Lately I’ve been obsessed with trying to get more out of social media while working on it less.

I didn’t used to believe that ‘work smarter’ was a real option.

I knew it was possible to get more done in less time, but I didn’t think you could go too far with it—especially on social media.

My approach to building my career was always ‘hard work, long hours, no excuses’—it was an attitude built into me.

So I did that for at least a year, maybe more. Every day I’d just push myself to my limit.

One week I even calculated how much I ‘worked’—90 hours.

And that was a typical week. Some Tom Bilyeu level stuff (I thought).

You’d think with that kind of work ethic my progress would be insane.

But it wasn’t, barely at all.

The truth is, I wasn’t doing 90 hours’ worth of work. I was just spending 90 hours a week ‘working’.

I wasn’t really getting anything done, it just felt like I was—it’s called ‘busy work’.

And you can imagine what ‘busy work’ would look like on social media.

Instead of speeding forward in my career like I assumed I would, I ended up burnt out every week or two, unable to do anything for a few days at a time.

I was sick a lot. Constantly exhausted. Starting to hate what I was doing because it just felt so draining.

And I stalled. Spending 90 hours a week getting basically nowhere.

Turns out I wasn’t Tom Bilyeu and—although I’m sure he’s much more productive with his time—I didn’t want to be him anymore.

So about 3—6 months ago I decided to try and find a better way to go about this.

Could I achieve my goals and build my business on social media while spending significantly less time doing it?

Could I find a way to not be constantly exhausted?

And is this something I could show others how to do?

If you’re someone who feels like you either work way too hard for the results you get on social media, or you just feel like you’re wasting your time—this letter is for you.

I’m going to take you through what I’ve learned to maximise my time on social media and get more out of it.

As a disclaimer, I will say that it’s entirely possible to work long days and not be exhausted—it depends on how you approach it.

But this email will focus on maximising what you can get out of social media while using up less time and energy.

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The social media problem for musicians.

When you don’t know how to maximise your time and effort on it, it can and will drain you.

I see this happen to a lot of musicians.

They have a hard time separating useful social media activities from the useless stuff.

Because you lack clarity, it will feel like significantly more work than it needs to be.

Another problem is the learning curve. Until you’ve ‘cracked the code’ it can feel incredibly frustrating and hard to justify.

This will last as long as it wants—depending on how quickly you manage to find and successfully implement the right stuff.

It’s no wonder so many musicians are fed up with it.

To many, it’s high effort, low reward. Over and over again.

This cycle is perpetuated by social media experts telling you to to show up a billion times a day and follow a 7—hour daily routine to make it work.

Not only that, but it’s also implied you have to show up in ways you don’t want to.

Or to put that another way—you’re told to be someone you just don’t want to be.

Trying to convince a musician to do something that feels like it’s taking them too far away from music and that feels inauthentic is a stupid game to play.

Of course there’s discomfort involved; if you want to level up in life you have to evolve. And there is a game you have to play on social media.

It’s just not so black and white as ‘do it this way or else’.

Doing it your way is a discussion for another time; today we’ll focus on productivity.

How can you stop social media from taking over your life and make it manageable over the long term?

How you can you make it work for you instead of working for it?

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A better situation.

“Productivity isn’t about being a workhorse, keeping busy or burning the midnight oil… It’s more about priorities, planning, and fiercely protecting your time.”—Gary Keller

You could easily find a million social media tasks to do every day and a million reasons why it’s impossibly hard to get anywhere with it.

But once you get rid of all the fluff—the stuff that’s either barely serving you, or not serving you at all—it’s not so scary.

We’re going to focus only on the highest ROI activities on social media and discard the rest.

Although social media feels busy, I’ve found there are 6 main things you can focus on and still get just as far (or further):

• Research—to help us understand and improve content, generate ideas, and learn how to use the platform(s) we’re on.

• Idea generation—to come up with ideas that get us somewhere.

• Creating/recording content.

• Editing the content.

• Posting the content.

