Outwardly, matters are settling. The suspects are no longer at large. Some Berklee buildings are open. My friends in Watertown and Cambridge have mostly stopped circulating photos of SWAT teams in their backyards. My children have been reassured of their safety, and I’ve stopped obsessively checking the news for developments.

It’s business as usual, sort of. Except, that it’s not. Because there are materials I’ve needed for a week that remain under FBI lockdown, so I can’t move certain tasks forward. People I need to make decisions or provide information are similarly constrained, and many of them are facing a host of new, complex, urgent, and stressful issues in their work, due to the major inconveniences that the tragedy brought with them.

While those of us who are so indirectly affected might no longer be terrified, or in mourning, or in a logistical nightmare, there remains a pervasive wave of general stress that seems to be permeating throughout the community, now.

That’s the trickle-down crabenomics. A system was traumatized, the major aftershocks have dissipated, but the networks of work and life remain under pressure caused by that great disruption, due to the backlog of obligations that accumulated as a result of not being able to attend them efficiently for so long.

It’s hard to peg this current phase as tragic, compared to where we’ve been. But it remains new territory.

I’ve made quite a few mistakes in the past week. I’ve delegated some tasks that I should have resolved myself, which I do sometimes when I’m feeling stressed and frantically trying to clear my desk and my head. My OCD is in full swing, and I’ve likely made a pest out of myself regarding some details that really could have been let go, which is driving people crazy. I’ve let a detail or two slip. I’ve answered some emails tersely, particularly when others are delegating things to me that I don’t have the psychic space to address. And I’ve watched a lot of others doing the same.

While the intensity of emotion is reduced this week, there is a level of residual crabbiness that I’m witnessing, and crabbiness is so contagious—even in the best of times.

Here’s how I’m personally trying to staunch this trickle, and I welcome other suggestions. First, before I click “Send,” I’m reviewing my emails with a crabometer, to reduce any unintentional acid in my pen. Second, I’m trying to leave the public swearing to Big Papi Ortiz, so as not to raise the general anxiety level of those around me. Third, I’m trying to minimize the work/stress/over-communication barrage that I generate for others, for a bit, while they join me in digging out of their ruts. Fourth, I’m avoiding checking the news more than once a day, or so.  And fifth, I’m reminding myself of the good that will come from my personal work. As a colleague wrote to me recently, “We’re all on the same team, here.” And forgive me for putting this in overly grand terms, but I truly believe that the work we are doing here at Berklee is ultimately beneficial to the whole world.

It’s time to cool down and focus on making everything better. I hope you join me.

GRAMMY^®

GRAMMY^®s (note the lowercase s)

GRAMMY^® Award

GRAMMY Awards^®

GRAMMY^® Award winner

So, the word GRAMMY is always all uppercase.

Source: The Recording Academy marketing department. Thanks for that!

Note: In running prose, common practice is to include the ® symbol in the word’s first usage, but after that, it can be omitted.

(Note: You can view this larger at the YouTube site.)

A project is running late, and I’ve had to put myself in hyper-focus lockdown mode in order to rein it back in. So, I’m keeping the Internet more or less off, only letting myself use Dictionary.com, and hiding from the social media sites that call to me like sirens, from their treacherous rocks. I monitor email only every couple hours, just to make sure nothing urgent has come up, and that I’m keeping everyone busy that I can. Chat is mostly off. I’m not checking in with anyone to get their status reports, and am temporarily not giving some languishing authors any productivity pep talks. I haven’t started my tomato seedlings, I’m not peeking at my new book’s activity analytics, and I’m only writing this blog post because it’s nighttime and I’m taking stock of my strategies for keeping focused, in hopes that it will help me keep the momentum going after tomorrow, which is shaping up to be a brief reprieve from this charrette. I’ve been soaking in coffee, and avoiding sugar, red meat, and certainly alcohol, until after I’ve moved enough of the day’s ink. Okay, enough pixels. And not checking the news during my coffee breaks. Just editing. Because by nature, I would rather do any of these things than maintain this intensity. But that’s what needs to happen, for a few days, if this book is to be in print by an important deadline this fall, in seven months. It seems a little far out, but I see the potential cascade of falling dominoes that must be circumvented, so here I am.

