[00:00:00] It is time for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. My name is James Cross, and today I am here with my self for a different kind of episode leading us into 2022, or rather as the second episode of 2022. It is dropping on January 11th, AKA 1/11. And a fun fact. This episode is number 111. The not plan, not anything behind that.

Just a coincidence of when we started the podcast two years ago, it happened to fall perfectly into place. When we released an episode every Tuesday for the last two years, since December of 2019, that episode 111 falls on 1/11. Crazy coincidence. I love it. I'm all for it. because of that, I'm going to do a different episode today.

It's going to be a solo episode. I'm really looking forward to having Matt back soon. But he's having kid number three. So he's, he's taken some family time, which he absolutely deserves, but I am definitely looking forward to having him back on the show. So. pivoting to what we're going to talk about today, or what I'm going to talk about [00:01:00] today is project management and specifically one tool that you should be using in your band, because it is incredibly versatile.

It's incredibly useful, and it will make your life so much easier. Plus it's free. It's a tool that I use for the Bandhive podcast. And you should absolutely use it for your band. I'm going to go through what it does, what it is. Just three examples of how you could use it for your band. Even though there are many, many more uses that you can come up with for it.

It's an amazing tool that does so many things just by being built the way it is. So getting things started, the tool is called Trello, T R E L L O. If you're already familiar with it, that's amazing. If not. Here's a little bit about how it works. And even if you are familiar with it, stick around to the end, because I'm going to talk about some of the things you can do to use this in your band.

So if you're not already using this for your band, or even if you are, you might [00:02:00] learn something new about it or get some ideas, some new sparks in your mind. So you can use this for your band, even better. The basics of Trello is that it is a to do. It lets you use the Kanban method, which is a system designed to help reduce overload and bottlenecks in human focused systems.

That means where people are doing work. It's a kind of project management tool. Each task that you have is a. That card is one task or perhaps a project. If it's a small project that needs to be completed, and then you move those cards through vertical lists and each list has a status.

For example, to do doing and done could be your three lists. just imagine you're looking at a corkboard or a whiteboard and you have sticky notes on it in different columns for. To do doing and done. That's basically what Trello is, except it's digital. It syncs to all your apps. You can use it on your desktop, your phone, your [00:03:00] iPad, whatever it syncs to all of them.

They have an app. It's a great tool to carry that corkboard with you. Now, each list is contained within a board and you can have multiple boards in your Trello account. Then going back to the card level, each card can have comments, checklists links to documents, or pretty much anything that's useful. So that card always has the relevant information for the task you're working on.

That that card is associated with. Uh, You can also set deadlines, which is really useful and getting into how bans can use it. It's really. Good for one-off projects. Like no shame there, you can use it for one-off projects. And it works really well, especially if it's like, oh, we have to do this thing. You know, move it from to do, to doing, to done.

That's what you do. Like you can go through there with one-off projects and it works, but it really shines on repeating processes, things that [00:04:00] you do on a regular basis. And this is how I use it. I use it for the Bandhive podcast. Every single episode we do has its own unique Trello card that makes sure I complete every single step fully and to my satisfaction.

And that's why this episode exists today because when I was going through the episode, we had planned for one 11, it just did not sit well. I didn't feel confident in that episode. I did not want to release that because I believe in quality over quantity. So instead of just skipping an episode here, I am doing this episode about the system that led me to say, no, we're not releasing this episode.

I don't feel this is up to Bandhives, quality standards. It was a good interview. Don't get me wrong. I had a good interview, really nice gentlemen, who came on the show to talk about what he did. But there were some tech issues on on his end, multiple devices didn't [00:05:00] work so long story short rather than releasing something with terrible audio, being an audio engineer that pains me.

I said, you know what? My checklist says, do quality control. And this checklist, it doesn't pass. Like this episode doesn't pass that checklist. So here are three ways that you could use Trello for your band. The first thing is when you're booking and planning shows, you can use cards to represent shows and use each one of those cards with a checklist for the show.

So for example, you could have your lists set up. These are the vertical columns as initial outreach. Confirmed advanced and completed. now, if you're unfamiliar with those terms, I'll just run through them really quickly. The initial outreach self-explanatory that's you reaching out to venues or promoters, trying to get a show.

A hold means that. You have a date that the venue is keeping for you essentially, you have the option to book a show, but that show is [00:06:00] not yet confirmed. And if another artist wants to take that date, the venue will say, Hey, you have a challenge on your hold. We're giving this to the other band. If we don't hear back from you within 24 hours.

