Bree Noble:
There's just a lot of videos, "Three tips to releasing your music better," or "Three tips to get on Spotify playlists." And that's like important stuff, but it's not going to really move the needle for you if you haven't set out your plan, given yourself enough time. And so I think what's different about how I talk about release strategy than other people is it's all around the plan. It's all around the timeline. You've put so much time, money, passion, love into this music, and you want to make sure that you're giving it its due course.

Michael Walker:
It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music. We're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.
All right, so I'm super excited to introduce you guys to Bree Noble. If you haven't met her before, she's awesome. Let me pull up my official intro here. Bree is an award-winning musician who hosts the Female Entrepreneur Musician podcast and she's a music business mentor who specializes in one of the most important topics as a musician is really around releasing your music. You have your baby, it's almost like this process of giving birth and when you give birth, that's a really special moment and you want to make sure that you have a good plan and a good strategy around it. And so Rock Your Next Release, which is really her program that her flagship offer was really focused around helping you to navigate that whole process of releasing your music successfully. And today we were talking a little bit backstage and just in figuring out for you guys who are here right now, what's the most important need or how can we provide the most value?
One thing that's very complimentary to the strategy of you being successful with launching and really seeing your music is you have to have a good foundation for planning and really productivity and time management and that's something that applies to everyone that's human. Really, it's like we have a limited amount of time to be able to accomplish our goals and there's an unlimited amount of things that we could do and that always keep coming up. Learning how to navigate that, having a good process and system around managing your time is so valuable. It's something that Bree and I are going to have a conversation about and super excited to dig into it. For anyone who maybe they haven't met you before and this is their first time connecting with you, could you introduce yourself briefly and share a little bit about yourself and how you got started with Rock Your Next Release?

Bree Noble:
Sure. I'm the founder of Profitable Musician. I have been a musician for years. I built my own music career pretty much outside of the music industry and building a fan base and in my local area and throughout California, I'm from Southern California. I did that for several years and then I also built a platform called Women of Substance Radio, which is now also a podcast where I elevate the music by female artists because it's amazing and more people need to hear it. Because of that, I had developed relationships with thousands of female artists and saw that they really needed help building their fan base, learning how to market themselves and just all the business aspects of the music that they were doing and running their music business. And so I moved into that once my kids got a little older and they didn't want to be dragged on tour anymore. And so I've been doing that since 2015. Female Entrepreneur Musician podcast is ongoing as well as the Profitable Musician show, and so I love podcasting.
Also, I ran summits for several years, so I'm very familiar with this community building that summits create. I believe Michael and I probably met for the first time on a summit, doing a summit together. I ran the Profitable Musician Summit for three years. And I think one thing that I learned that ties into what we're talking about today with running Summits is, it's like drinking from a fire hose. You're getting so much information, you're learning so many amazing things from so many great mentors, but then, and this is true about live conferences too, and then you leave with this pile of notes and then you go home and you go back to regular life and then you don't implement any of them. You've got so much information in your head, so many exciting ideas, but you don't know how to crystallize those down to things that you can actually take action on.
And so that's where goal setting comes in and productivity and stuff. I think that things like this are great and they can really key you into what am I excited about in my music career? What stream of income am I going to focus on? But then if you don't actually do that and you don't prioritize it doesn't happen.

Michael Walker:
So true. And it's great that we're having you come on right at this point because it's right at the point where most people are here right now probably are taking a bunch of notes and maybe it's just starting to reach that point where it's holy cow, there's so many gold nuggets and wisdom. How do I consolidate this and crystallize this into more action items and actually implement what I'm learning? And they'll be able to apply this to the entire conference from here on out. Really good timing. Maybe we can talk a little bit about when it comes to goal setting or productivity, especially for our musicians, what are some of the biggest mistakes or biggest challenges that you'd say they're making?