Ideally, project managers should focus on strictly PM tasks, rather than having their hands in content. But in many environments, that purity of specialization isn’t possible. Particularly in relatively small shops, where everyone wears multiple hats. And particularly in the arts. There are many reasons why being a generalist, like this, is a bad idea. First, there are benefits for project managers to be emotionally detached from the content, so that we can focus on making cool-headed logistical decisions, regarding a project’s rate of progress and ultimate destiny. Sentimentality towards details can sabotage the over-arching project vision. (Yes, it can also save it, but for now, let’s acknowledge that it can sabotage it too.) Second, fragmented attention leads to mistakes. Multitasking generally results in loss of quality control, and when experts practice their highest trade, we get the best results, if it’s all managed well. Again, though, while that kind of division of labors is an ideal, it is not always the most cost effective. I’ve got my own hands deep into the content. It works out okay most of the time, but there are periods like this when I’ve got to stake out some territory and focus, on one side of the work or the other.

This week, I’ve had to pull my personal nuclear option for maintaining focus: keeping incense burning most of the time. The perpetual jasmine scent and slight stinging in my eyes reminds me that I don’t have the luxury to mess around. I’m not answering the phone, and only checking for messages every two hours. Strangely, the world hasn’t come crashing down around me, yet. And in the past week or so, I’ve reviewed 600 pages of galley proofs and edited about 90,000 words. Too much. And not enough.

I imagine the incense smoke rising from my writer’s garret in central Massachusetts, reaching out a gossamer strand towards the Vatican, where the College of Cardinals’ black smoke will be soon similarly wafting upwards, as they burn their papal ballots. Hopefully, it will turn white for all of us before too long.

The actual titles for the people performing these roles varies. The sponsor might be called a record label executive, publisher, or client. The project manager might be called a producer, tour manager, recording engineer, or agent. The visionary could be an artist, company founder, teacher, or author. And these roles might be fulfilled by three different people, by just one or two, or even a lot more people involved—most commonly, in the case of a board serving as sponsor or a band serving as the visionary.

However the roles are staffed, the three roles are present. Understanding how they relate can help alleviate some tensions and make sure that the essential functions are covered.

Let’s take a look at what each role’s responsibilities.

The project sponsor is the person who decides whether or not the project should exist. He or she is its chief advocate and controls its funding. This person might be on staff or might be a client. Say, for example, that you are a producer, and for your current project, the parents of a teen-aged singer/songwriter hire you to produce their daughter’s album. The parents are the project’s sponsors; they can turn the money faucet on and off. The producer is the project manager, who coordinates all the logistics involved in making the vision real, given the resources that the sponsor’s funding makes available. The singer/songwriter daughter is the visionary—the person who imagines the project’s content (guided by the producer, to one degree or another).

This means that ultimately, the parents are in control, in this case. The project belongs to them, and they are ultimately the “deciders.” If the daughter starts failing math, they could decide to halt work on her recording until her grades improve. If the daughter tells you, the project manager, that what her parents say doesn’t matter and that you must proceed with booking the studio, you have to clarify that it’s her parents’ call, not hers, and certainly not yours.  Remember the golden rule: Whoever has the gold makes the rules!

Let’s look at a more corporate model. Imagine a television studio. The board of directors meet with the CEO and together, they decide to send down a mandate to a senior executive vice president that they need a hit show. The VP sets a market research team in motion, and they determine that a viable concept could be a reality show about the adventures of a guitar technician. (It could happen….) So, the vice president tells an A&R/producer guy on his team to find a suitable guitar technician for this role, who will serve as both the on-screen talent and the show’s creative director. Auditions are held, and a charismatic and visionary surfer-dude guitar tech gets hired.