• Interacting—the social connection element is crucial.

Let’s break these down to see how we can get the most out of these.

Keep in mind my circumstances might be different to yours but take what you can and set up your own solid plan.

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Research

Research is a crucial part of getting the most out of social media.

If you want to make serious progress on your platform(s), the last thing you want to do is go in blind and stay blind.

I don’t recommend closing your eyes and posting whatever you want without ever paying attention to what works.

Yes—you can post whatever you want. And you can definitely do this in the beginning when you’re getting into the swing of showing up.

But understand that doesn’t automatically = success on the platform.

If you want to grow with content, your long-term strategy should not be to do ‘just whatever’.

Research in this case refers to:

• Studying high-performing content so you can use similar structures / formats

• Looking at your own posts’ performance (to help you understand what you should do more and less of over time)

• Researching ‘how to’ do something (content, editing, social media stuff, etc.).

Here’s how I recommend you approach this (at minimum):

— Spend 30 minutes once or twice a week (maybe on a Sunday and Wednesday) collecting high performing posts and studying them. What about them is so good? Pay attention to audio and visual quality, colours, vibe, aesthetic, the message, the song, the first few seconds of the video, and anything else interesting about it.

— Take another 5 minutes to note your own highest performing posts for the week—specifically posts with a noticeable increase in engagement relative to the others. Could you recreate these or at least build on these ideas in new ways?

— Once a week, watch / read / listen to something for at least 30 minutes that’ll help you level up your social media presence in some way. It could be to do with content, learning the platforms, whatever. Go for high-quality information, not just short TikToks or IG posts, and really pay attention to what you’re taking in.

If you come up with any ideas for yourself during these processes (which you probably will), write them down immediately.

Once you’ve done this, you don’t need to be on social media at all until we get to posting and engaging.

No mindless scrolling—that’s a dangerous trap.

And no replying to comments or messages yet—that’ll come.

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Idea Generation

Another crucial part of a successful online presence is creating space to generate good ideas for content.

This is something I didn’t fully understand the power of until recently.

If you intentionally make space to generate ideas, you will come up with infinitely better stuff to create and post.

The last thing you want is to be creatively exhausted and stuck in a constant cycle of coming up with mediocre ideas that don’t stand out. That won’t get you anywhere.

I don’t know what your days look like, but ideally, you’re creating space for this every day.

And here’s the important thing: You don’t sit down in front of a computer, focus, and force yourself to come up with ideas.

You intentionally let your mind fall back to its default state, what Chris Bailey calls “Scatterfocus” in his book Hyperfocus.

Basically, you want to create space to intentionally let your mind wander; the ideas will come from that.

Remember that research you did? This is where it’s going to really start working for you.

In this ‘mind wandering’ space your brain will start connecting all of these dots between what you recently learned and what you already know, and you’ll come up with super creative ideas.

To let your mind wander effectively, you do not watch TV or go on social media—this is keeping you distracted.

Instead, try things like:

• Exercising

• Meditating

• Contemplating

• Going for a walk

• Reading

Hopefully at least one of these is a part of your day already (they’re so good for you) and you don’t even have to create extra space for them.

If you do have to create extra space, aim for every day and for at least 30 minutes. Ideally longer, but we’re trying to keep it tight here.

I know you might be like “30 minutes just for this? What a waste of time”—I’m telling you, it’s worth it (and fun).

Just make sure you’ve got a quick and easy way to capture any ideas that come up—do not let them escape.

And they will come up.

Always write everything down. Writing itself is magic, but that’s a discussion for another time.

If you do this (right) every day, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll be able to consistently generate better ideas and improve your social media presence—provided you’re not exhausted for some other reason.

If once you go through everything in this letter, you find you’re not able to generate enough great ideas, you can increase how much research you do.

The idea is you fill your mind with high quality information and then during your idea generation periods you start to connect all the dots.

If you haven’t got enough high-quality information in your mind, you won’t be able to come up with enough high-quality ideas.

