“Big things are happening this year! I’m gonna become a whole new person and achieve more than I ever have before!”
This is what we tell ourselves every year. Nothing is going to get in our way. It’ll be a year full of creativity, productivity, taking care of business, and massive personal growth.
But while some creatives do manage to stay productive year after year, a lot end up making minimal progress, often feeling as though they could have done more, and using ‘life happens’ as a way to justify their stagnation.
Don’t get me wrong, life definitely happens.
And some things that slow us down simply can’t be avoided. Happens to me all the time.
But if you’re someone who knows deep down you could have been more productive last year (even though you said you were going to be!) and you don’t want to make the same mistake this year, this is for you.
A lot of musicians I talk to or work with have no problem thinking big and getting excited about building their presence or levelling up their career in some way.
Thinking and talking about the dream is easy. Making a plan and writing out your huge list of goals is fun.
But actually working on it and staying productive is a different story.
For most, simply saying “this year will be different! I will achieve my goals” isn’t enough to change. Planning to move the needle won’t actually move the needle.
You might believe it will.
You might ‘just know’ that this year you’ll be able to power through your blocks, stay disciplined, and get it all done.
But if you want to be truly productive in 2024, it’s time to get real with yourself.
You’re going to need a strong, ambitious, and realistic approach to levelling up. Something more than just telling yourself you can do it.
Last year I dove into learning how to be more productive and build the life I want around creativity.
I messed up a lot, but I also levelled up a lot, and I plan on making 2024 the biggest year yet.
So today I want to share with you how I’m approaching my goals this year, how I’m working through my ‘productivity roadblocks’ and how you can do the same.
I’ve uncovered 4 major roadblocks in myself, the things that have held me back the most in recent times. They seem to exist in a lot of the musicians I work with too.
So we’ll be talking about how to work through these to ensure you have a highly productive, rewarding, and fulfilling 2024 as a creative.
Ready? Let’s do it.
Why can’t we achieve our goals?
There are plenty of reasons, but for me it’s been mostly these 4 problems:
- Committing to too much at once.
- The emotional pull of creative work + the avoidance of everything else.
- Lack of clarity and purpose.
- Lack of habit.
And these aren’t isolated to me.
Last year I worked with musicians with all kinds of struggles, but who all wanted the same thing: To make significant progress in their career.
I found that most were struggling with at least one of the above, which is why they weren’t achieving what they wanted.
So the goal for all of us: Fix these.
Once you do, you’ll either have no reason not to achieve everything you could possibly want, or you’ll have much better reasons to do the things than to not do them.
Let’s go through each of them now.
You’re doing too much.
As Jim Collins said: If you have more than 3 priorities, you have none.
And just like I did last year, most creatives (at least the musicians I work with) have a lot more than 3 “priorities” at any one time.
This is a major cause of halted productivity, and makes it much easier for us to procrastinate.
We’ve been trained to put everything first.
Everything has to be done right now.
Everything is important.
And it’s hard not to justify this. As a creative—whether it’s being an artist or running a creative business (or both)—we do legitimately have a lot to do.
A lot is expected of us, and many of the things we do are integral to making real progress and achieving our goals.
But let’s get real here: If we’re saying everything is important… we’re kind of saying nothing is important.
We don’t really have priorities; we just have a kind of neutral to do list that doesn’t give us any real direction.
If we want to achieve a lot and do our best work possible this year, we need to do more on less.
This means we give our attention to less things at any one time, but do a much better job of them. This is even more important if you have a 9—5 which is taking up a good chunk of your weeks.
The way I’m going about this is working in 3 month blocks.
Each quarter is dedicated to one or two specific things that I give the majority of my energy to.
This means making sacrifices in other areas, which hurts because I want to do everything now.
But I know that by giving more of my time and energy to just one or two things in these blocks, by the end of the year I’ll have achieved much more and done much better work.
And this is an important point: We have to learn to look at our goals over a longer time.
If we’re able to look at our whole year instead of just the next two weeks, it allows us to make better decisions.
Here’s an example: This year, I want to:
- Radically expand my business
- Start a (proper) YouTube channel
- Start an artist journey from scratch (yep, I’m gonna get in the field with you guys)
These are my three big goals for this year. And as much as I would love to start all of them right now, it’s not going to work like that.