Here, the vice president is in the role of project sponsor, though the project’s funding is ultimately at the mercy of the board of directors. But it’s easier for one person to serve in this role, so he’s nominally and effectively the sponsor. The A&R/producer guy is the project manager, and the guitar tech/surfer dude is the visionary.  The show will get funded only for as long as the “people upstairs” want it to continue. The guitar tech might now be the star of the show, and his specific pixie dust may make or break the show’s viability, but there’s a limit to his actual decision-making authority. If it turns out that he likes to tune guitars in the nude, that will only fly onscreen if the sponsor ultimately agrees to try it. Similarly, if the guitar tech tries to insist that live concert footage must be included with every show no matter what the cost, it’s not his call to make. It might be a captivating idea, but it’s not necessarily possible, given the available resources; figuring that out is the project manager/A&R/producer guy’s role. So, there’s a limit to how much of the vision is possible to implement, and deciding how the money gets spent is not the surfer dude’s gig. Temper tantrum off, please. If the dude wants more control, he can fund a project himself, rather than collaborating with a studio. These days, many artists are opting to do just that, and so they need to replace what’s missing in the triangle: the project’s sponsorship and its management. Which are each, a whole lot of work.

Again, for the TV show, the A&R guy/producer is in the role of project manager, taking care of logistics, managing resources (i.e., people’s time, gear, and budget),  and keeping the trains running on time. Sure, he might be a seasoned pro, and perhaps even the person best able to determine what will actually make for good television, market research be damned. He could well consider this show his personal masterpiece. But in the end, he is an advisor, rather than the ultimate decision maker, at least for the most significant issues. For in the big picture perspective, the purpose in this case is to get a hit show for the studio, rather than to depict the actual world of this guitar tech.

In the end, the sponsor decides. It is human nature to feel a sense of ownership of the work that we get hired to do, but the project only actually belongs to whoever is funding it. (Muddying the waters is who owns the copyright, but that’s kind of a separate issue. I’m glad you thought of it, though.) So, clarifying this chain of decision-making authority is really important to a project’s success.

Success is not necessarily determined by how great a project is artistically or even how financially viable it is. It is determined by the project sponsor’s opinion regarding whether or not they got what they paid for. Likely, artistic quality and financial viability will be among the sponsor’s criteria for success, but you never know. In the singer/songwriter example, the project’s ultimate purpose could well be to motivate the daughter to do better in math. For the TV studio, it might simply be whether it gets an Emmy or not. The sponsor’s metrics are the only ones that truly matter, from a purely project-management perspective. Hopefully, these metrics get articulated and communicated to everyone who needs to know, so that they can all be working towards the same result.

In any case, ideally, the people who are brought aboard to create the project are aligned philosophically with the sponsor’s over-arching goals, beyond the objectives of the single project. This is why hiring for values alignment is so important. It makes some of the necessary decisions—such as changing a project’s artistic direction, extending the timeline, or even terminating the project entirely—a lot easier for everyone to take, if they understand why the project is being funded.

Here’s an approach that might be helpful. It’s a cold, financial look at project acquisition, which might just be one of several factors you want to consider. But the tighter the cash situation, the more decisions should likely rely on unromantic looks at data such as this, as opposed to riskier, more intuition-based approaches.

In this modeling, we can see the financial performance of different types of projects, in comparison with other categories of endeavor.

Say that you’re an agent, and you’re trying to decide what kind of new artists to sign. Your projects are “artists.” You might make a chart that shows the performance of all your artists by genre. There are two data points for each category: how many artists you’ve got and how much money the category rakes in, as an aggregate. (Note: For the money received, a measure I like to look at is “average income per month based on the previous twelve months.”) It might look something like this.

If you convert these numbers to percentages of the totals, with a few clicks in Excel, you can create the following kind of chart, which shows the relative profitability of each genre.

Now, it’s easy to see the relative performance of each category. Red to blue shows profitability compared to representation in the product line. We’ve mostly got rock musicians (longest blue line), but the income they are bringing in is relatively low. Our wedding bands are among our lesser signings, and yet those few are bringing in most of our income, by far. The classical artists are also quite profitable. So, if we want to base our next signings on who will bring in the most Do-Re-Mi, then we hope that aspiring wedding bands will come knocking on our doorstep.

(We can also use this chart to spark an exploration of why some of these genres perform so much worst than others. For example, why do the classical musicians net more than the others? Is it because they are acoustic and require less rented sound gear? Or do we simply have better classical artists than the other types? That’s another kind of exploration these genre comparison charts can motivate.)

