9 Mental Models and Organizational Systems That I Use in Daily Life

The other day I had a realization that although I make my living as a musician, most of my core operating models and principles are not taken from the field of music.

Over the years, I’ve developed a way of thinking, planning, and working that draws on models and systems from a wide assortment of writers and thinkers. The ideas that work for me are the result of a lot of experimentation and tinkering over the course of years. When determining your own operating principles, the important things are to read widely, understand what drives you to work creatively, and discover what scaffolding you need in order to get your best work done. This is the way to create a scalable, repeatable system that can weather the ups and downs of professional and personal life (2020 is the perfect example).

Some of these concepts are frameworks for thinking, while others are well-developed systems. All of these are ideas formulated by others, are things that I’ve practiced over time, and found to work for me.

1. Neuroplasticity. There is a growing body of research in this relatively new field which shows that the brain’s power to remap itself, even under conditions of extreme disability, can allow us to heal, compensate, and grow throughout our lifespan. Two useful books on this subject are Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Heals Itself and Caroline Leaf’s Switch On Your Brain.

2. Growth Mindset. This is a concept that grew out of Carol Dweck’s work on motivation and mindsets (see her TED talk here). In order for neuroplasticity to happen, we need to have the belief that we can grow our core abilities through dedication and hard work. For me, this manifests as an intrinsic desire for continual professional development, even if it results in a few dead ends and tinkering that doesn’t always yield effective results. But when COVID-19 hit, the openness to change enabled me to move our entire studio operations online and identify developing trends in the music education field.

3. Little and Often. I’ve got too much stuff to do. One of the ways that I avoid paralysis is by working at important things for a short time, put them away, do something else, then work on them again a while later. I learned this concept from Mark Forster in his book Secrets of Productive Poeple and found that it helps me to develop a rhythm and clarity that helps me power through difficult things. This idea also works extraordinarily well with practicing an instrument.

4. Getting Things Done. An important part of being able to function at work or home is how to deal with the multiple inputs of email, phone messages, and daily life, put them into relevant contexts and projects, organize our priorities, and do the things that need to be accomplished. At the same time, we need our everyday stuff to be congruent with our medium- and long-term horizons. David Allen’s Getting Things Done system (aka GTD) has been a mainstay of my daily process since 2007.

5. Inbox Zero. We’re all deluged by a mountain of email in our inbox. Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero system (originally devised as a natural next step from David Allen’s GTD system) helps you to maintain control of your expanding inbox with three simple steps: reply, archive, or delete. Now that we have multiple inboxes, it also becomes increasingly important to identify key areas of focus and learn how to triage our email.

6. Plus Minus Next. Developed by Ness Labs’ Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Plus Minus Next is a short weekly journaling practice were you take stock of what worked and what didn’t over the last week, as well as what the next steps are for the coming week. This is a great way to maintain direction over changing contexts and situations from week to week.

7. A Morning Routine. This is by far the most pliable, and the one for which an ideal solution for me might not exist, and if it does, would need to change over time. Starting off the day, early, with the right focused activity can set the stage for the entire day. I’ve tried many different systems over the years, including Morning Pages, the 21-Day Brain Detox, meditation, yoga reading, blogging. All of them work, just not all the time, depending on my mood and situation. A rotation between several of these over the course of time is what works the best. But for me, the important things to consider are getting up early (6:15 is ideal), brewing amazing coffee, and launching into a focused activity right away.

8. Zettelkasten. When developing an idea in creative work, we need an organized place where chaos can live, and which allows us to make the connections that can lead to meaningful output. Nicholas Luhmann was a sociologist who developed a system of writing ideas on index cards and putting them in a slip-box (Zettelkasten in German). He then reviewed these cards regularly in order to find connections between them. The connections he discovered between them led to a steady body of work throughout his career: 58 books and hundreds of articles. In the last few years, there has been significant work in the tech community to create tools that can help to uncover connections between ideas with programs such as The Archive, Roam Research, and Obsidian, to name just a few.

9. Antifragility. Stress and random crap that happen to us (like trying to stay afloat in a pandemic) can be beneficial rather than negative, especially if we take responsibility for our actions and have skin in the game. One of the most important and challenging concepts in Nassim Taleb’s work is antifragility - being able to gain from volatility, randomness, and disorder. I highly recommend Taleb’s book on the subject, and although it’s a long read, it’s highly entertaining and informative, with many applications in real life.

