This post is the first in what I hope might turn into a series of posts to help musicians who struggle to get organised some (or more than some) of the time. Welcome to The Productive Musician.
As I write, it is 35 degrees Celsius outside – and in my studio, not a whole lot cooler than that. The fan is going top-speed.
Which is why I might not want to sit here and do any recording on headphones, or mixing with the doors and windows all closed up. But what if that was what I had planned to do today?
We all make our plans – what we’d like to get done on any particular day, that is, when we haven’t otherwise got to be somewhere pre-arranged. Great, I have a day in the studio, I’m going to finish that mix!
Except, life is never quite that convenient or kind, and it might only be about half the time that I’ve been able to stick to what I’d planned. At least half or, perhaps more than half of the time, I’ve had to change, adapt, reschedule, because what I had originally planned now can’t happen.
I think also of a time I had to take my car to the garage for an emergency repair – not a big one, just a crack in the windscreen, but enough to warrant an immediate visit to get it sorted.
It’s exactly times like this that I am able to pivot and do something else because all of my current incomplete tasks are organised not by when I want to do them (although they may have date-specific criteria, like a due date that they must be done by), but by where I have to be when I want to do them.
This is one of the core concepts from GTD, ‘Getting Things Done’, a book by David Allen, and a worldwide phenomenon. The concept is incredibly simple; the execution takes some getting used to (I feel like I’m still only just learning to adapt to it after more than 10 years of practicing GTD), but once it is instilled, it proves itself remarkably powerful.
So, I can’t get the mixes done in the studio today…but I can do another task I had captured at some point: sort out my gig- and go-bags which had got a bit disorganised with their contents for when I’m out and about teaching or gigging.
Or I could tidy up some of my computer filing system, another one of those tasks that it would be good to get around to at some point, but needs the right moment to do it. Well, on a hot day when I haven’t got a lot of deep work I can get into, this might be the perfect kind of shallow task to work on now.
The day I took the car to the garage, I couldn’t do the admin I thought I might get done at home, but I could still do a few tasks which I had assigned to be done on my phone – a call or a text here, or looking something up there. (I also took the time to just read a book – sometimes, the right thing to do is nothing, and take a break.)
If you’re thinking of doing this, I would advise trying it with one or two contexts first, something useful to you: a certain shop sells things you need to buy. Set up a tag in Reminders (or your task/reminder app of choice) for that shop, and tag every task that you would want to see in that shop. Or if you have a few different workplaces (e.g. schools to teach at or studios you visit), try tagging with those place names if you have things to remember to do or talk to someone about at each point.
Once you get the hang of it, it starts to flow more and more seamlessly, and wherever you are, you only need to look at your list for that place to see what you could do. And if you’re roasting in 35 degree heat – choose something easy!
ben trigg music 