So if it's in a hole, that's good, the data's available, but it's not confirmed. It's not locked in. Once it's confirmed, then that means you have that show. You have that date, you can go through and send them whatever paperwork you need them to sign. Ideally, they'll do even just a simple one-page contract for you.

Some venues don't, it gets kind of sketchy at the DIY level, but ideally you will have something in writing, even if it's just an email that has all the relevant information, something like that. But that is what confirmed. Advanced means you've done the production advance for the show. That's the next big step before you actually play the show and then completed means you've played the show.

You've settled at the end of the night, you have your payment, all that kind of stuff is taken care [00:07:00] of, and you're on your way to the next show or wherever you're sleeping for the night on each of those show cards, you're going to have a checklist of all of the sub tasks you need to complete. This is how you make sure that every single thing is done.

So, for example, in the initial outreach phase, you might have a couple of steps in there on that checklist that say, for example, research, the venue we want to play and sent the email. Boom. There you go. Then for the hold, you would have something like found local bands to play the show. Got the hold from the venue for the dates.

Then for confirmed, you would have more steps like, okay. Contract has been sent, awaiting signature contract has been returned signed. I'm not going to go into an exhaustive list of the things here, but some basic steps, the production advance, you could say advanced scheduled. And then once you've done the advance, it moves to.

For completed, you can have lots of stuff in there. Somewhere along the way you're going to want [00:08:00] promo sent in there as well. If you're mailing flyers to the venue, which I absolutely recommend, it's a great way to really show them that you're making an effort, send them some flyers for your show that they can put up at their venue or around town.

If they have somebody that goes around posting up those posters, this is a great thing to do. And having it on that. Makes you remember to do it. So that's the idea. There are lots of things that can go on that checklist probably like 20 to 30 things or more so, like I said, I'm not going to go through all of them, but.

This lets you be consistent with what you're doing. It lets you be efficient and effective. This means you don't have to remember every single thing for every single show because you have that checklist. So when you do these things, you check them off and you don't have to remember, Hey, did I do that for this show?

Because you just look at your checklists and oh yeah, you already did it. Takes all the stress away. This is why I use it for the podcast. I get [00:09:00] so lost between having the same content coming out every single week. I forget where I am in the process of each episode, but by referring to Trello, I can always remember, this is where I'm at with this episode.

So these are my next steps on the checklist, and I have way more systems than that. Like I have other systems beyond Trello that helped me with. But Trello is my go-to central hub for what step of the process am I in? And what am I doing next? Now, another way that you could use Trello as an artist is in songwriting for each song idea, you have, you create a card and then you can move it through your lists.

As an example, here, you could have the list of ideas (voice memos). Rough demo, produce demo recording. . Mixed and mastered slash ready for release. So each of those would be your vertical columns and you can move [00:10:00] your cards through. This does two things. One, it helps you keep track of your song ideas. So none of them get lost in the shuffle and no, that's not unintentional pun and get it shuffling cards.

Yeah. But not in that. And two, it lets you weed out songs that you want to keep versus songs that you will either scrap or maybe you're not sure. And you're going to save them for later. Here's another thing you can do in Trello, you can color code labels so you can have labels for each card and based on color coding, you can see at a glance what your plans are for each song in your lists to see if you want to move that song to the next list or the next column or not.

It's really easy to see an overview of what you're working on, on what you need to do. The third example is for releasing your music. One of the best things you can do is have a release checklist. So you have a consistent way to do things every single time.

Obviously you should always be testing and see what [00:11:00] works, but the groundwork doesn't change. You still need to be sure that you have it uploaded to your distributor. So it gets to Spotify and apple music. You still need to be sure that you got it back from the mastering engineer in time. You still need to be sure that you have the correct assets so you can share it on social media.

All of that stuff does not change. From one release to the next, whether it's single or an EAP or a full length album, it doesn't change. There are certain constants that are going to be there for every single release. And that is what goes on your checklist. If you want to go into more detail, you can have different checklist templates for singles, EPS, and full albums.

However you structure it, it's up to you to use this tool because it will help you so much. And again, it's free. You have no excuse not to use it, whether you're using it for booking shows or tracking your songs or you're releasing promotional efforts, it is so useful.

And so customizable that you are going to be. So much more [00:12:00] able to focus on the creative aspects of your music, because your mind is not filled with all this useless junk of internal. Oh, did I remember to do that? No, I didn't. Or yes, I did. You just keep going and you focus on the music because you let the systems handle the tedious stuff for.

So again, let yourself be creative and use Trello for your band.