Songwriting Organization

Writing to me feels like a skill. It takes discipline, patience, determination, and refinement in order for me to finally publish and share. 

Songwriting feels like those same things, but also feels blissful, joyful, and excitingly magical. 

When you’re learning a new song, and you get into a flow, and have is nearly memorized and can fully enjoy playing in that moment, it’s blissful. 

When you’re doing a task around the house and all of a sudden a line of lyrics comes to mind that fit perfectly with a song you’ve been working on for 6+ months, that’s joyful. 

When you’re having an exhausting day, with little to no energy left, and you sit on the couch to finally relax, and then an entire song, 2 verses and a chorus just comes to your mind seamlessly, now that’s extremely exciting and magical. 

I have been extremely challenged, humbled, and overjoyed as I’ve dived into my songwriting over the last few years. To be in a place to start sharing my journey feels very scary, and I’ve gotta say I’m quite nervous. The songs I write are a form of art I am so deeply in love with. To share them is extremely vulnerable, and I’ve questioned whether to share them at all. But for some reason, a little bird in the back of my mind is pushing me to share. 

My ideas come to me at random times of day. Usually, I have lyrics or ideas come to mind. Occasionally, I’ll have a melody, and I’ll quickly pull out my voice memo app and record it. With diving into my songwriting, I knew I needed to create a process that would allow and assist me to quickly capture ideas I have. I needed to organize these ideas in a way that I can continuously work on them, and slowly finish a song one by one. 

By day, I work as an operations manager. To give context, I am a shining Capricorn, with the need to organize and create streamlined processes, almost to a fault, in my daily life. My major strengths are organizing, analyzing, and staying on top of my to-do list. To say I was up for the challenge of creating a great process for my songwriting is an understatement. With a little research and using the knowledge I had from work, I created it. 

First things first, my ideas and thoughts needed to be easily accessible, no matter the time or day. Song ideas tend to creep into my mind when I least expect them, and I needed to be ready. I felt the need to have this process easily accessible on my phone, so when inspiration strikes, it’s as easy as grabbing my phone. 

I also started to realize that ideas came in different forms. Although it’s indeed magical when a full song comes to me in one sitting, that is rare. More often than not, it’s one line, a title, a hook, or maybe just an idea of a feeling. I needed a way to capture and organize all these ideas, no matter the stage, and have them easily accessible to continue to work on. 

At my current job, I use Asana, a task management software, that allows me to organize all my to-dos, and create a streamlined process for my daily tasks. With this experience, I decided to create a process similar for my songwriting. But for the sake of trying something new and getting experience in a different software, I decided to use Notion. 

I love Notion because it’s extremely clean visually. As I set up my process, it felt like I was putting together my own site or app for my own creativity to-do list. I decided that with each new song idea- no matter the stage- I would create a new task for it. These tasks, then, all within one Songwriting task board, are sorted into the following stages- 

💡Title/Idea: Song is only a title, feeling, or idea.

📝Lyrics: Song has a few lines, or the majority of the lyrics. 

🎧Melody: Song has a melody and chords to go with it. 

🎀Verse 2 & Finishing: Song needs a second verse, or final finishing lyrics. 

🌊Flow: Song needs a better flow in some way.

🎙️Recording: Song is finished and I’m ready to record. 

🖥️Editing: Song has been recorded, but needs production editing.  

✅Share: Song is done, and ready to share.

Songs can be essentially tagged with any of these stages, more than one, allowing me to organize the songs and ideas based on what stage I feel they are in. For example, if a song has a few lines of lyrics, but still mostly just an idea it would fall in Title/Idea and Lyrics. 

Now that I have a process to keep track of my songs, like keeping track of tasks -I needed to ensure I keep track of all the voice memos and documents that are used when creating the song. Within each of the song tasks, I have a section to add various links: 

• Doc’s

• Audio

• Last Edited- Auto Date

• Splice

I then organize all my songs into new folders within my Drive. Each folder contains all the documents, voice recordings, sample audios, etc., in one place.

And that, my friends, is how I organize my songwriting.

I have this annoyingly overplayed mental battle of never feeling like I’m doing enough in life,  especially with the things I love. I think it’s ingrained into me that if I create a streamlined process, then I’ll feel like I’m at least doing that much, and that is enough. It’s the same with songwriting. I so badly wish I could quit my job and only focus on the hobbies I love. But that’s unrealistic, unfortunately. Instead, I’ve got to find a way to quickly and efficiently capture my ideas, so my time spent working on my music can be as effective and efficient as possible. Even if I only have 20 minutes, I have an organized process that allows me to dive into a song and pick up where I left off. Trying to get more bang for my buck, ya know?

So far, I’ve been very happy with the process I’ve created. It’s been efficient and productive, just as I set out to make it to be. It’s been so satisfying to witness my catalogue of songs and ideas grow. It’s felt very reassuring knowing that this is something I not only love to do, but my heart and soul are truly helping me along the way, as ideas and thoughts continue to come. 

Do you have a process for writing you’re in love with? I would love feedback and ideas! 

Thanks for reading!