Introduction: Composing and Conducting (preview)

In March of 2020, I was in a Notion subreddit researching how to build a Zettelkasten when I learned about Roam Research. I never fully realized that Zettelkasten, but I did rebuild my GTD system in Roam.

By this point I was coaching productivity locally, and shifting to Roam was a big deal. Nobody in my town had any idea what Roam Research or Tools for Thought were, so I wasn’t pitching those to my clients.

This was also, however, the beginning of the pandemic. With the widespread adoption of Zoom, I soon found myself coaching people all over the world. My primary online clients were people who used Tools for Thought.

The most advertised use for these thinking tools was taking better notes and getting more value out of them. This was the biggest piece I had been missing while using Todoist: the connections between my notes and my tasks. Many notes require tasks to develop them further, because I won’t remember to revisit a note without a task pointing me there. And many tasks require notes to understand the context of the work and to link to important information. Building GTD in Roam brought my tasks and notes into the same environment and opened me up to a more fluid, organic approach to work. (Side note: the approach I teach in this book does not require that notes and tasks live in the same app. But if they’re living in different tools, they must be seamlessly interrelated.)

Working in Roam broke me free of the rigid structure of Todoist, and started my shift from pure GTD toward my current method. I created daily agendas, logged the work I completed, built projects that were more than mere containers for tasks—they were hubs for information and resources related to the work.

I transitioned from Roam to Tana in 2022 because Tana allowed me to generate specific structure to support my work. You can implement my approach using any tools, but the features of the tools you use will shape the way you work, so you want to choose your tools wisely.

But where does this leave us? What does it even mean to know “the way you work”?

To make sense of this, let me first define the word “consilience.” Consilience occurs when insights from more than one discipline converge to generate new, useful perspectives. So far I’ve discussed my background in the practice of productivity. The Rhythms of Productivity is the product of the consilience between my productivity practice and another significant part of my life, music and theatre.

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.

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.

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 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.

We have one thing to clear up before we dive into this productivity book.

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.

In this book, you will learn the fundamentals of Action-Powered Productivity (APP). The way you work and the tools you choose to support that work need to make it easier for you to (1) Take Action and (2) Capture Recurrence™.

When you Take Action, it’s your Inner Composer doing what needs to be done. I’ll supply you several tools to make taking action easy.

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. I’ll supply you many tools to make capturing recurrence easy.

That’s APP in a nutshell. We’ll cover a bit more than this—you need to have processes to review your work and workflows, and you’ll want some guidance on setting goals and devising strategies. But if you can get action and recurrence right, most of the rest will fall into place.

So, my composer and conductor friends, let’s press forward so you can be more productive!

Join Cohort 11 of Applied Action-Powered Productivity for early access putting these principles into practice!