How do you hack the BORING parts of your music career?

File Management, Spreadsheets, and Rock N’ Roll!

I love exporting email lists, cleaning months of JPEGs off my desktop, and waiting around at the end of a recording session to consolidate tracks. Those things are why I got into music in the first place.

Kidding.

However, the boring, tedious, mundane, uninspiring, redundant  aspects of managing your musical life CAN sometimes play as big a role in your successes as the music itself.

When things are well organized, fewer opportunities are apt to slip through the cracks.

Here’s just a few of the things musicians need to keep track of:

• properly-tagged fan lists
• analytics (in Google, Pandora, Spotify, Facebook, etc.)
• ad audiences
• merch inventory
• accounting
• digital files
• booking contacts
• communication across email, Messenger, DMs, phone/text, IG,…

But we’re musicians first. For most of us the clerical and entrepreneurial stuff comes in at a distant second (if we finish that race at all).

How do you build the busywork into your music processes?

I need your help.

Last week I took a few days off to record. Staying true to a long, proud musical tradition, I underestimated how much time things actually take in the studio.

You’d think after a trillion sessions I’d have learned by now. Nope. What I thought was the “end” of each day turned into the beginning of all the busywork: track consolidation, uploading files to Dropbox, etc.

Same thing goes whenever I send an email newsletter. I think, “Oh, this will just take me about 15 minutes.” Then I spend 30 minutes cleaning my list, manually inputting new contacts, and importing some lists that aren’t automatically integrated with Mailchimp. Only then do I get to START writing the email.

I’m not a complete mess in this department. I get things done, but it always feels like I’m wrestling with myself to complete those tasks. I envy musician friends who seem to have been born with the efficiency and time-management gene. So…

I’d love to hear how you get things done.

Ya know — the stuff that needs to get done even though you’d prefer to put it off.

• Do you have some mental “hack” that helps you actually get inspired to tackle the office work?
• Do you always budget a certain part of your day for staying organized?
• Do you fire up a playlist, put on your headphones, and just dive into data-entry mode?
• Do you sit in the back of the van on tour and handle all this stuff because you’re sick of talking to your bandmates?

What works? Lemme know.

Sincerely,

Bare Lee Organized

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