The assumption above is that each type of artist requires roughly the same amount of work to manage. Perhaps, that’s the case. In my industry, music book publishing, it is roughly correct; books about jazz improvisation take roughly the same amount of effort to prepare as books about bluegrass mandolin technique.

Sometimes, though, the amount of work required for various efforts will be radically different. If you’re a rock band, you might produce albums and you might produce t-shirts. Albums are harder, so it’s not a fair comparison, yet. No matter, you just need to add another step to level-set the data.

So, let’s say that you’ve got a band that’s been around for a while. You want to do a new project and are trying to decide what. You’re all dead broke, and so the goal is to rake in some bread. Art, shmart.

You make that chart, showing your sales history of previous endeavors: various things you create, and also efforts to make your existing tracks available on download sites, such as iTunes, Pandora, and so on. To make it more of an apples-to-apples comparison, include another column, showing the number of hours required to do these. (You could get more sophisticated and also factor in cost, but let’s keep it simple, here. For variation, I’ll say “profit,” meaning total profit for all products in that category.)

It might look something like this:

Now, just graph number of hours, rather than number of products. Again, do it by percentage, to make the graph more readable. We see now that the quickest way to make money is to play more gigs. Introducing a new t-shirt could be a good bet as well.

Of course, in the grand scheme, all these activities are interconnected. The videos might not draw money by themselves, but perhaps releasing them has a stimulating effect on our fan mailing list, which then encourages people to come to gigs and buy t-shirts. New material on albums might give you a reason to perform, and be why the concerts are so well attended. And perhaps, your efforts on the distribution campaigns are so recent that they haven’t had an effect yet, but in six months, you will get more significant rewards.

So, these data points must be seen as isolated looks, and used to inform decisions, along with other data points and more nuanced conversations. But they can offer a clarifying glimpse into exactly where the income is coming in, and thus help inform what you should do next.

A band, led by my friend who relayed to me this story, has found some success in bumping up attendance at their monthly pub gigs. They offer their fans a link to a free song download via a precisely timed email blast the day before each appearance. These blasts used to be sent by the bandleader, but more recently, two of the members took it over: the guitarist, who is a marketing guy from Texas and writes the email copy, and the drummer, a Scotsman who is really good at technology, and thus is the band’s guru on the marketing software used to send out these communications. Together, they drive the process, keeping the bandleader (from New England) apprised.

This month, they got their blast all set up and ready to go. Then, the Texan sent an email to the Scot (cc’ing the bandleader) that said, presumably in his native twang, “Fire in the hole!”

The Scot replied, we all imagine in full brogue, “Aye aye, Skipper!” To the New Englander bandleader’s ears, each turn of phrase was as colorful and delightful as the next. Such a fun team, she thought.

Then, they all waited. One, two, three hours went by, and the business day came to a close. Strangely, though, no bounce in activity on their site was evident. The Texan crossed his cowboy-booted ankle over his knee and wondered whether he had misgauged the tone of his email. Zero clicks resulting from what he thought was an enticing offer seemed suspect. Finally, he sent a query to the team, and learned that the Scot hadn’t sent it, as he had expected him to do.

“Why didn’t you send it?” asked the Texan.

“Because you said, ‘Fire in the hole,’” replied the Scot.

“Right!” said the Texan. “That meant that you were supposed to pull the trigger.”

“No!” said the Scot. “It meant that you were going to pull it yourself. ‘Fire in the hole’ means the same as…”

At this point, the game of telephone by which I received this anecdote from the bandleader gets murky. The Scot gave what he thought was an analogous expression—something very Scottish about barrels, she thought. I imagine it was, “Don’t put your kilt on the wrong haggis barrel,” or something. We’ll have to get clarification.

Then, I (an editor/bystander, from New York, frequently asked for opinions on such matters) inaccurately proclaimed to the bandleader/storyteller, “No, the expression is ‘fire in the hold,’ which is a nautical expression meaning ‘abandon ship’ because the engine is on fire. It implies that the Texan was launching the blast.” And that little bit of sage wisdom was totally incorrect on many counts! First of all, a “hold” is the cargo bay, not the engine room. Second, “fire in the hole” turns out to be a mining term, meaning, “The dynamite is set. Everyone should stand back, and you should trigger the detonation.” (Later, it became a military term meaning “It’s time for you to toss a grenade into that enclosed space!”) It has nothing to do with ships and engine fires, and more importantly, it is a directive that someone else is to do something, not that you are doing it yourself.