I took the last month off social media so I could focus on this and to help artists.
So now for the next 3 months, my focus is going to be on bringing my social media presence back to life and focusing on the business.
The 3—6 months after that will be when I start YouTube. This way I’ll be able to give it more attention and actually get somewhere with it.
Then I’ll start this artist journey.
I know what it takes to build a presence as an artist because I help artists do it year round. And so I need to be able to give it everything if I want it to work.
I know I’ll need proper focus, and I know how difficult and slow it’ll be in the beginning, so I really need to be on it.
This approach (big blocks dedicated to specific things) is how I’ll become truly engaged and make real progress with these goals.
From all my efforts trying to get shit done over the last few years, I’ve found that total immersion in a project is the best way to go.
And this by the way is a huge issue I have with social media: It’s not set up for creatives to do this.
It’s a constant struggle for myself and the musicians I work with.
Right now, I teach processes that help musicians use social media in a sustainable way all year round, but with the idea that there may be certain blocks of time where you’re more focused on that, and other times where you’re more focused on making music.
This is currently what I know to be the best approach for long term results, but I’m constantly looking at ways to move this further in the right direction. I’ll keep you updated on that as I discover more 🙂
The bottom line is that most creatives I talk to have way too many big goals they want to achieve, and they want to achieve them all right now.
But by committing to less and working more on those, you will achieve infinitely more.
If you have big goals this year, give them each the love and attention they deserve.
Don’t treat them like they’re not actually important by cramming them in among 50 other things you’re deeming equally important.
This is how we counteract the surface—level bullshit music and content we’re bombarded with now.
Let’s go deep on a few things, not shallow on a bunch of things that don’t mean anything to us.
Let’s make real stuff that actually matters.
So step 1 for you this year if you want to radically upgrade your productivity: Pick just a few major goals and map out how you can go super deep into them.
By giving yourself permission to not do everything now and all at once, you’re creating space for a massive levelling up as a creative.
The emotional pull of creative work (+ the avoidance of everything else).
Something I regularly experience as a creative (which I’m sure you do too) is the emotional pull of the creative work I want to do.
Some stuff (like music) is really easy to bring yourself to work on.
You’re just pulled towards it; you don’t need to be pushed at all.
This is obviously a great thing in the right circumstances.
But there’s a sneaky side to this that can pull us off track if we’re not careful.
Some specific creative work can be so attractive that it becomes all consuming, to the point where we stop doing all the other important stuff we need to do.
It makes all the other work we need to do look and feel worse than it is by comparison, and we don’t want to do any of it.
All we want to do is this one thing, the one thing we truly live for. And if we’re not in a phase where that’s the only thing we’re committed to, it becomes a problem.
On top of that, there’s our tendency to avoid tasks we don’t really want to do for other reasons (for some, this is the ‘business’ side of a creative career).
If we’ve built the task up as too difficult or too big, we avoid it.
If we have some kind of negative emotion attached to the task (like fear, anxiety, etc), we avoid it.
And when you couple this tendency to avoid these tasks with the emotional and distracting pull of the specific creative work we want to do… it’s a recipe for disaster.
This is when we start to feel really fucked up.
We get overly emotional. It feels like the world is trying to tear us away from our one thing, and all the feelings associated with our creative work and the other tasks we’ve committed to are exacerbated.
It gets to the point where the situation feels infinitely worse than it actually is.
We start making all kinds of justifications and rationalisations around the actions we take, which often puts us in a worse position, because our emotions have completely taken over.
This has happened to me countless times, and is a major problem all of us need to be conscious of.
It’s of course a good thing to feel our emotions.
But when they start seriously messing with our progress, we need to quickly and effectively get back control.
To deal with the tendency to avoid tasks , I’ve found a really simple way to get around it is to drastically minimise the task.
Break it down into such small and easy parts that even you in your heightened emotional state could deal with it.
For example, if you need to start showing up on social media but it feels too overwhelming: Do one tiny thing you can definitely handle, like taking a simple, rough photo and posting it to your Stories.
You could even make the task smaller—laughably small if needed—so you have no reason not to be able to handle it.
