Notion: Project Management for Musicians and Artists
I’ve moved to writing independently at Substack, consider reading this article there!
For musicians and creators, so much of our time is devoted to perfecting the craft of creation that we often miss out on thinking about how we create, what we do with our creations, and how do we spread our creations. It may not be immediately obvious, but this all involves knowledge management, process development and extensive self-reflection.
For instance as a musician, when I get into a state of flow, tap into a creative burst, I sometimes create so much that Ilose track of the very things I’ve created over the long term. Either that, or I use imperfect systems to capture rough drafts and ideas that I hope later to return to and refine (but often never do). Sadly, over many years and due to inconsistent tracking, losing scrap papers, or dealing with the frustrating app changes (including losing over 100 song ideas when Soundcloud nixed their draft recording feature without any warning) I’ve lost track of many meaningful and valuable pieces of art. Eventually I settled on cobbled together system in OneNote, and despite it’s usefulness, it never inspired me with elegance or drove me to dive deeper into making it a useful system.
Notion.so has emerged in the last year as the contender to unseat OneNote as my go-to all-in-one workspace for keeping track of these pressing life needs. To put it simply, Notion is a productivity tool with journaling, project management, personal wiki and database tools that can help bring organization and elegance to a wide range of personal and professional needs.
Besides serving as a landing page for many domains in life, a tool for systematizing my knowledge and experience, it’s become a great way to better plan out creative and professional goals. For musicians and creatives in general, there are a few aspects that deserve attention:
✏️Templates and an Enthusiastic Community ✏️
Notion is a collaborative tool, so linking others to your pages is pretty seamless. One of my favorite features when I started using Notion was the templates library for users to use and refine existing ideas from others, and even create and contribute their own. I liked it so much, in fact, that one of the first things I did was to create a Song Writing Template, which I’ll write more about soon. Notion was even kind enough to highlight in the template library!
Even better than the template library, though, are the enthusiastic community of users in places like the Notion subreddit, or the community of content creators (including the team at Notion themselves) posting tips and tricks on Youtube and even here on Medium. Simply put, there’s no shortage of inspiration to guide the creation of your ideal life management workspace.
🎧Flexible Tools for Bumping Music Business Management to 11 🎧
It’s kind of a truism that musicians or creators in general often overlook their business and management needs as soon as they set out to *become professional*. Indeed, this is something I’ve written about before, but really, even if you’re not creating an exhaustive library of techniques for promotion and tracking their effect, having a single space where you can keep important information or even track your progress in building habits that enhance your creative expression, it’s hard to not see the advantage of being able to do this all in one place. So plan that release, get a handle on accomplishing those dull tasks (like copyright management), or log the habits that helped you get into a state of flow.
Really, the benefits here are pretty wide-ranging so a few examples will be helpful. Say for instance you’re trying to keep track of all the promotional contacts you’ve reach out to, blogs you’ve connected with, or social media profiles you want to stay in touch with. If you leave those blog communications only as email chains, or those important social media profiles simply as an endless list of profiles you follow, you may miss out on how to build those relationships for your next release. Using an elegant database to organize your progress with those important relationships might make the difference between a successful release getting a coveted blog coverage or missing out on the opportunity to personally connect with others in the industry.
Or maybe you’re doing your due diligence and thinking deeply about crafting your personal artistic identity. Draft a mood board to explore feelings, themes and aesthetic for future creations. Here, again the templates are your friend.
Conclusion
Really, the uses are endless, and depend only on your creativity. Excited yet? If you are, definitely check out Notion, or any of the other awesome creativity and project tools out there and start streamlining your creative process and elevating your output. Stay creative friends.
Hey, I almost didn’t mention, Notion is affordable and/or free with a student .edu email. Are you interested in signing-up? If you’d like to, consider doing so thru my link here. It’ll hook you and me up with free credits, nothing more, nothing less.
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Notion at all except as an enthusiastic user. I’ve not been nor expect to be paid or compensated for this post, I simply would like to share some of the benefits I’ve found for honing the craft.
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