Why be an Organized Songwriter?
Getting Songs Written (GSW)
Being an organized songwriter is giving your craft a wonderful gift: both parts of your brain:
The right side to be creative, and
The left side to be logically organized.
Many songwriters don’t actually like being organized. Even part of me doesn't want to feel I’m organizing myself sometimes. There are days I love having a lovely creative day off. However, doing creative work is still doing work. It's not actually a day off. It's a working day, which means doing something that needs organizing. And ignoring what needs to be organized stops me from doing my best work.
But here’s the good news:
"Organized work is a lot less effort than unorganized work."
Most times, organized work is incredibly productive. And, given the proper focus on the right tasks, it actually takes less time to do organized work. Even the task of organizing work sounds like it's going to take a lot of time in the first place, but it doesn't. Sometimes, deciding what to do with a raw idea can be done in less than five minutes, especially if done with all the emotional juice behind it.
The difference between being organized and unorganized is the key for us creatives: adding significant creative value and taking the opportunity to do something positive with the idea. For example,
It's having the effort of thinking, "what can I do with this raw idea?". It's about taking a raw idea through a process that will enable the raw idea turn into something more developed—a writable idea—and then planning to write it into a finished song at some stage in the future.
Or it can be about taking an amazing writable idea and organizing it to use with a co-writer or planning when it will be written on our own.
So, here's the process I work on now, something I wish I had figured out right at the beginning of my full-time life as a songwriter: Getting Songs Written.
Getting Songs Written (GSW)
The difference between Getting Songs Written (GSW) is about putting our chaos in enough order to turn our songs into successful songs, from idea through to recognition, rather than random ideas into songs unused (in files or piles of paper – A below). It's about using the chaos in our lives, then pushing them in the right direction - the bull's eye we're trying to achieve, according to our own 'why' we write songs (B below).
It's the difference between writing songs using random chaos versus writing with organized, productive, and purposed crafting. This aim is to try and put some order into our creative lives.
In my former corporate day job, I used David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) and several apps like OmniFocus to try to increase my productivity. However, as a creative person, some elements don't work for me in my songwriting. For example,
I never trash ideas because they are too valuable.
I'm always in control of my ideas because they are always there waiting for me to write into a song.
So, to make a modified GTD for songwriting, I had to make a few changes. And over the years, here's my own modified version I use now:
Here's what the process looks like:
Step 1. Captured - all raw ideas
Step 2. Mapped - turn the best raw ideas into writable ideas
Step 3. Organized - plan when to turn writable ideas into songs
Step 4. Written - written writable ideas into songs
Step 5. Sent - recording finished songs sent off
Here's what it looks like in a picture –
Having used this kind of approach, GSW, in managing my ideas and songs as a songwriter, I believe this is one of the main reasons I ended up getting signed at Brentwood Benson/Universal Music and more.
To see more details of this see Part II of The Organized Songwriter.
Questions
Here are a few questions:
How do you feel about combining creativity and organization for songwriting? Does it work right now?
What elements of the writing process could usefully be organized better for you?
Could a GTD, a GSW, or another alternative approach work for you?
I hope this helps!
Simon