Breaking tasks down into more manageable bites not only makes it infinitely easier to get started on something you don’t want to do, but also shatters the illusion of this task being massive and impossible.
You just take one tiny step at a time. Eventually, you’ll have done the whole thing.
It’s extremely easy to procrastinate when the task is seemingly so difficult—it’s so easy to justify not doing it.
But when the task becomes a tiny thing that takes 1 minute to do, that’s a different story. It’s much harder to make excuses for it then.
And you can do this for anything you can’t get done—break it down and make it incredibly easy.
No small amount of musicians I’ve worked with have struggled with this.
They just couldn’t get themselves to take the next step on social media, whatever that was (actually starting, posting more, engagement, whatever).
They were looking at social media as this massive, overwhelming adventure, and they’d built it up in their heads so much that they were frozen.
But if you take just one small part of that and say “right Alex, this is your first step—this is all you have to worry about right now” suddenly you’re moving.
And before you know it, you’re doing even more than you initially planned.
So that’s the avoidance problem from one end. But what about the emotional pull of the specific creative work we want to do?
How do we deal with something that’s so strong and makes us so emotional, something that makes the rest of the world disappear?
Again, we want this to happen during times when we’re supposed to be doing that creative work. We just don’t want it to ruin our lives.
I still struggle with this problem every now and again, but I’ve done a good amount of work on it.
First, I know this: Simply telling someone to have more discipline and get their shit together doesn’t seem to work.
It doesn’t work on me. It doesn’t seem to work on most of the musicians I work with who struggle with this.
What does seem to be a lot more effective for solving this problem is solving the third problem in our list: Lack of clarity and purpose.
Lack of clarity and purpose.
Recently I made a post about why your releases may be “flopping”, in which I talked about creating a strong driver to encourage you to go harder on the promotion side of things.
This same concept applies here. It’s incredibly difficult to get creatives to do stuff they don’t really care about. If they don’t feel like they have a good enough reason to do it… they probably won’t.
It’s impossibly easy for a musician to get sucked into making music and also feeling like they hate everything else but music.
There’s a clear pull to music—a massively strong ‘why’, whether you’re aware of it or not. It’s so easy to justify making music all day and letting the world around you disappear.
But when it comes to other work that doesn’t feel so obviously and immediately connected to your current purpose, that enthusiasm—that pull—is nowhere to be seen.
Let’s be clear here: If something is truly not aligned with your purpose, and you don’t have to do it (like your family isn’t relying on it or something), don’t do it. Because what’s the point, right?
But let’s take something like building a presence on social media—something not super appealing to a lot of musicians.
At first glance this might not feel like it’s aligned with your purpose.
But if it’s massively important to you to get your music out there, and this is currently the best way you know to do it (or the way that makes the most sense for you)… that is aligned with your purpose, right?
It’s actually an integral part of achieving the thing that’s so important to you.
If all you care about is making music, and that’s truly it—fuck social media. It’s not worth it.
But if your goal is have that music (and you) reach a lot of people and build a genuine fan base of people who support and care about you, then maybe it’s worth getting more connected to it.
I regularly work through this stuff myself. I take something I feel I “have” to do but maybe don’t feel too great about, and I simply think about it.
Do I have to do this thing? And if so, why? And if I sit with it long enough (and it’s important), I’m properly reminded of why, and the motivation to work on it comes rushing back:
“Why do I have to do social media again? Oh yeah, I want to fucking change people’s lives. I want to make them feel like they can do anything, while also filling my soul with all the creative fulfilment I can handle.”
That wakes me up. It’s about feeling it. Getting back in touch with why you’re doing everything you’re doing.
If you sit with this long enough and start truly feeling how and why something is important to you, that’s going to light a fire in you.
Do not underestimate the power of simply reminding yourself why you’re doing something.
Clarity on what to actually do.
You also need clarity on what you’re actually doing—otherwise the work you need to do will feel impossible and exhausting.
Simply being motivated is not always enough to get you somewhere decent.
Without a clear path—or at least a clear first step—you can stall fast.
Whether it’s releasing music, building your social media presence, or something else—you need to know what you’re doing so you don’t go round in circles.
I mean, there is some amount of going in circles that needs to happen.
But it’ll happen a lot less if you have a clear path and you know you’re going the right way.