Bree Noble:
I think number one, they're trying to do everything and every day we come up with new ideas. We're creative people and it's exciting all the things that we could be doing, and that's where someone's like this come in and spark all these great ideas. But then we try to do all of them, and I use this analogy of trying to cross a river and you're building a bridge and you start building one and then you're like, "Oh, but this bridge over here could be easier or would look prettier or whatever." And so you go start building another bridge and then you build that halfway through and then you're like, "Oh, but this is not going very well and I'm not getting a lot of traction. Let me try over here. Let me build a bridge over here." And so this is what I would call just seeing all these objects or exciting things or strategies that you want to implement and then you're just distracted by them constantly and you never cross the river, you never reach the other side with one thing.
And if I've learned anything from other business owners and even seeing other people in the music space, it's doing one thing really well, can get you to 10K, 100K, even a million dollars in rather than trying to do 20 things and you think, "Oh, what if I do more things, then one of those things is going to pop, one of those things is going to happen." And it doesn't really work like that, so that's the biggest mistake I see. And also people having a to-do list that's like a mile long. And just they'll open up their to-do list, they'll look at it, they'll get overwhelmed and then they'll, "I think I'll just go watch Netflix instead." Or something else or, "I'll just go practice because that I have a handle on, I know exactly what I need to do." But they're not doing any of this stuff for the marketing and business stuff because they feel in their comfort zone music and practicing and writing songs and things like that, but then you never do anything with them.

Michael Walker:
That's so true. And the ancient proverb that if you chase two rabbits and you catch none kind of thing. I love that bridge analogy too. That's a really great way to articulate it. What do you say are... When it comes to getting focused and all of us live in a world right now where especially with social media and being so connected, it's like our phones beep every two seconds, "Oh, this person said this thing and now this is..." How does someone decide what are the one to three things that are actually, I do want to focus on? There's so many different opportunities, so many different ideas. I could do all of them and they all sound so great, but which one do I actually choose? How would you recommend that they do that selection process?

Bree Noble:
I take my students through a goal setting exercise and I usually like to choose 90 days, because it's just long enough to see serious progress and results. If you choose 30 days, then you're going to feel like you didn't really get much done, and if you choose way longer than that, then it's going to seem way too far out and you're not going to be motivated because you're not going to see the results fast enough. I take my students through a 90-day exercise and I believe that we did offer this as our free offering for you guys today that you guys can go through this as well. And basically you're doing a huge brain dump, figuring out all the things that you want to do or you think you might want to do. And that would be great to do right after this summit because maybe you watch someone just now talk about YouTube and you're like, "I really want to grow my YouTube channel," so you put that down.
And then you hear Chris SD talking about, how you can connect with supervisors and get your music sync licensing, and so that may be something you want to do. And so you write all those things down and then you have to really go through this process with yourself of which of them are really the most important to me right now. I'd like to do these other things down the road, but in the next 90 days, what could I absolutely do in 90 days that I'd be excited about that's going to make the biggest difference in my career? And you whittle that down. After you put them in categories and similar things, you whittle that down and then you come up with five. And usually they're five, they're in different parts of your business. It could be one of them is a musical skill and one of them might be relating to releases and one of them might be relating to a new stream of income. And you figure out exactly what those are going to be for you and then you commit to those.
And then when you've got those five goals and maybe fives a little much for you, maybe you're working a full-time job and you're doing music on the side, so maybe then you'd like to do three or four. And then next you figure out how do I break that down into actionable steps? That's the most important part. Can I actually take action on these and know exactly what they are? Versus just looking at that goal every day, "Okay, I want to release a single." What does that actually mean? What does that break down into in the steps? How would I get to the end result there? You try to map that out as well as possible. And of course a lot of people say to me, "But I don't know what the steps are." You try to figure out, just think backwards or think about what you've seen other artists doing and try to put that down and then you maybe consult someone that has done it before.
I'm like, "Do these steps look... Am I missing anything?" And then of course there's education as well. If you really don't know the steps, then you can maybe get a course on that or whatever. And then you're going to prioritize eventually, "Okay, how can I get these done faster? Which of these things would be easy for me to do first or which of these things are the biggest needle movers?" And then I'm going to do those first so I know exactly how to prioritize them because again, after you do the goals and you break it down to the action steps, then you've got a long list of things again, and that might be overwhelming. Then you want to prioritize it and then pick out a few of those things each day that you can do. I like picking three things. I call it the three things a day strategy, and it really works for me and my students because you're not overwhelmed by anything.
And when you get those things done, you can either be like, "Yes, I feel accomplished, I'm going to go hang out with my friends." Or, "Yes, I feel accomplished. I can do even more things today because I'm feeling really good." And getting that momentum and so then you can even move on to the next things.