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Creating / Recording Content + Editing

It may take a while to figure out how to maximise these depending on what kind of content you’re making and how you’re approaching content on a weekly basis.

For recording, one thing we want to aim for—for most types of content (except the off-the-cuff style)—is to not have to spend our creating / recording time generating ideas.

We should have those ideas ready to go.

Let’s assume you’re a musician who’s planned to go and record a bunch of ‘performance’ videos.

I don’t mean live shows—I mean you’ve found some cool locations to film yourself playing and singing along to your own songs, and you’re going to replace the audio with the original recording afterwards.

(^ I’m using this content type as the example because it’s currently one of the things that works best)

Although I don’t do this myself anymore, I highly recommend the batching approach to this or any other content type like this.

Don’t just plan to get one video per one recording session; if you can, record a bunch of stuff all at once.

This will drastically reduce how much of your time it takes up.

I recommend taking a few hours on a Sunday to do this because it works for most people. That might not work for you and that’s fine—go with whatever suits you.

Yes, this will take some time—but the plan here is to get a ton of video to make enough content to last at least a week (preferably a lot more).

I can’t tell you exactly how long this will take you, but regardless of what kind of content you’re making, you should aim to trim it down.

Find the things that take the most time and look at ways to reduce them.

Think templates, presets, shortcuts, etc — any processes that can be condensed, seek them out.

Work on this and over time these recording / creating sessions will be much less of a hassle.

When it comes to editing, it’s the same deal: Aim to use templates, FX presets, etc. wherever possible and try batching your edits.

Never stop searching for ways to maximise your time; there is almost always a way to improve your process.

I also recommend you pick one editing app / program and stick with it long enough to learn it properly and get fast with it.

Or if you have money, you can cut this part out altogether and hire someone to do all this.

If you find someone good and within your budget, this will take a lot of pressure off you!

Workshopping the creation / recording and editing process is tough because of all the contributing factors.

But pay attention, and constantly look for ways to reduce friction and time spent on each individual part of the process.

If you stick with it, you can get it down to a fine art.

And remember, this is a long-term thing. Don’t expect to be good at any of this overnight.

With patience and time, you’ll be unstoppable.

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Posting + Interacting

Ok, we’re back on social media… but only briefly.

Upload your post at whatever time suits you (takes about 5 minutes—if that) and use either 15—30 minutes before or after to interact with people.

Interaction seems to be the thing most musicians want to do the least, but it’s such an important part of building your online presence.

This includes:

— Replying to your comments and DMs

— Interacting with some of the people you’re following who are also following you (can be liking and commenting on their posts or reacting to stories—I go for posts)

— Interacting with new people (outside your existing audience)

— Maybe sharing someone else’s post to your Stories and tagging them.

— And that’s it.

This does not have to take you long at all:

• Replying to comments and DMs: I do this in about 30 mins across two platforms with roughly about 50,000 followers total. If you have less than that, you could probably do it in 10 mins.

• Interacting with your followers: 5 minutes is all you need.

• Interacting with new people: 15 minutes

• Sharing a post to your Stories: 30 seconds, if that.

Once your content is doing a lot more work for you, you can cut some of this out (like interacting with new people—the content will be bringing them to you).

Of course, this will be different for everyone, and it probably won’t be this quick right away.

But with practise, you can make it fast.

So let’s say that’s 30 minutes max interacting each day + another max 60 minutes a week doing research—that comes down to about 4.5 hours per week actually on the platform.

Not bad for building an important part of your music career.

And you know what? You could probably do it on the toilet, seriously!

I can’t calculate exactly how long the rest will take, but if you’re disciplined with your time you can make this manageable.

This will not be easy right at the start.

But eventually it will become manageable—and you’re more capable of getting there than you think!

Once you can master this you can spend less time on social media and more time on what makes you happier. You’ve got this 🙂

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I hope this one gave you something to think about! Give this stuff a go, see how it goes, and if you’d like some personal help, you can check out your options here.

All the love and stay awakened,

Alex​