And a warning: One thing I’ve noticed in musicians who lack true clarity on what to do is that they see barriers as red flags.
They see walls as signs to turn around and try something else.
But even with crystal clarity, there will be barriers.
You can’t avoid them.
There has to be some degree of faith that what you’re doing will work out.
It’s just hard to have that faith if you don’t know whether or not you’re going in the right direction.
So you need a clear structure within which to work.
To show you what I mean, let’s take a detour and go down the road of building a social media presence—a common goal for many musicians (and creatives) nowadays.
Here’s my personal approach to it which has served me and other musicians well:
Strong identity.
You need a strong identity to communicate, no matter your goals on social media (yes, the identity is you—it’s authentic).
Without a strong identity, you don’t stand out, visually, psychologically, emotionally.
It’s easy for people to say “just be yourself” and leave it that—especially with how ‘raw and casual’ social media has become…
…but if you’re not someone who already knows how to draw a crowd online, see how far ‘just be yourself’ gets you without any direction beyond that.
If you don’t have clarity on a strong identity you can communicate online, you will be much less likely to make waves.
That does not mean not being yourself, or being inauthentic, or being loud.
It means being able to clearly and accurately communicate who you are so you don’t come off as “meh”.
No one is actually “meh”, but many people come off as “meh” online because they don’t know what they’re doing—or who they really are.
I struggled with this for ages.
I don’t have a loud personality. I’m quiet, reserved, and hesitate to speak my mind because I struggle to have a strong opinion (or ‘take sides’) on certain topics until I’ve thought properly about them.
But through brand strategy I was able to discover more about myself, what makes me great, and how I could use that to communicate effectively online and make an impact.
It’s not different for artists, or any kind of creative on social media.
Even in this age of leaning into the ‘raw and casual’, brand strategy is highly underrated. It’s a process of self discovery, something I think everyone could benefit from.
If you need help with this, I’ve created this to be a roadmap for musicians, a structure within which to not only define your artist identity, but also to build your social media presence and release your music.
Content.
You also need a simple but reliable way to get a lot of content out there.
You do not need to post every day, but most will benefit massively from showing up regularly (at least a few times a week) if they want to see any real movement.
What you actually put out there is very flexible—there is no one right answer.
I’ve talked at length about performance videos, introduction posts, reaction videos, storytelling, skits, and a lot of other approaches.
All of these are good, and at this point there isn’t really one thing that’s better than everything else. Everyone is different.
- I have artists in the course building successfully online with simple text—based posts.
- I have others cutting up footage they’ve recorded, putting their song underneath and getting tens of thousands of views.
- I have others leaning into their story and touching hearts. We explore these different approaches in this.
When determining what you’ll do for content, don’t overthink it. Not in the beginning, anyway.
Find some ideas or types of content you like and start form there.
The goal is clarity—knowing what to do to build successfully—but in this particular case clarity will come from picking your own starting place, getting some stuff out there, observing what happens, and learning from that.
Just make sure that whatever you do, it’s something that allows you to show up at least multiple times a week.
If your content creation process takes too long or it’s too difficult right now, make the process easier.
If you’re finding it incredibly easy to create stuff but you’re not getting any result from it, increase the frequency or try your hand at something more intense that might generate a better result.
Growth system.
On top of this, you need a growth system.
Unless you’re new here, you’ll already know what this means. If you are new, or you need a refresher, read this.
Sometimes posting a lot of stuff to grow on social media is enough. I have artists right now doing mostly just that and it’s working.
But I also have others trying that and it’s not working. That’s because they’re not in the ‘right’ position to do that yet.
This is where a growth system comes in, a system you can build for social media growth that suits you but that also covers all the important stuff: a steady stream of content, consistent traffic, and sustained connection.
^Hitting these three is absolutely crucial, and there are plenty of different ways to go about it.
In a lot of cases where musicians ask me where they’re going wrong on social media, they have a ‘broken’ growth system.
When you’re building a presence online as a creative, you need to understand that people may derive value from you in different ways based on where you’re at.
Even if you have great music or art, you’re not guaranteed to get amazing results simply by posting it—not right away, anyway.
Building or fixing a growth system will almost always solve your social media problems.
Releasing music.