Michael Walker:
That's so good. And I think Bree, maybe the last time we talked about this, we might have watched the domino stacking video. Do you remember the domino stacking video with it's like half as big, but this little tiny domino, if you stack up the bigger dominoes, you can knock over the giant ones?

Bree Noble:
That's true.

Michael Walker:
And it seems like it's so true that anything that we do individually, if there's all these little to-dos, it might feel like we're doing a lot, but it's like we're just knocking over these little tiny dominoes all around us. But if you do what Bree just mentioned and you actually start with the end in mind of 90 days from now, you think about what are the three to five giant dominoes that I'm looking to actually knock over? And then you strategically place these dominoes or each half as big as the previous one then when you push over a little tiny domino, it can actually knock over this giant domino over the course of 90 days because it's all aligned rather than separating out and doing all these things that aren't really aligned with that bigger domino.

Bree Noble:
That's really important because it's important the order that you do things in. For example, let's say you were excited about putting out a Patreon or a crowdfunding or something like that, but then you're like, "Oh, I don't have an email list yet, do I need that? Or I haven't really built my fans up very much, do I need that in order to do those things?" And you really do. Michael and I, were all about building your fan base, and that's going to lead to so many other things. But what I see artists do is, "I want to do a Patreon." And they focus on that instead of doing the pre-step to that, which is really focusing for 90 days on building your fan base, building those relationships, getting those email addresses or text addresses or phone numbers or whatever. However you want to connect with your fans or getting them on a Discord channel, whatever works for you.
But that is going to be the big domino that can then actually help you do that Patreon maybe in the next 90 days, because you got to see how those steps line up. Because if you just go ahead and put your Patreon out there and realize, "Oh, I don't have the fans that I need to get this done." Or, "I better scramble and start building that fan base while I'm trying to launch this Patreon," it's not going to go the way you want it to.

Michael Walker:
That's so true. And to Bree's point, it can really save you a lot of unnecessary suffering or just trial and error and learning, because I'm sure that there's probably... If we're honest with ourselves, there's probably a lot of people here who've made that mistake where it's like you put all this time and energy into your music and you put it out, but you didn't have an audience. And then not really anything happened and that just caused you to feel like, "Wow, maybe my music's not good enough or what's going on?" And the point is that you learn that lesson and everything's about learning lessons. There's no true failure, it's just all learning lessons towards the right point. But you could have saved yourself probably a lot of time, an unnecessary struggle and energy, if you had connected with Bree or someone who had released music successfully in the past who could basically tell you, "Hey, before you release the song, you might want to think about actually having a strategy, building an audience first."
It does seem like that's a key pattern, is that if you can find whoever it is for you, because it's different for every person, but if you can find a mentor or a guide or someone that has a little bit more experience or knowledge, they can help you. And you can even just present your action steps, like Bree mentioned, present your action steps, "Am I missing something here? Does this seem like this is right?" And it's going to be really easy for them to be like, "Oh no, actually there's this massive domino that if you push over these dominoes like it's actually just going to fall flat. You need this big domino." Right?

