Organizing your time with the MAPS system (Composer Business Skills)

As a freelancer and artist, it can be absolutely brutal to try and mange your schedule. Should you spend time writing music, finding work or doing social media? How do you organize your time in a way that is effective for both artistry and business. How do you determine what tasks are worth doing or how to block of your time?

This first post will be about how we can organize tasks into what I consider to be the four main categories of any business: Marketing, Administration, Production and Sales - or MAPS for short. It feels so sterile and unsexy to say it in those terms so feel free to change them to whatever you need to feel inspired.

These four categories cover pretty much any task you will have in any business, so let’s break them down more in depth.

Marketing

First off we have marketing. Marketing exists to create a marketplace - ie let people know that you have a product and you are selling. You can be the greatest composer in the world, but if nobody knows you exist nobody will listen to (or buy!) your music. Marketing solves this problem.

Marketing tasks can include anything from social media posts, running ads, attending networking events, content creation, commenting on people’s posts, etc. Generally anything that leads to a general awareness of your existence would fall under marketing.

Admin

Next is administration - this is the “business skills” section you probably think of when thinking of businesses. All that paperwork - taxes, websites, contracts, accounting, scheduling, etc. I would categorize in the administration section. There are some tasks on here that need to be scheduled in regular intervals (Taxes) and others that are more project dependent (contracts) - so just be aware of the ebb and flow here when blocking out your time.

Production

Production is perhaps the category musicians are best at. This is where you actually create your product or perform your service, in this case composing. Client work falls into this block, as does composition, songwriting, teaching lessons, creating sample packs, etc. Anything where you are making time to make a product or performing a service.

Sales

Lastly, we have sales. Sales has a bad rep and people hate it but it doesn’t need to be bad (check out my other posts on sales!). Sales is when you are ACTIVELY engaging in the act of trying to make or close a sale - this is cold contacting, taking meetings with leads, negotiating, following up on emails, etc.

An important note:

You may get confused at the difference between marketing and sales - you may even consider them to be basically the same thing but it’s important to understand that they are not. Marketing makes sales easier. Marketing exists to create an environment where sales can happen. But without sales, marketing is useless. It is an easy trap to fall into where you are sitting around doing marketing all day, thinking you are making progress but ultimately sales is where the needle (your bank account) moves and it is as important to spend time in the hard one-on-one people world skills of sales as it is to write good music, be on top of your book keeping, and make content to make sure people know you exist. In short, don’t neglect sales and don’t confuse it with marketing.

Blocking:

When I am blocking off my week, I don’t do things in terms of tasks - rather I block off my calendar in terms of categories. 8-11 might be marketing with 12-3pm being production. This sort of blocking makes it easier for me to get into a deep focus and get things done without having to switch gears so constantly. My schedule will vary week to week based on what work needs to happen, but generally this is the system I use.

In the next post, we will look at how to prioritize tasks inside of these 4 groups so be sure to subscribe for more. In the meantime, check out my free email course, "Getting Your First Scoring Gig in 7 Days" that guides you through step by step day by day how to find work as a composer with a free checklist to help you get organized!