I also highly recommend you have a good idea of what you’re doing with your releases.
For some, it’s enough to just make a song, put it out and create a bunch of content to promote it for a good whack of time.
For others, it’s highly beneficial to have a more rounded plan, one that incorporates other means of getting your music heard.
Aggressive content promotion alone is ideal… but extremely difficult for a lot of artists.
In the same flopping releases post I’ve mentioned in this letter is an outline of a 5 step plan I take musicians through to help them get clarity and structure.
I much prefer helping musicians understand how they can build something for themselves, rather than give them a generic plan that may or may not work for them.
If you learn the aforementioned structure / framework for releasing music, you can give yourself clarity on what to do and build something that makes sense for you, specifically.
Ok, a TL;DR on this bit: You need both clarity of purpose (a strong driver), and clarity of what to actually do. Having both of these will radically increase the chances you’ll be able to stay productive and achieve your goals this year.
Lack of habit.
The final big thing I’ve found to be a problem when it comes to productivity for me is simply a lack of habit—I haven’t built the habit of doing the thing I want to do.
When something isn’t yet a habit, you may feel resistance to doing it—quite a lot if it’s something that’s seemingly hard or that you don’t want to do.
But once something does become a habit, it’s not only a lot easier (takes a lot less energy), but you start to truly want to do it.
When something is a habit, your subconscious is trained to see that thing as “normal” and “comfortable” and so it wants you to do it.
You can see how this would lead to high productivity, right? If your subconscious is trained to see it as normal for you to show up and get ‘x important thing’ done… bring productive is a given.
This is one of those things that once you really know it, it makes life super exciting.
It’s so simple, but if you want to become a certain type of person or achieve a certain goal, you just have to do that thing a lot until it becomes normal.
Just get your reps in, over and over.
I wish I’d properly known this years ago, and this year I’ll be diving deep into repeatedly doing things I want to become ‘normal’ for me.
Ok, but how do you turn something into a habit if you’re struggling to even start it? How can you be productive and use this knowledge if you can’t even get in the game?
Again, make it easy.
Just like tackling your tendency to avoid tasks you don’t want to do, if you want to build a habit I’ve found the best way is to make building the habit incredibly easy (something I learned from James Clear).
You want a super low barrier to entry.
It doesn’t sound like you’d make much progress by committing to only 5 minutes per day working on, say, music or social media—but something magical happens when you do.
When you lower the barrier to entry and you’re actually able to start, you usually end up doing a lot more than what you initially set out to.
Getting started is the hard part; once you’re in, you usually just go to work and don’t stop.
You’ve also got less mental pressure on the task because you’ve told yourself you only have to do 5 minutes.
I cannot tell you how big of a difference this makes for your overall productivity.
And again, once you get used to showing up every single day (again, because of the incredibly low barrier to entry), that becomes your new normal.
It uses up a lot less energy to do it because it becomes the new ‘comfortable’.
So after doing this for a little while, suddenly you’ll just be doing it on autopilot. You’ll be asking yourself how you ever struggled with it in the first place.
So many of the things we want to be doing consistently but aren’t are due simply to the fact that we haven’t turned them into something ‘normal’ yet.
And all we have to do is do it repeatedly until it becomes automatic. Such a simple but powerful thing to know.
Ok, so let’s do a TL;DR for the whole letter:
If you want to be infinitely more productive this year—if you want to reach the end of the year being amazed at how much you’ve accomplished—there are no crazy secrets, just simple solutions.
Of course there are more problems and solutions than what I’ve mentioned here, but working on what we’ve talked about today will have a huge impact on your level of productivity as a creative in 2024.
These are what I recommend you work on:
- Don’t commit to too much stuff at once. Pick a few major goals and go insanely hard on those.
- When you’re finding it hard to commit to things and stay productive, make the tasks incredibly easy. Break them down into super small chunks.
- Seek clarity, both in exactly what to do and why you’re doing it. A strong driver will get you far. As a reminder, if you need the ‘what and how’, I hope to see you in this soon.
- Get into (the habit of) building habits around the things that are important to you. To do that, again, make things easy so you can do them repeatedly until they become automatic.
I hope this year is an amazing one for you.
All the love and talk soon. You’ve got this!
Alex