Bree Noble:
Yeah. And I just got to say, as a music curator for Women of Substance, I will tell you most of the time it's not that your music isn't good enough. There is so much good music out there, and that's why I started helping musicians because I saw there's so much great music, why doesn't anybody else know about this music? And it's because they don't know how to get it out there and market it and build a fan base like their music deserves. And so when I started working on My Rock Your Next Release program, it was all about the fact that a lot of my students had released music and then had tons of regrets because they just threw it out there and they thought, "Once I release it, then I'll build the fans for it." But that's not really how it works. You want to build the fans first before you release it because then they're going to be anticipating, excited to get it, they're going to want to tell other people about it when your thing comes out.
And so I think what's different about how I talk about release strategy than other people is it's all around the plan. It's all around the timeline, but it's not... I've been hanging out on TikTok lately and there's just a lot of videos, "Three tips to releasing your music better or three tips to get on Spotify playlists." And that's like important stuff, but it's not going to really move the needle for you if you haven't set out your plan, given yourself enough time and set out, "Okay, this many months before I release, I'm going to work on this and I'm going to work on this." Because most of the time people wait until the very last... I've gotten emails, "I'm two weeks out from a release, what should I do?" At that point, it's almost too late. You can do something, but having all that time beforehand to really strategize is going to make the biggest difference. And you've put so much time, money, passion, love into this music, and you want to make sure that you're giving it its due course.

Michael Walker:
All right, let's take a quick break from the podcast so I can tell you about a free special offer that we're doing right now exclusively for our podcast listeners. If you get a ton of value from the show, but you want to take your music career to the next level, connect with the community of driven musicians and connect with the music mentors directly that we have on this podcast, or if you just want to know the best way to market your music and grow an audience right now, then this is going to be perfect for you. Right now we're offering a free two-week trial to our music mentor coaching program, and if you sign up in the show notes below, you're going to get access to our entire music mentor content vault for free. The vault's organized into four different content builders, the first being the music, then the artist, the fans, and last but not least, the business.
When you sign up, you unlock our best in-depth masterclasses from a network of world-class musicians and industry experts on the most cutting edge strategies right now for growing your music business. On top of that, you'll get access to our weekly live masterminds where our highest level of modern musician coaches teach you exactly what they're doing to make an income and an impact with their music. Then once a month we're going to have our Music Mentor Spotlight series, and that's where we're going to bring on some of the world's biggest and best artist coaches and successful musicians to teach you what's working right now. And one of the most amazing parts is that you can get your questions answered live by these top level music mentors. A lot of the people that you hear right here on the podcast are there live interacting with you personally.
Imagine being able to connect with them directly. On top of all that, you'll get access to our private music mentor community, and this is definitely one of my favorite parts of Music Mentor and maybe the most valuable is that you're going to have this community where you can network with other artists and link up, collaborate, ask questions, get support, and discuss everything related to your music career. If you're curious and you want to take advantage of the free trial, then go click on the link in the show notes right now and you can sign up for free. From there, you can check out all of the amazing contents, connect with the community, and sign up for the live masterclass that happen every week. This is a gift for listening to our podcast, supporting the show, so don't miss it out. Go sign up for free now and let's get back to our interview.
So true. We started digging a little bit into this productivity management and time management and goal setting and how it relates to releasing your music successfully and building an audience. I would love to go a little bit deeper into that. It's so cool too, that you have that freebie resource that's basically an exercise that you guys can go through. I would highly recommend getting that and that's going to help you identify your priorities from this whole conference. But maybe we can talk a little bit about that process. Starting, you recommend looking around 90 days ahead of time and that gives you enough time to actually accomplish something worthwhile. You set three to five big targets or big goals for the next three months, and then you break down all the action steps that need to go into making those happen. What do you recommend in terms of organizing maybe on a daily basis, and do you recommend any tools specifically or what would your recommendations be around their system for just managing the endless to-do list that always seems like it's never done? There's always more to-dos.

