as I enjoy the creative aspect of music-making especially the state of flow I can get into starting a new song, I struggle a lot staying productive and making progress too. It’s challenging to finish and release a song.
That’s where creative organization comes in. For me, creative organization describes the tools and practices we can use to manage the multi-step process of reviewing, revising and finishing any creative project. There are a lot of different productivity approaches and tools you can leverage to manage your creative process. A dive into productivity goes beyond this post. Quite simply, creative organization should be thought of as a way for you to stay organized in order to take meaningful next steps on the stage of your project and track your process and progress towards finishing.
Recently, as a music producer, I was struggling to finish my album and make tangible progress on the individual tracks I had started. Happily, I had nearly 20 or 25 initial tracks to work on following a productive and flow-filled period that I describe in my post on my 30-Day Songwriting Challenge. Unfortunately they were all unfinished in some way. They needed work. Some needed basic music production work to complete the sound, while others likely required additional songwriting, melodies and instrumentation. Unfortunately, after picking my initial selection, things weren’t moving forward. I had vague intentions to finish the album, but I wasn’t putting in the work. I was at a creative and organizational impasse.
In that moment of uncertainty and disorganization, I took the simple step to create a spreadsheet, a tool normally used for accounting, to help me manage and organize my creative process. In this spreadsheet I initially dumped in the titles and duration of my selected songs. I then added a column for feedback and notes and a checklist column to track if I had reviewed the song. From there I started reviewing songs and adding notes. I added more columns of steps I needed to complete (like review, revise, remix, master, finalize title, etc) and started completing them one by one. Slowly by surely and as I’ll describe in this post, my album management spreadsheet enabled me to confidently and quickly move forward with a host of tasks. I started revising. Songs got better. I was able to make decisions about the overall project and individual tracks. Certain songs got dropped, based on lack of progress. The steps and ratings in the spreadsheet helped ease those decisions. All of this was tracked and visually transparent by using this spreadsheet for project management. And in much less time than I had imagine, my songs were ready, my album was ready, and I was ready to release it.
Whether or not use a spreadsheet or even the spreadsheet tool I used, namely Google Sheets, I believe creative organization is an underappreciated aspect of being a creative. For me, a spreadsheet was a powerful tool for managing my creative process. This simple spreadsheet was a flexible way to keep track of all the moving parts. It allowed me to see everything at a glance, from the basic information about each song to the progress of each individual track to finally checking off a song’s readiness to release. In short, this simple spreadsheet was a flexible way to keep track of all the moving parts.
In this blog post, I want to share my personal experience with using a spreadsheet to streamline my music production process and how it helped me stay organized and focused towards finishing songs and completing my latest album project. I’ll go over why productivity and creative organization are important for all creatives. I’ll delve into the specifics on how I setup and structured my spreadsheet to track my progress on individual tracks as well as additional checklist items I used.
Ultimately, the goal of this blog post is to enable other musicians and music producers who may be struggling with staying organized and uncertain with how to manage a multiple step release like an album. As independent artists, the music production can be extra challenging since we don’t have a team around us to support us and the relay race we are running is entirely on our own. Hopefully it can help anyone in a similar struggle consider alternative mental models, productivity processes and tools to move forward and finish whatever they are working on.
AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): The following written content was generated by me with the assistance of an AI-based system (ChatGPT). Specifically I used it to help me in pre-writing phase, copyediting and minor re-writing and drafting a few individual points.
Productivity and Why Creative Organization Matters Creativity can be unpredictable and chaotic, but productivity is still essential to success. There are a lot of examples of artists whose creative process seems to flourish on chaos. It’s okay to think of much of what happens in a creative pursuit as mysterious and nonlinear. That said, I’m here to tell you that at the end of the day even the most chaotic and disorganized of artists do one simple thing: they ship creative work.
Actually, shipping creative work should be part of what you group under the rubic of being creative. And, in fact, there is evidence to indicate that the quantity of creative output is correlated with creative success too.
In his book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam Grant notes that while we are most familar with his classics, Shakespeare was incredibly productive artist. Specifically, “in the span of two decades…he produced 37 plays and 154 sonnet.” Similarly, “To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand…Picasso’s oeuvre includes more than 1,800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, and 12,000 drawings…In science, Einstein [had] 248 publications.” Though there are many “one-hit” wonders and one-off success, as Grant argues, the evidence shows that the greatest artists and scientists (think Nobel Prize winner) were also the most quantitatively productive too. In short, greatness comes in large part from shipping a large volume of work.
There is a whole range of factors that drive these creatives to productivity and subsequently the chance of success and greatness too. To simplify this down, I believe there are two critical components to being a productive creative.
First, creating a wealth of first drafts and initial versions. If you want to have creative work to finish and ship, you have to get started and put something down. In the case of music it means writing, riffing and jamming on new songs and song demos. There are various strategies a creative can deploy to generate new ideas. As I documented in my post on dedicating a month to new song creation, I assembled an environment and tooling that made it easy to get started (Template!) and then made it a habit to show up daily and try to create something fresh. Personally I used various starting points but through that month, I discovered that the combination of intention, routine, and flow-centered music writing resulted in 31 new songs in just 31 days. There are a lot of strategies and approach to consider with getting started, and I highly encourage a divergent thinking approach.
Second, along with generating first drafts (often crappy, let’s be honest), the other critical component to productive creativity is selecting from these early drafts, improving them, and ultimately finishing them. Releasing your creative work is what it means to be a creative. Until a creative project gets shipped it’s still in-utero, a baby in the womb. In order to play out a full creative idea or project it is essential that you ship it.
Finishing and shipping creative work can be really hard. Emotionally it’s hard to let go of a piece of creative work you’ve been developing. It’s hard not to see flaws in the things we make, judge our creations as not quite good enough or claim endless that our song, piece of writing or other artistic creation can and should be even better. Releasing it comes with external judgement and possibly rejection. Our peers and fans might not like what we create. You don’t really “fail” if it’s never really released and you can avoid the pain of rejection or worse yet simply not being ignored or unheard.
Beyond just letting go of your work, there are a myrid of steps between the first version or draft and the final version you release. It can be challenging to know what is the next step and keep track of what’s done and what’s left to do. Whether it’s a song, a piece of writing, visual art or even code, shipping creative work demands a certain amount of organization and productivity. In order for art to find a place in the world, you need to finish it so it can be shared. As such, creative organization is key part of being a productive artist.
There is a lot to consider about our brains too to consider when it comes to productivity and creativity too. Productivity is a topic I’ve written and throught heavily on. At the core of my personal and professional productivity process is David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology and a task management tool called Todoist. If you are interested in that topic, I recommend reading my two-part blog series: Getting Things Done with Todoist and Tracking Your Tasks with Todoist. Beyond just task management, I found weekly reviews to be immensely powerful best practice for setting intentions and reflection on past week and week ahead.
In spite having pretty good productivity tools and practices, it might seem surprising that I ended up using a spreadsheet to organize and streamline my creative process and finish my album, especially since generally speaking a spreadsheet is for accounting and managing numbers rather than a creative endeavour.