293 – Get More Done in Your Artistic Career with Templates & Frameworks

 A simple thing can make a big difference. Most artists aren’t thinking about saving five minutes here or 10 minutes there but think about it. Over a year, if you could cut down your daily social media time from 10 to five minutes per day, you’d save yourself 1,825 minutes or a little over 30 hours per year. In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, David shares the importance of building structures around your music career to ensure you’re empowered in getting more done, whether writing songs, booking gigs, interacting with your fans on social media, or otherwise. Download the PDF Transcription Podcast Highlights: 00:16 – Structures? What are structures?! 00:37 – Firsts in your life and your music career 00:52 – How structures work and why they matter 02:29 – Closing thoughts Sponsors: The Music Entrepreneur Companion Guide: Get the official definitive companion guide to The Music Entrepreneur Code covering, in clarity and detail, secrets to making it in the new music business. Productivity, Performance & Profits Blackbook: The first of its kind – David’s new premium book covering productivity, featuring content from Music Entrepreneur HQ, his personal blog, his many books, and even Start Your Year the Right Way, which is included in its entirety. Be fully unleashed in accomplishing your dreams and desires! Transcription: You're listening to The New Music Industry with David Andrew Wiebe. Hey, it's David Andrew Wiebe, and today I wanted to talk about structures. Now as an artist, you're probably going "Structures? What's the point of that? Like, why would I need that in my music career? That doesn't sound like 'song.' That doesn't sound like 'guitar.' Those are none of the words I know. 'Bass,' 'lyrics,' never heard of 'structures.' Are you talking about building and building?" Well, no, not necessarily. But let's start here. You know, you're going to have a lot of firsts in life, right? Just like you're going to have a lot of firsts in your music career. A first in life might be like first kiss or first time eating a mango, or first time skydiving. A first in your music career might be your first gig, or first interview. You know what I mean? And so, structures might be one of those things that you've heard for the first time. There are other words we could use to describe a structure. It could be a [00:01:00] system, a framework, a checklist, or something like that. What it is, is it's something that allows you to be more productive. It allows you to get things done smoother, faster, and with better precision. I, for example, have templates for all my books so I can just drop my content in, do all the editing and put it out into the world. I'm not saying that all the writing's done. What I'm saying is, I've got the formatting done in terms of fonts and layouts and things like that. So there are a lot of things you could create templates for, whether it's like a lyric sheet template or a project template in your DAW. The idea is to stop yourself from reinventing the wheel. You don't want to start from scratch. You want to build on things that you already have. That you're going to have to come back to all the time. There are certain motions, there are certain things you're going to be doing in your music career all the time. You're going to be sending emails, you're going to be making calls, you're going to be setting up and tearing down your gear. You're going to have sound checks; you're going to have performances. So, what structures could you build around these, including your promotional activity, of course, to streamline, to optimize, to make sure certain things get done so that you can have a much better performance or a much better marketing campaign every single time? What are the things that you need to do every single time? You can always create structures around those things. So, this insight comes from my book,