The Art of Organization

The journey of Flare is nothing amazing or outlandish; however, it’s very much filled with important life lessons and opportunities to learn and grow.

When Flare was a dream shared between five girls, our biggest challenge was making anything happen. Whether it was online or offline, it was hard, sometimes impossible, to get anything done. To be brief, one of these reasons was our organization skills. They were nonexistent and it became frustrating to try anything since we had no direction and no division of the work.

When Flare became an objective between two girls, the first thing that was worked on was organization. Anje and I knew very well that we would only achieve more failure and nothingness if we didn’t work on the factors that led to the failure of Flare’s first version.

Organization.

In this blog post, I, Radium, your favourite chemical, will tell you how Flare made the art of organization our first priority.

Organization

Being organized is very important in all areas of life. That rings true even for a music project. But what does it even mean to be organized?

I could put down the definition of organization and go from that, but I believe organization is often subjective. Here’s what it means for Flare.

When we came to terms with Flare’s new direction, the first thing we did was to evaluate the factors that had contributed to the previous failure. Obviously, organization was one of them. But what within organization didn’t work out?

We came to the conclusion that it was the following:

1. No assignment or division of tasks.

2. No regular checkups.

3. No tool to write important things down.

Knowing what it was that contributed to organization being nonexistent, we quickly had our first meeting and corrected that. With our important objectives in mind, we put down some new guidelines to follow to stay organized.

Knowing that we have social platforms and a website to keep active, we quickly divided the tasks of being active online within the two of us, in a way that felt authentic and easy to maintain. I’m the type to share memes and other fun things, and I like browsing Pinterest for outfit ideas. I quickly created stuff related to that; my series 4W is an example of my consistent task. I create little outfit posts and add a meme at the end. I do one a month, with a different theme every time. I also occasionally share the song that obsesses me in a story.

Anje is outside more than I am, so she shares the highlights of her activities and other fun outings. She also now maintains a bilingual podcast, which I recommend (look at this shameless plug)!

When it comes to music, as you may have noticed, we both work on a monthly individual cover following our calendar (more about that below!), with a duet after. When one works on her cover, the other works on the monthly blog post. So, hint hint, Majesties.

With a six-hour difference between us, we regularly keep up with our tasks through chat messaging (or Anje reminds me of mine, hehe), and if something comes up and we can’t do it anymore, we help each other out. Of course, the tasks and their due date are in our calendar.

All these things help us stay organized, but also motivated. And so far, it’s worked out quite well for us.

Meetings

I know I said I’d talk about the calendar, but first, I’d like to talk about the importance of meetings.

One of the first organization habits we instilled was meetings. Even if we keep up mostly through chat messaging, Anje and I have monthly meetings on our Discord server (shameless plug like we love them) where we take time to just talk. Not just about the month’s new tasks and objectives, but also about what’s been happening in our lives, our projects, or simply to catch up.

These meetings are important, because they allow us to bond and spend some time together even with the distance and the hours between us, but also to agree together about what’s next. We also have meetings to work on music, like we did with our cover of Beyonce’s Black Parade (another shameless plug!).

Tools

We have many tools to allow us to stay as organized as possible. We mostly use the tools provided by Google to help us complete our projects and both have access to our files and documents.

My favourite tool of the Google suite is definitely Google Sheets. I must admit, I love creating spreadsheets. I never understood what it is about blocks that I like, but I love it.

This is why I created a very long and detailed spreadsheet to help us along our organization. It details the process when we post online, with a unique approach for each platform. It also includes a detailed calendar for each month of the year.

The calendar is our life and saviour. It’s the jelly to our peanut butter, the ice to our cream, the seasoning to our meat.

The calendar is monthly, and we write in it what needs to be done for each month. When there’s not much happening, it can feel quite empty. But when it’s full, it’s a must-have tool that has helpful reminders, colours and objectives. Anje and I fill it together and we look at it every time we need to. We also put down important dates to remind each other of any event that could make something in our lives difficult. For example, I wrote down that I’d be busy in April due to grad school. When Anje had her trip, she wrote down the days she’d be gone.

Outside of the calendar, the spreadsheet has our blog ideas, our music projects, our budget (for another blog) and any other thing that we could need.

For bigger projects that can’t fit the spreadsheet, we use Google’s equivalent of PowerPoint. We create a detailed presentation and write down everything in it.

Balance

Last but not least, we try to keep things as balanced as possible. And that involves deleting, moving, or adding tasks, dates or anything else.

As important as it is for us to follow our dates and do our tasks, we’re also aware that rigidity is not helpful. We are organized, yes, but also flexible in scheduling and tasks. We are comfortable moving the due dates of projects if we realize we won’t have them done by a certain date, and we’re also comfortable removing tasks completely.

You never know when life might happen, and it’s important to be open to the plan not being like what we planned. What we decided on the 1st of the month might not happen exactly the 30th or 31st, and that’s okay.

Conclusion

I love writing blogs because I never respect my own guidelines. A blog should usually be between 500 and 600 words. Mine never are.

And they never will!

Anyway, I hope this not-so-short blog post about organization has been insightful, either for your own music project or for your daily life. Reworking the way we work has immensely improved our motivation but also the reach of our goals.

How do you stay organized? Be sure to share your tips with us!