Happy Friday!

Dual perspectives

In a 2009 article, computer scientist Paul Graham discussed the “Maker’s schedule” versus the “Manager’s schedule.” The point of his article isn’t relevant to this newsletter, but the idea that different roles require different mindsets and different logistics is highly relevant. It’s something I’ve written about before—see Weekend Upgrade 4: Coaches and Players—but we’ll explore a different angle here.

Drawing on my background as a composer and conductor (and adapted from the Introduction of my upcoming book, The Rhythms of Productivity), this newsletter will delve into the productivity value of maintaining dual perspectives.

💡 Cultivate your Inner Composer and Conductor 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

A Composer’s Perspective

I earned two college degrees in music. The first was a bachelor’s in composition. To show you why that’s relevant, let’s journey back to the early 1700s and the composer, Johann Sebastian Bach.

At West Virginia University, I studied 18th-century counterpoint, a compositional approach modeled on the music of Bach and his contemporaries. We studied that not because we were expected to write music in a nearly 400-year-old style, but so that we would learn certain fundamental rules of construction and the interaction of melodic lines.

Learning this way is valuable, but it can lead to a dangerous misunderstanding. In our class, if we wrote parallel fifths or octaves in our exercises, those were marked wrong (you don’t need to know what a parallel fifth is—but I had to know!). Or if the soprano line ventured more than an octave away from the alto line, or we assigned more than one voice to the third scale degree in a major chord, those were marked wrong too.

The potential misunderstanding is this: because we were restricted by these rules, we could assume that Bach was also following these rules. He might not have had an organ professor circling his parallel fifths with red ink, but he still followed the rules of 18th-century counterpoint.

But that’s not true. Bach followed his ear. Parallel fifths sounded wrong to him, so he didn’t write them. Then we extrapolated rules from Bach’s compositional practice and turned them into exercises. We learned the rules, but not their aural underpinning.

Composers do not write music based on structural rules. Or, at least, good ones don’t.

Bach to Sondheim

Let’s jump forward 350 years to another composer writing in a very different style, renowned musical theatre composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.

In his excellent two-volume book of collected lyrics, Sondheim shared three mindsets he followed in his compositional process. The first was “Less is more.” The third was “God is in the details,” a flipped perspective on the expression “the devil is in the details.”

The second mindset is what I want to zero in on here: “Content dictates form.”

What does that mean? The story you’re telling determines the structure of the story, not the other way around. Your symphony’s structure emerges from the musical themes, not the other way around.

This is why so many movies and TV shows feel boring—they start with forms that “they know work” (“they” being producers, usually) and cram all sorts of content into those forms, whether it makes sense or not. They’re violating Sondheim’s dictum, and producing formulaic drivel.

Main ideas and core themes, as you work with them, will “tell you” how they want to be assembled, whether you’re writing a symphony, a musical, or a movie.

Takeaway from the Composer’s Perspective

The first six years of my productivity journey, 2014–2020, I ran GTD in Todoist. Though I was reasonably productive, I faced challenges that I bet will sound familiar to GTDers. I usually cleared my Inbox daily, but if I didn’t, it snowballed until I stopped using it altogether. I usually did Weekly Reviews, but sometimes I’d let a few weeks pass and my system would slip out of sync. And even when I was on my best GTD behavior, I’d still have to overhaul the system every six months or so because it was bogged down with outdated or extraneous clutter.

The Composer’s Perspective made me realize that my primary problem in productivity was that I was putting structure first and cramming potential action into it, rather than taking action first and letting my structure follow. I was allowing the preordained structure of GTD and the limited, opinionated feature set of Todoist shape the way I worked, and those limitations restricted what was possible. My every-six-month overhauls happened because work that didn’t fit those limitations gradually piled up into blood clots for my productivity system.

To truly appreciate the “action first, structure second” approach, you have to understand how to convert action into structure. Doing that requires the Conductor’s Perspective.

A Conductor’s Perspective

My second degree was a master’s in conducting, with an emphasis on orchestral conducting.

The job of a conductor is to recreate the intentions of a composer. Granted, many conductors are hailed for “their interpretations” of works, but even widely varying interpretations are rooted in the instructions the composer wrote on the page.

A good conductor unlocks the story told by the form of the piece, clarifying for our ears the repetition of main themes and the relationships between musical ideas.

In a sense, a conductor is the opposite of a composer. Composers allow the musical themes to dictate a work’s structure, while conductors seek the structure so they can best articulate the work’s musical themes.

Structure is repetition

Structure in music is defined almost entirely by what repeats and what doesn’t.

Sonata form, for instance, is made up of three or four sections: Exposition, Development, Recapitulation, and optional Coda. Within the exposition are two (occasionally three) contrasting main melodic themes. The exposition is played twice before the development begins, a direct, literal repetition of those first themes. The development takes the themes and plays with them, varying their keys and mood, sometimes dovetailing or entirely overlapping them. Then the recapitulation is almost a direct repetition of the exposition, with the usual change that the second theme is now in the same key as the first theme. If there’s a coda, it’s a sort of second development that leads to a satisfying conclusion. The pattern of repetition of the themes and sections is what makes sonata form sonata form.