So, the Texan was correct in his use of the phrase. However, he also torpedoed the timing of the campaign by assuming that everyone would know what he meant.

The moral of the story: If you use colorful turns of phrases in time-critical situations, make sure that everyone knows what the heck you’re talking about!

And also, don’t put your kilt on the wrong haggis barrel. It’s almost never a good idea.

There’s no denying the math. If you compose just two measure of music every day, which doesn’t seem like a lot, in a year, you’ll have completed dozens of songs, or a symphony, or perhaps half of an opera. If you write one page of words every day (not very much), in a year, you’ll have written a significant book, or four practically sized music method books, or developed the curriculum for a 12-week college level course. Call it the power of plugging away.

In his book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell discusses how it takes about ten thousand hours of experience to become a master musician (or exceptional at any skill). If you can’t play guitar right now, but today, you start practicing two hours per day, you can expect to be a fantastic guitarist in fourteen years. That’s a long time, but within reach, for most of us. If you practice eight hours a day, obviously, you will dramatically crunch that schedule, but you also greatly increase your risk of career-ending injury, so the math isn’t completely indicative here.

While achieving true mastery within a college degree program might be a full-time, body and soul exhausting aspiration, achieving basic competency and a clear future path will happen much sooner than the ten-thousand hour mark. You’ll need to play/practice about seven hours per day to come out swinging. But a few dozen hours, total, can give you a basic capability at an instrument (perhaps, fulfilling enough for an amateur), and after a few hundred hours (an hour a day for a year), you’ll be able to make some decent music. It’s amazing what a focused year can bring to a dedicated student. On the other hand, practicing bass for just an hour a week probably won’t be enough for you to make Victor Wooten break into a cold sweat. At that pace, it will take you a century to catch up him (by which point, Mr. Wooten will also have a century’s worth of additional experience, so you’ll still be cooked).

Now, again, this math isn’t precise. Some people progress faster than others. Some are lucky enough to want to play an instrument that is well suited to their hand size and shape, and they will have an easier time of it. Some styles are more exposed, some instruments are more difficult, some practice strategies are more effective and efficient. Nobody just writes two measures a day. We write sixteen measures, then revise it, then write lyrics, then go back and reimagine the chords…. You might write an average of two bars per day. An hour of thoughtful study with an excellent guitar teacher will facilitate more efficient progress than will eight hours of aimless strumming along with your favorite Justin Bieber track. The point is, though, that achieving any of these goals will require time to create those words or notes. For the endeavor to reach completion, somehow/sometime, a certain number of synapses need to fire and the work has to get done. There’s no escaping the math.

After watching hundreds of authors work to complete their books, here at Berklee Press, I have noticed two things about productivity. First, you have to work at it constantly, almost every day and certainly every week, to get anywhere. Our books require between 60 and 400 hours or so for an author to create a first draft, and somehow, that time has to be found inside busy schedules. Hours simply need to be devoted to it. It’s like dieting or exercise. Once it becomes a regular habit, the drudgery becomes easier, and we start to see results. That’s the conventional wisdom. The tortoise. Slow and steady wins the race. It’s true, and there’s no escaping it, especially for long-term goals such as developing muscle memory.

The other side, though, is that there’s nothing like a deadline to inspire a burst of productivity, and I have come to respect the speedy, frantic running of the hare as well. Summers end and semesters begin, and suddenly, there is no longer an easy hour a day to find. So, we have to avoid Facebook and work into the wee hours, or else our upcoming textbook won’t be published by the start of the school year. Or the album won’t be ready before the tour. Or our band won’t be rehearsed enough before we go into the studio.

While an eleventh-hour, panicked, monomaniacal effort isn’t typically considered best practice, I’ve found that it can be remarkably productive—often actually necessary—because it inspires heroism that might otherwise be elusive. Burning the midnight oil comes with great risks, and details can suffer, but the momentum and the caffeine-fueled fun of a late-night charrette carries us forward and brings us to places that well-behaved, constant, respectable plodding often does not. Many personality types require that kind of excitement in order to actually bring a major project to conclusion. The fire helps crystallize ideas, make it easier to jettison the debris, and let us see the overall work as a whole.