Bree Noble:
That's really the next step is number one, time blocking. Making sure that you've got space in your calendar to work on this stuff. And I understand that many of us have other responsibilities that you might have kids or older adults who have to take care of or you've got a job or full-time. You've got to block in time to work on music, otherwise it won't happen. Just like I tell people, you got to block in time to have time for self-care or actually do stuff with friends. Because otherwise your schedule will just fill up with all the to-dos and you won't do those things and you won't have the quality of life that you want. Time blocking is super important. I use Google Calendar because I keep my life digital. It's just easier for me, but a lot of people, they really want a paper calendar. They feel good with that.
And I say, use exactly what is going to work for you. It doesn't try to fit yourself into whatever I use because if you don't use it doesn't help if you set up Google Calendar and then you just don't go in there every day. I recommend that. And then I love using Asana, A-S-A-N-A, to organize my tasks because again, I'm all digital. I'm a digital, I want to be able to access it from my phone or from my computer wherever I am. And I just love checking things off a list and putting in those... I think doing it project based is probably the best. If you've got a project based thing, like if you're releasing music and then you want to put in basically all those things that you broke down. What I was talking about earlier where you're breaking down the action steps, you can put all those in under that project.
And then on a daily basis or a weekly basis, you can go in and assign those to yourself for you to do them on a particular day and you can set have it, send reminders to make sure that you did them, which I always need. And then the great thing about Asana is you can also use that for recurring things. If you were working toward a musical goal and say you just want to practice every day for 30 minutes, you can put that into Asana to remind yourself to do it. And I know we're probably thinking I don't need a reminder to practice every day. I don't know, life just gets in the way. I literally forget sometimes to practice. I work at a church now and I've got to practice my music every day, so I'm ready for Sunday. And sometimes it's all of a sudden I realize it's Friday and I haven't practiced. And I'm like, "I bet I'm not going to be ready for Sunday," if I haven't done this.
That's what's great about Asana. You can do project-based stuff and you can do recurring stuff and just have it repeat every day or every two days or whatever you want to do. And then I think the final thing is just to reduce distractions. As Michael was mentioning earlier, we always have our phones are going off, they're binging, there's people texting you, like all of that. And having time periods where you are just focused on working on your music marketing and business tasks where those things are not distracting you shutting all of your tabs, keeping your phone in another room, turning off your notifications in your email or anything like that. Also for me, a distraction, we get these endorphins from when new messages come in or new things come in, people responded to something on social, and so we are tempted to just look at that all the time. I have to close my email tab and all my social tabs if I really want to focus.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. I know there's been a lot of studies around the effect of our push notifications and how if you're in the zone and you've been working, you have an hour block to focus on something, if your phone dings like 20 or 30 minutes into it takes you at least 10 to 15... It robs you of your productivity. What do you recommend in terms of managing those notifications, because at the same time, I think that one thing a lot of us are afraid of is, "If I turn off my notifications, what if my dog is stuck in a tree and needs to be saved and I don't see the text message." Or we have this fear of missing out if I turn off... And then at the same time, there are some valid things where we want to be able to be reached if there's something like that needs to happen.
How do you personally find that balance and how do you recommend that people... What are the systems they can use to actually manage this notifications so they can focus and go deep, but they also just have things organized so that they can be reached if they need to be reached?

Bree Noble:
It's hard because I remember when my kids were younger and were in school and nobody else was home except for me, I was the emergency contact, so I had to have my phone on me and on all the time. And you can set up notification or set it up so certain phone numbers will come through even though you put your phone on silent and things like that. Either your favorites or just specific phone numbers, like the school or your kids or something like that. And you can still have the responsibilities and keep up with everything, but yet most other things are not going to be distracting you that way. It depends on your personality. For me, I hate having a ton of notifications in my email, so I always turn all of those off, but that means I have to know that I'm going to be looking for those notifications on my phone.
I have this habit that every day I go to Instagram and I go to TikTok and I check my Slack and my Voxer. That's just a habit that I have, and so I can turn off those email notifications because I know that I will still look at those things. If you haven't developed those habits yet, then you might need to send yourself notifications in a place where you know that you always look or that you'll even get pings and stuff for it until you start to build this habit of, "Okay, I can shut off these pings because they're really annoying if I make sure that I go look at these other things." Or maybe you set up one notification every morning at 08:00 AM that says, check Instagram, TikTok, Voxer and Slack, because those are the places you need to keep up with. And so then you've reduced it to just one notification instead of a million.

