One of the most important aspects of achieving success as an independent artist is that of organization. It’s almost impossible to succeed without this skill in your life. Being organized allows you to be more effective, with as little amount of time as possible. It’s nearly impossible to run a business without having or acquiring a system of organization.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume you’re a very unorganized person. You get something important in the mail and you throw it on your desk with all your other bills, your piles of CD’s, and all your desk accessories. Let’s assume for a minute that the important document you received in the mail was a proposal to play a festival and you need to sign it and return it by the end of the week. So, the next day you are on the phone to your booking agent and they ask if you received this proposal and if you could sign it and drop it in the mail asap. ”Sure, no problem” , you say. You begin to look for this envelope and you can’t find it. But wait a minute, “I just had it here on the desk, where I keep everything else”. You fumble around and rearrange half your room looking for it. Needless to say, you spend an hour looking for this festival agreement before you finally find it.
Now you may not consider this a big deal, but in that hour you could have written a new song, practiced, booked the gig, done an interview, taken a nice relaxing walk outside or any other of numerous things, but instead you spent this time unnecessary hunting for this document, that in all honesty, you should have dealt with it when you first opened it. An hour here, 30 minutes there etc. etc. Before you know it, you have wasted time that could have and should have been spent enjoying something else. What could have taken five minutes from the time you opened it, to the time you should have mailed it, has now thrown you off focus and taken twenty times the amount of time and energy to deal with and complete this simple task.
If you want to be successful in this business, you need to get organized. For me, I love to perform, write, practice and record. I don’t like dealing with the business stuff, but I know that in order to get where I’m going, I have no choice. So for me, I like to get the business stuff done in as efficient a time as possible, allowing more time for me to do what really matters the most to me.
BOTTOM LINE: Commit to an organized effort.
KEYWORDS: Organize, Energy, Sanity, Freedom
CONSIDER: Here are a few suggestions to consider in getting organized:
* Start by labeling everything.
* Use stickers to help organize.
* Use color pens and color files in easy identification of certain files.
* Get cardboard boxes, shoeboxes, crate filling cabinet, plastic box and any other storage containers and label them.
* Organize your existing contracts, documents, forms, papers, music and find an appropriate place for them.
* Start by writing everything down.
* Start by labeling everything.
* Use stickers to help organize.
* Use color pens and color files in easy identification of certain files.
* Get cardboard boxes, shoeboxes, crate filling cabinet, plastic box and any other storage containers and label them.
* Organize your existing contracts, documents, forms, papers, music and find an appropriate place for them.
* Start by writing everything down.
NOTE: This is a repost from the ebook - "Indie Artist/Producer Handbook". Permission granted and all rights reserved. Download the 100+ ebook for $4.99.