So, to truly be productive, you might need a combination approach, between the tortoise and the hare. Mostly, realistically, it’s regular, constant work that advances our efforts. But the plodding might need to be punctuated by goal milestones and delivery deadlines that you will do anything to achieve.

If you are managing a project, you need to find the right balance. It’s your job to make everyone aware of deadlines, and prod them to deliver slightly ahead of the critical dates, so that you have a buffer against bad luck. Musicians’ careers are increasingly eclectic, and people have a greater number of simultaneous projects in their lives, as well as a host of distractions. They often need assistance in structuring their time, understanding how delivery points affect the overall project timeline, and getting reminders of deadlines well in advance of the critical dates. This is a reason why frequent communication is necessary for schedules to work out; it just keeps the ball rolling.

You may need to light some brush fires, in addition to regularly raking the leaves. Just keep your eyes open for the mistakes that likely creep in, during these intense efforts, balancing mad dashes with particularly careful quality checks. This can help you keep your project on track, avoiding it dragging out indefinitely, and finally bringing it to a successful conclusion.

1. Clarify the vision of what the project outcome should be.
2. Figure out what work needs to be done in order to bring that work to a successful conclusion.
3. Do that necessary work, monitoring progress constantly to make sure that all is proceeding according to plan.
4. When it’s done, make sure that the result is positioned for its highest potential impact.

Typically, students take a reactive approach to education, rather than a strategic one. They get assigned work, they do it, and then they go off and chill out, somewhere. People develop these passive habits for becoming educated very early on, perhaps starting in nursery school. More often than not, we grow to think of education as an arena in which we don’t have the power to be proactive, and the end result of the effort isn’t at the forefront of a student’s concern until towards the very end. As children, we are shepherded to school, and the curriculum is far beyond our control. The subject matter and culture is not of our own choosing. Grade-school education is something that is done to us, which we must endure, and our choices for managing the process are limited. Work gets doled out, and students must address what comes before them, in a survivalist mindset.

As adult learners, though, this theoretically changes, in many respects. There is no longer a legal requirement that students must attend class. Yet, old habits die hard. It is easiest to continue with college-level musical studies in much the same way as we dealt with what came before it: as an inconvenience (or, perhaps, an indulgence) that must be squeezed into life somehow. Courses present work. There are grades. Students witness lectures, study for tests, do projects, and then are assessed on their performance. It most frequently remains a reactive process, as they get ushered through the system. At the end, they either get a diploma (listed with or without honors) or they drop out.

A great difference now, though, is that college experiences affect our professional lives in ways that grade school experiences do not. College-level accomplishments are prominent on résumés, for all of our lives, and particularly in music education, our mastery of the skills we learn are what makes us hirable. And after this stage of education concludes, most people try to monetize their academic experience. That’s the ultimate purpose, or vision—a credential that can be monetized, due to the level of experience and aptitude it reveals.

I would urge all students to look at their tenure in this light, immediately upon embarking on taking any course of study—and if not at the beginning, then as soon as possible along the way. Rather than just plowing through, trying to make it through the classes that come before you, consider what your ultimate project goals are, in this journey, and continually track your progress on completing those objectives. Probably, your overall objectives of post-secondary education are (or should be):

1. Learn the material.
2. Get credentials for your résumé.
3. Network with others in your field.

These three are the objectives of your educational project. Like any project, it is essential to keep the objectives in mind, monitoring your progress on them constantly.

Learning the material is the most obvious objective. Teachers present lectures and assign research (reading, listening, etc.), and then tests, projects, and audition results reveal whether you’ve learned the material or not. These monitoring mechanisms are clearly built into the student experience.