Michael Walker:
Super smart. It sounds like what you're saying is that if you can learn to plan your notifications and actually work it into your schedule and time block out some time on your calendar every day that you know that you're going to check on those notifications, then that can help subconsciously to know that, "Okay, do I really need to check my email right now? No, I'm going to check it at 01:00 PM." That's super important.

Bree Noble:
That's right. Building in that admin time, even as a time block on your schedule once or twice a day, because there are things that do come in. Maybe you sent a whole bunch of emails to venues and you're waiting to hear back. And knowing that you're going to be checking your email once or twice a day and get back to those people, then you know they're not going to get lost. But you're also not checking every hour, "Oh, did they get back to me? Did they..." Because that can very easily happen when you're really waiting for something. Just knowing that I've blocked off this 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon to do these things. Same thing with social media. You should be checking because you do want to be responding to all comments because that's how you develop relationships with people and that are seen by new people and things like that. And so putting that on your calendar, either a separate space for admin stuff and then maybe a separate spot for social media every day.

Michael Walker:
Super good. And when it comes to this idea of time blocking and scheduling your day, I know personally that's been a game changer for me and actually having my calendar, I-

Bree Noble:
Can I just say, you're a master of it? I've seen your calendar and it's insane. It's so organized, but there's a lot on it, but it's not overwhelming because you know exactly what each thing is.

Michael Walker:
And it's exactly what you're talking about right now in terms of time blocking. It's called my Daily Rhythm Calendar, and the point of it isn't necessarily that every single day it's going to be the exact same thing. Life gets in the way and certain things... What is it, the phrase man plans and God laughs or something like that? That can happen, but just having that ideal daily rhythm where you just have a calendar where, "Okay, I'm going to have two hours blocked off from nine to 11 every morning by default." And those are going to be my prime focus block and those are going to be the place that I actually do the most important top three things from the day before I check my email before I check my inbox has been important. I'd love to hear you talk about when it comes to the people here right now making their own time blocks and figuring out, "How do I want to structure my day and when should I set aside time to maybe to check my notifications and when should I schedule time in my day?
Maybe in terms of peak performance, my energy levels, I want to align my most important to-dos with the time that I actually have the most energy. What would your advice be for people as they're starting to discover that about themselves?

Bree Noble:
That's exactly where I was going to start. The peak performance and energy and that kind of thing. I know we hear all this advice of morning routine and all of that, but I do understand that some people's circadian rhythms don't work that way. I have plenty of people in my own family that think I'm nuts for getting up at 04:00 or 05:00 AM and for them their peak performance time is at night or it's in the afternoon. You need to really be honest with yourself. Don't try to put yourself into this box of productive people do it in the morning. It doesn't have to be that way just because I'm that way and my productivity best time is 05:00 to 08:00 AM but that doesn't mean that it's for you. And so you need to figure out what works best with your personality or energy levels, your lifestyle.
Although back in the day I couldn't do it at that time because I was getting my kids ready for school. It's all about your season of life and just your energy levels internally when you're going to be able to do these things. And then the other thing I would say is that for me, I find that doing things that are seem hard, seem out of my comfort zone, I don't even necessarily really know how to do them or know how to answer somebody's question or something like that. I do those during my peak performance time because I find for me, night is not my peak performance time. And I find at night if an email comes in and I'm just like, "Oh, I can't deal with this," or, "Oh, this is so annoying or whatever." It's something that I really don't want to do, I would not do if I tried to deal with it at that time because that is not when I am at my peak performance. And I can get up the next day and see that same email and be like, "All right, let's tackle this."
You've got to know yourself, you've got to be honest with what is going to work for you and your own rhythms, the rhythms of your household or your work schedule or all of that. And another tip, if you work full-time or if you're working during the day, I find that building in some time if you have a lunch hour, can be really productive. Because of the fact that it's number one different work than what you've been doing, so you're probably getting a little bit bored of the work that you were doing and you want to do something different and it might seem fun and exciting to work on music stuff. Also, you're in that mode of I'm in working mode and sometimes it takes us a little bit to rev up to that momentum, and if you've been working for three or four hours, you're in that peak momentum mode of working. And so if you just throw in even 30 minutes of working on music stuff.
Maybe you're emailing venues or maybe you're trying to put together your EPK or something that's an administrative thing. If you can fit that in the middle of your workday, you'll actually find you can get a lot more done on it than trying to then fit it in when you get home and you're already tired from the day.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. That's so good. And it reminds me of the classic book. It's been a while since I've read it, but I think it was by Brian Tracy, Eat That Frog.