Some Thoughts: Atlassian's 2020 Retrospective on the History of Work

A retrospective infographic by Atlassian shows how technology developed by decade from the 1950s to the present, as well as how perceptions of what the future might be developed alongside it. Some futurists have been remarkably prescient:

In a 1964 interview with the BBC, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke nailed almost all of his predictions for the year 2014. He predicted the use of wireless communications, making us “in instant contact with each other, wherever we may be,” as well as robotic surgery, only missing his prediction that workers would no longer commute to their offices and travel “only for pleasure”.

This Stephane Kasriel quote from the final section might be a bit onerous for those hoping for the security of traditional employment:

The majority of the U.S. workforce will freelance by 2027.

Perhaps those of us in the arts are a bit more robust for already having had this experience?

(Image courtesy of Alex Knight on Unsplash)

Managing the Disconnect Between Having Ideas and Executing Them

Daniel Gross has written some interesting thoughts on improvisational productivity:

The longer you think about a task without doing it, the less novel it becomes to do. Writing things in your to-do list and coming back to them later helps you focus, but it comes at the cost: you’ve now converted an interesting idea into work. Since you’ve thought about it a little bit, it’s less interesting to work on.

It's like chewing on a fresh piece of gum, immediately sticking it somewhere, then trying to convince yourself to rehydrate the dry, bland, task of chewed-up gum. Oh. That thing. Do you really want to go back to that? “We’ve already gone through all the interesting aspects of that problem, and established that there’s only work left”, the mind says.

In knowledge work, this is the transition between having ideas, planning them, and moving into the execution stage. The timeline becomes longer with each of these three steps, at the same time that that the initial clarity of the idea becomes ever more concrete (and paradoxically farther away) the farther you move into the project.

Daniel’s solution:

…my solution is to (somewhat counter-intuitively) not think about the task until I am ready to fully execute it. I do not unwrap the piece of gum until I’m ready to enjoy it in its entirety. I need to save the fun of thinking to pull myself into flow.

This is where a system comes into play, as well as the world of productivity tools that can help you to get there. I must admit that I fell down the rabbit-hole of the productivity world long ago, and it has without a doubt helped me to get where I am at present. There are one-size-fits-all solutions such as David Allen’s Getting Things Done (check out this quick run-through of the system) and I used this system for many years. And although using GTD always helped me to understand my current responsibilities, it never got me into a flow state with any consistency. At present, I use the Simple Scanning method of Mark Forster, which I find helps me keep track of my complete responsibilities as much as other systems, with a much more intuitive moment-to-moment sense of what i need to do and how it’s progressing over time.

But as someone who works in the portfolio-based world of the arts (which only partly explains the kind of work I currently do), managing even one project becomes far more challenging if you combine it with a bunch of other projects in multiple areas of focus. Here are some elements that add complexity to the mix:

• the degree of agency on a project: is this something that I have the final say on, or is it for someone else?

• separating strategy from next actions

• projects that have defined end-points or ongoing responsibilities

• managing the nature of different work contexts: home office, the work office, on the road

• discretionary time vs. pre-scheduled events (ie. teaching lessons, performing, examining)

• a constant stream of new information arriving in my inbox

Learning to say no has also helped me clarify my priorities considerably. So my method of working is constantly evolving, and I love talking about it. Leave your comments below!

How Wendy and I Designed our Company Logo

Back in 2012 when Wendy and I made the decision to move all our self-employment work to a newly incorporated company, we encountered a pretty steep learning curve. All our revenue and expenses (which up until then had been thrown in a box and dealt with over two hellish weeks in April) needed to be processed on the same day in QuickBooks Online, and accurate bookkeeping became a must in order for our business to run in an orderly manner.

We also needed a logo for our invoices and letterhead. I suggested to Wendy that we budget a few thousand dollars and find an advertising company that could encapsulate our vision as a technology-based arts startup that engages in a variety of business activities*.

Wendy’s reply: “No, you’re going to sit down with Microsoft Word or Pages and figure it out yourself. Then you’re going to show several different versions to me and we’ll agree on something.”

So I sat down with Pages and experimented for a while using different fonts and font sizes, with italics, boldface, and superscript, and came up with several different possibilities. Wendy and I worked through several of the early versions, did some fine tuning with character spacing and baseline shifts in Pages, and eventually agreed on what you see above. (Update: Wendy insists that her role in the creation of the logo is considerably larger than what I suggested above. Perhaps my memory is a little too selective…)

Total cost: $0.