Although grades perhaps seem like overly simplistic measures of a student’s competency, they can have important repercussions later on, such as when applying for graduate programs or scholarships. Keep this in mind when doing special projects or assignments. Students often become distracted by “expressing themselves,” rather than doing the assigned work. In the grand scheme of things, expressing yourself is important; making an assignment relevant to your personal interest can make the content real for you, and thus help you to learn it. However, doing this should also be tempered with the over-arching directive to demonstrate mastery over the technical material being taught. Now and then, students hand in projects to me that are lovely, as art, but don’t demonstrate mastery of the material in the curriculum. For example, I give an assignment where my Music Notation with Finale students must create lead sheets. Occasionally, someone will hand in an multi-instrument arrangement instead, without any chord symbols or a single lead line. This is an indication that they are confused about their objectives. “Expressing yourself” might be a critical life objective, but likely, it is beyond a core and essential objective of many courses. In other words, it might be wise to simplify your artistic aspirations regarding an assignment, and stick to its stated requirements. Do that arrangement you’re burning to do as a personal project, on your own time. (And many teachers will give you feedback on that too, just for the fun of it, if their bandwidth permits.) Focus on demonstrating mastery of the prescribed material, as your primary work.

Getting credentials for your résumé is another over-arching goal, but besides a good GPA, it is typically less actively/strategically pursued and controlled by the student. How would you like your education credential to read on your résumé? The school’s name and year is a start, but what else about your experience can you describe that stands out? Will you graduate with honors or win any awards? Will you participate in extra-curricular activities that will spark the imagination of someone who might hire you? Will you take the initiative on something that is likely to foreshadow potential for future professional accomplishment? Will you have meaningful professional experience (such as playing gigs, rather than flipping burgers), in addition to being a student? Students frequently participate in such things for the fun of it, or on a whim, but they can actually have far-reaching use beyond simply filling empty time.

Similar to the résumé credential is the recommendation letter, and a good one can easily be worth many thousands of dollars, in your career. Likely, at some point, you will need a recommendation letter from a teacher (or several teachers), whether it is for a job, a new degree program, a scholarship, a grant, or some other future prospect. While you are still pursuing your studies, can you identify teachers who might be influential in the future, regarding this function? How will you be able to impress them regarding your unique abilities? Hint: Try mastering the prescribed coursework, producing exceptional quality assignments (submitted on time), asking good questions, and being kind and helpful to your classmates. Without these in evidence, writing the recommendation will be a stretch. You’re asking the teacher to stake his or her reputation on you, stating that you are a reflection of the teacher’s own values and judgment, so consider how you will make your case clear.

Networking with peers, as well as teachers, is another great benefit of education. Academia is a rare circumstance where people who share essential values and worldview come together in a non-competitive, non-commercial environment. At the time, college socializing seems more like fun human interaction than professional networking, but decades after your classes conclude, you are likely to find that your college chums may make your professional life easier and lead to opportunity—more so than friends from grade school, because more professional focus is shared. Socializing is therefore a dimension of experience that I recommend all students pursue deliberately and methodically—online or on campus. It is among the most important dimensions of your time, and the shared experience of your alma mater will always give you something to talk about with fellow alumni.

So, jam with other musicians, play on their albums, help engineer their recordings, or just have coffee. If you find yourself traveling to a city where one of your online classmates resides, try to meet for lunch or a walk by the river. Can you make one meaningful new connection every week? Keep track. And don’t exclusively hang with the obvious superstars. People commonly have epiphanies that allow them to leapfrog to a much higher degree of competency later on, and during college days, such transformations might yet be several years off. During this brief period while you’re all in the same boat, general human bonding matters more, and this is one of the rare, easy times to connect with people and trade favors. These connections can help you forever after. Today’s entertaining cafeteria companion might well become tomorrow’s critical mutual acquaintance or most cost-effective project resource.

Like any project, consider what your ultimate goals are, in your education, and how you will accomplish them. Reflect on these objectives at least weekly, say every Friday morning. Track your progress, and correct the course, as necessary—whether this requires more time practicing solfege, more time finding a meaningful internship, or more time jamming with new friends. As is usually the case, being strategic rather than reactive will bring your project to a better conclusion, and your education is among the most important projects you will ever undertake.

Time was money, as they say. Yet, Phil set an easygoing, professional, fun, and focused tone for the session, and watching his insights into how to improve the performance was incredibly inspiring, to me. My most memorable moment, though, was when Phil decided that a song needed a vocal harmony part. One of the world’s great session arrangers was sitting just a few feet away from him, but Phil cheerfully grabbed a sheet of manuscript paper, and simply wrote out what he wanted, while everyone else waited. It took him several minutes.