There are other common musical structures, too. A-B-A is a simple three-part form defined by the repetition of the A-section. Rondo form is an extreme example of the power of repetition: roughly A-B-A-C-A-D-A-E-A… and so forth, with that repeating A-section as the unifying factor. We rely on repetition in our popular music, too. 32-bar song form is made up of four eight-measure segments structured A-A-B-A. The “Great American Songbook” and the majority of well-known Christmas songs follow this pattern. And even though 99% of the listeners don’t know anything about musical structure, the repetition that defines that structure is what our ears rely on to make sense of the music.

Repetition is the key, and it is the role of the interpreter—for choral or orchestral works, the conductor—to unpack that repetition for us the listeners.

Takeaway from the Conductor’s Perspective

The conductor’s perspective illuminates the second phase of converting action to structure, a process I call Capturing Recurrence™. Once you’ve taken action, you look at what you did, ask “How can I do this better next time?”, and take the necessary steps so that you will take that action more effectively the next time you do it.

Just like musical forms, the structure of the system you build will emerge from the repetition of your action. Instead of sonata or rondo form, you’ll use templates, automations, procedures, and more (what you’ve heard me call Productivity Bridges™) to capture the recurrence and allow you to work better and faster in the future.

Inconsistent Truths

In the composer’s perspective, I claimed that good composers do not follow rules. Then in the conductor’s perspective, I detailed a variety of common musical structures. If composers don’t follow rules, how do we have any common structures at all? The musical truths implied by this apparent inconsistency are also productivity truths, so pay close attention.

The 1st Truth: Content dictates form, but forms and structure clarify what is possible

Sondheim’s “Content dictates form” does not mean that form is irrelevant. Sondheim’s masterpiece Follies contains many prime examples. Some parts of the show are set in the 1920s and 30s, so Sondheim’s songs for those parts are pastiches of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and others. The songs deliberately evoke a form. But note: this is still “content dictates form,” because the time period of the songs is integral to the content.

Likewise, in our productivity systems, there will be certain forms that are predictable and reliable. We may not know every piece of information about a given project, but we can predict certain information that all projects—or specific subsets of projects—share. We may not know what a certain template will look like in advance, but we do have set rules for creating a template. We may not know the steps of an automation in advance, but we know what an automation looks like and can build one in our tool(s) of choice.

The 2nd Truth: Existing structures make it easier to create new, more specific structures

Creativity and productivity both thrive on the push and pull between emergent and prescribed structure. Take Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the one that famously begins with a unison orchestra G G G E-flaaaaaaaaat. The first movement is in sonata form. Audiences in Beethoven’s time (or in this time, for that matter) might not have known to call it sonata form, but their ears would have recognized the pattern of repetition.

I mentioned “optional Coda” above when I discussed sonata form. The coda is largely an invention of Beethoven’s, and it relies on the audience’s expectations in order to subvert them. They’re expecting the movement to end after the recapitulation, but Beethoven plows onward into another section altogether. In short, the existence of the prescribed structure, sonata form, gives Beethoven an opportunity to innovate and iterate, and his musical ideas provide the fuel for the emergence of new or modified forms.

Our productivity systems develop in a similar way. If I have a structure to capture projects, I also have the structure to capture a repeatable “travel project,” complete with a list of toiletries that I always need to pack and a reminder to change the battery in my Ring doorbell before I go. And if I have a “travel project,” I can create a “Business Trip to San Diego” project, that includes my toiletries and battery replacement, but also reminds me to book a room at my favorite hotel and make reservations at a new restaurant. The simple structure allows more specific structure to emerge when it is needed.

The 3rd Truth: We are both composers and conductors

The secret to successful productivity requires us to emulate my favorite composer, Gustav Mahler. Mahler was both a composer and a conductor—in fact, though his symphonies have stood the test of time, in his own lifetime he was much better known as a conductor. It’s not easy to be both a composer and a conductor, because the mindsets are different. It’s especially difficult if you’re conducting a piece you also composed. By all accounts, Mahler was an effective conductor even when his own works were on the program.

Like Mahler, we are both composers and conductors. When we’re in the midst of our work, we follow the themes and ideas. We compose by taking action. When we’re planning our work, we capture action into structures that improve future work, and we modify existing forms to create new ones. We conduct by recognizing and emphasizing repetition—capturing recurrence.

Combining our perspectives

The way you work and the tools you choose to support that work need to make it easier for you to do two things: (1) Take Action and (2) Capture Recurrence™.

When you Take Action, it’s your Inner Composer doing what needs to be done. When you Capture Recurrence, it’s your Inner Conductor making sense of what you did and offering some solutions for taking action more effectively next time.

If you can master those two perspectives and their associated actions, you’ll be equipped to tackle any work that might come your way—and to get better and better at it every time you do it!

What do I do next?

(1) Take 2 minutes and answer this question: What’s one thing I learned in this newsletter that I can put into practice right away?

By committing to a specific action, you make it much more likely you’ll do it.

(2) Take a few minutes to take stock of the way you work now.

In what ways are the structures in your systems and the limitations of your tools interfering with the flow of your work? And how could you apply an “action-first, structure second” approach to fix that?

If this was valuable for you:

Share the newsletter with someone you think would also get value from it! https://rjn.st/weekend-upgrade-newsletters​

Plus, you should check out the outline of my upcoming book, The Rhythms of Productivity!

Until next time, friends:

Get in touch with your Inner Composer and Conductor!

R.J.
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P.S. If you’d like to dig into the core productivity principles of The Rhythms of Productivity before the book releases, sign up for Cohort 11: The Final Cohort that launches on Friday, November 24. Everyone who attends Cohort 11 will get a Special Thanks in the book!