What I learned was that if you arrive at a challenging task with the mindset that you can learn the skills needed to accomplish it yourself, it becomes doable. Of course you could outsource it to the pros for a price and save a lot of time. But what you gain from doing it yourself is the self-knowledge that you can learn a skill, apply it to your career, and have the satisfaction of having built something yourself.

If more of us in the arts have the vision to take that first step and learn how to do things slightly out of our comfort zone, the range of bold and visionary activities we can accomplish becomes considerably wider.

*At present, our business activities include music lessons in Oakville with four teachers, operating two blogs (The Collaborative Piano Blog and this eponymous one), providing described video services, Wendy’s operatic performing, and her growing art business).

Musicians Should Learn Career Skills Just Like They Learn Music

Part of working as an emerging musician today is developing the skill-set that can help you to gain a foothold in the profession at a time when there have never been so many people trying to do exactly the same thing, and the standards have never been higher. If you’re already established in the profession, keeping up with the relentless pace of present reality will require a continual growth and broadening of your professional horizons, even in the final decades of your career. So many of these critical skills are non-musical:

• self-care and mental health

• marketing yourself on social media

• email management

• project management

• grant writing

• financial skills

These may seem like things that are completely apart from playing an instrument, but the kind of careful daily preparation that can get you there is more than familiar to musicians. David Perrell in Learn Like an Athlete talks about how many of these elite learning abilities of athletes and musicians need to be applied to knowledge work.

Athletes train. Musicians train. Performers train. But knowledge workers don’t.

Knowledge workers should train like LeBron, and implement strict “learning plans.” To be sure, intellectual life is different from basketball. Success is harder to measure and the metrics for improvement aren’t quite as clear. Even then, there’s a lot to learn from the way top athletes train. They are clear in their objectives and deliberate in their pursuit of improvement.

Knowledge workers should imitate them.

Being a musician no different from being a knowledge worker. You may have already developed your elite musical skills, but in order to get the chance to actually use them, you need to be able to create a situation where you can either get hired or create your own work. Music teachers need to be able to sell a high-priced product within specific communities. Performers need to market themselves to their audience and build a fan base.

Here’s David’s plan:

Learn in three-month sprints and commit to a new learning project every quarter.

Even the longest projects are simply a collection of short term tasks. Knowing that, you should break down the project into daily increments, and create a series of daily and weekly goals to learn the skills required to complete the project on time. 

The end goal should be clear. Start by writing down a positive vision for your future. Focus on the end goal, not the skill itself. For example, rather than saying “I want to learn how to draw,” I focused on the end goal: “moving forward, all the charts, graphs, and images on my website will be hand-drawn.” 

Just like learning music! David also has a template that helps you put this type of learning program into practice.

What are your non-musical learning goals and challenges? Leave a comment below.

(Via Marginal Revolution. Image courtesy of Providence Doucet on Unsplash.)

Experiments in Rejection and Failure

Most of the things that I’ve done have taken me quite a long time to realize any sense of real visibility in doing them. That’s just always been the arc of my life in anything that I was doing. I didn’t really get any traction with my career for about the first decade. I now look back and call that first decade experiments in rejection and failure.

The quote above is from Debbie Millman, the guest on Jocelyn Glei’s latest episode of Hurry Slowly, who talks about how the most important projects in life take time and simply cannot be realized in short timespans. Another quote from Debbie on her conversation with David Lee Roth (of Van Halen fame):

“We were talking about the arc of a career and what he [David Lee Roth] said was, ‘You don’t really ever want to reach the peak because when you reach the peak you’re often alone, and it’s always cold. The only direction is down.’ I thought, ‘My, God, that’s got to be one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever heard.’”

Debbie’s way of looking at the trajectory of long-term creative projects is useful in plotting your own path, and I like her idea of the 10-year creative plan. The long roads are often the ones with the most potential.

Debbie Millman: The Speed of Achievement (Apple Podcasts, Spotify)

(Photo courtesy of Diego Jimenez on Unsplash)

A Life of Total Work?

What if our entire lives were taken up with work? Andrew Taggart looks at what such a scenario might look like in his recent article for Aeon:

Imagine that work had taken over the world. It would be the centre around which the rest of life turned. Then all else would come to be subservient to work. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, anything else – the games once played, the songs hitherto sung, the loves fulfilled, the festivals celebrated – would come to resemble, and ultimately become, work. And then there would come a time, itself largely unobserved, when the many worlds that had once existed before work took over the world would vanish completely from the cultural record, having fallen into oblivion.