From a project management theory perspective, a purist might argue that Phil should have had his excellent arranger write the part instead. But I would classify that as a sophomoric suggestion. Composing what he knew would be the most effective line was what was best for the project, at that moment. Grabbing the pen was the simplest and most pragmatic solution, even though it perhaps blurred the lines between project management and specialist. But Mr. Ramone has enough Grammy awards that those of us theorizing about how to achieve success should examine what he does as a model for how great work really gets accomplished, rather than measure his every action against some laboratory standard regarding how managers must spend their time.

In much of the literature, project managers are told to focus only on planning work, analyzing and managing progress, and facilitating productive communication throughout the project team. That’s the project management role, in its pure form. The vision for the project comes from someone else, and the actual creation of content is executed by specialists. For example, a producer such as Phil Ramone (i.e., project manager) will be hired to work with an artist or a label executive (i.e., a visionary) to guide/clarify/implement the vision, and then various engineers, performers, arrangers, and such will create the recording according to spec, of which the producer is the guardian. That way, during project execution, the producer can focus on coordinating logistics and resources to make sure that the project’s vision gets actualized according to the agreed scope.

That’s the theory, and that’s what’s considered best practice. If a project manager starts to get seduced towards wandering too far into the details, their focus on the big picture can be compromised, their stature as leader is said to be potentially diminished, and there is the danger that they will lose sight of the overall project vision. Conventional wisdom says that this increases overall project risk. That’s a major reason why artists do well to partner with producers. It keeps logistics in the hands of someone who has emotional distance from the content, so that they can keep the trains running on time.

On the ground, though, things are rarely this simple, and there are also risks when project managers become too detached from the details.  And it’s an easy excuse, for executives to dodge responsibility for disasters by claiming that their role requires detachment. “Passing the buck” is one way to phrase it. Contemporary music history books have endless anecdotes about clueless suits steering artists in inappropriate directions.

The ability to delegate depends a lot on available resources, as well as circumstances, and this “pure” model of project manager is perhaps more effective in larger organizations where increased staff on hand gives freedom for everyone to be a specialist. But in music, particularly on artist-produced projects, the roles between project manager, visionary, and worker bee are frequently best intertwined. Music is an art of cross-pollination by multiple creative spirits, and producers sometimes have clearer visions of the projects than do the performing artists. That’s our reality, and we can embrace it without guilt, because examples of this model’s success are legion, where success can come from either abandoning ego and collaborating, or from embracing ego and pushing forward. Flexibility to entertain either approach—to accept inspiration where we find it—seems to be the necessary paradox of the music project manager’s mindset.

To maintain focus on the big picture during any digressions down rabbit holes, it’s just important for us project managers to be self-reflective that our own time is a limited resource, and it should be managed as such. If the PM wants to do detailed work, they must also step back, consider how much time they are spending on that compared to other required tasks, and confirm that all can still remain on track.

I would argue that project outcome is more important than maintaining purity of role, particularly in the case of someone in a more managerial role taking care of the business of a more content-creation role. While you probably don’t want a session drummer to take the initiative to, say, redo the singer’s mic placement uninvited, any producer would do well to have a detailed enough understanding of audio engineering to have a meaningful conversation with whoever is actually running the board. While project management is a specialized skill, it is helpful in our business for the PM to have a diverse, applicable skill set, in order to be able to put out fires (or write the occasional background vocal line) with the greatest efficiency.

Micro-management is to be avoided, obviously, but too much golf also increases project risk. Sometimes, project managers need to roll up their sleeves and address details, in order to keep things moving, and having a project manager capable of nuts-and-bolts problem-solving brings a kind of resilience to a project, as well as the ability to take advantage of serendipitous opportunity. The deep dive just needs to be done with our eyes wide open, regarding how that diversion affects the big picture: the timeline, the budget, the quality, the team morale. In the end, what the project needs is an over-arching consideration of what the situation demands, rather than how neatly tasks are accomplished in accordance with theories of best practice.