More about how Total Work plays out:

Following this taskification of the world, she sees time as a scarce resource to be used prudently, is always concerned with what is to be done, and is often anxious both about whether this is the right thing to do now and about there always being more to do. Crucially, the attitude of the total worker is not grasped best in cases of overwork, but rather in the everyday way in which he is single-mindedly focused on tasks to be completed, with productivity, effectiveness and efficiency to be enhanced. How? Through the modes of effective planning, skilful prioritising and timely delegation. The total worker, in brief, is a figure of ceaseless, tensed, busied activity: a figure, whose main affliction is a deep existential restlessness fixated on producing the useful.

Hey, that sounds really professional, and not unlike the lives of many people I know, including myself at various times over the last 30 years.

Taggart’s article is highly disquieting and raises more questions than it answers. But perhaps what these questions teach us is that even if (to quote Nicholas Bate) the purpose of work is purpose itself, we need to find contemplation, friendships, and cool things to do quite apart from that purpose.

(Image courtesy of Bethany Legg on Unsplash)

From Brainstorm to Project in One Evening

A little bit of brainstorming can go a long way when you’re starting something new. Pictured above is the one-page project plan I wrote out in my Leuchtturm notebook one evening in late February when yet another winter storm caused the cancellation of a concert that several of my students were to perform at.

This small glitch in my schedule gave me the opening I needed to jump-start a project that I intended to eventually get to over the coming weeks in a leisurely manner, and moved up the launch from weeks to days. The plan I came up with was only a bare-bones sketch, but provided the framework for the actions that followed with a lot of subsequent review and adjustment. And in hindsight, once I had taken the initial steps, it felt really easy.

That project plan above led to the the blog that you’re reading right now.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with people over the last few weeks about how the musical profession, both with performing and teaching, is moving more quickly than ever into an entrepreneurial model. The scarcity model, where an ever-growing pool of highly educated professionals apply for a limited number of academic and performing positions, is is a zero-sum game that seems to be shrinking every year*.

But through the ability to generate new ideas and projects, we’re able to create genuine growth in the arts. Understanding a few basics of product creation and marketing, we’ll be able to find those who are genuinely interested in our projects, develop the personal connections, create, and sell a product, whether it be our expertise, a concert series, or something entirely new.

Musicians need to be able to do this.

Since I started this blog in early February, here are some of the things that have transpired:

• I’ve come into contact and development friendships with many amazing people in the fields of music, productivity, and business development.

• I learned a new platform (Squarespace).

• An entirely new audience for my writing.

• I landed my first clients in an entirely new field for me (life coaching for musicians), and intend to pursue this line of work in the coming months.

• My teaching has been transformed through contact with a host of new ideas related to life coaching and personal productivity.

Above all, it’s the friendships and conversations arising from this project that I value the most. New ideas and connections lead to more of the same, and this is the greatest advantage of the entrepreneurial model once you tap into its vast potential.

And it all started with a few basic ideas written out in a notebook that coalesced into a simple project plan hatched over the course of an evening.

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* I’m indebted to Jennifer Rosenfeld of iCadenza, whose explanations of the entrepreneurial and scarcity models have helped me to understand a lot of the trends that are currently going on in the profession.

Get Into the Studio

Steven Pressfield on the importance of showing up and starting:

Shut up and get into the studio. Once your physical envelope is standing before the easel, your heart and mind will follow.

If you want to write, plant your backside in front of the typewriter. Don’t get up from the chair, no matter how many brilliantly-plausible reasons your Resistance-churning brain presents to you. Sooner or later your fingers will settle onto the keys. Not long after that, I promise, the goddess will slip invisibly but powerfully into the room.

Technology vs. Business Models

The development of business models behind technological innovation is what will fuel growth, argues Irving Wladawsky-Berger:

New technology alone, - no matter how transformative, - is not enough to propel a business into the future.  The business model wrapped around the technology is the key to its success or failure…

…Business model innovation has long been the domain of disruptive startups looking to compete against established companies by changing the rules of the game, - and, hopefully, creating new markets and reshaping entire industries.  But, it’s no longer enough for established companies to just roll out improved products and services based on their once-reliable business models.

This is something that I’ve emphasized in my workshops on technology in the music studio - having devices and apps won’t make a big difference in your teaching. It’s the agenda behind it (both core pedagogical process and business model) that will provide the impetus for making technology genuinely useful.

(Via Wally Bock)