Bree Noble:
Oh, yeah.

Michael Walker:
When you say he's talking about if every day, the first... A lot of times the most important thing to do, the thing that is uncomfortable that stretches your comfort zone is the thing that we procrastinate on the most because it's uncertain or just makes us feel uncomfortable, so we push it away. And the analogy is that it's like eating a frog and that if at the beginning of each day you just eat the frog, then everything else is just easy. You eat the frog right off the bat. And so it's an interesting one, and I think it's-

Bree Noble:
And I add to that too. I gamify it for myself because I was always that way, when I did homework, I'd put a little bowl of candy and every time I finish two math problems, I could have one piece, one chocolate chip or something. I do that with this too. If I have something I really don't want to do, then when I do, what are my three things that I'm going to focus on today? I put that in there, but then I put it in with two other things that I enjoy doing. Maybe it's recording a podcast episode, I don't know, maybe it's practicing music for 30 minutes, and so I reward myself. It's okay, once I do this thing that I really don't want to do, then I get to do these other things and we always build it up in our mind.
This thing that we don't want to do, we feel like it's going to take five hours and I'm never... You often turns out that it really only takes 30 minutes to an hour when we think it's going to take five times as long just because we've built it up in our mind as being this big, scary, hairy, scary thing that we don't want to do or this big obstacle. And when you just face it head on and you're like, "When I finish this, I get to do this and this. And then I get to go in the pool after I finish those three things." Then that's the motivation that's going to push you through that thing that you didn't want to do.

Michael Walker:
That's so good. I love that gamifying it for yourself and giving yourself a piece of candy. That's awesome. And along those lines too, it seems like this is one practice that's been really helpful for myself when it comes to those kinds of tasks that I'm avoiding or just seems scary or just procrastinating on it. And I'm a pretty good procrastinator. When I was in school, I would literally wait until the last day of the project and just do it. But one thing that helps a lot when it's something like, I don't know, working out or a regular habit or something that's just, it's going to be uncomfortable is just slicing off the minimum piece of work or effort as you possibly could do on that thing. For example, if you wanted to get in the habit of start meditating once a day for, and you wanted to do half an hour a day, then you probably wouldn't start with 30 minutes a day of meditation.
But if you start and you said, "Okay, I'm going to do at least one minute or at least five minutes of meditation," then a lot of times that can build momentum. Or if it's five minutes of doing a task like sitting down to plan your next release and just, there's so many pieces to it. It's going to be a lot simpler for you, if you have Bree's course that just walks you through step by step how to do it. But if you're procrastinating on starting it and you're like, "Okay, I'm at least going to spend five minutes today doing that thing." And you set aside five minutes on your calendar and you do it for five minutes, then it seems like naturally the momentum carries you forward. And actually it feels really good because you did face it head on, and so now it's like you see, "Wow, I can do this, and yeah, it's not actually that difficult once I got in the flow of it."

Bree Noble:
Oh, a great example of that, in fact, I've been having to do this lately, but a lot of artists as well, you want to build let's say a nurture sequence into your email and you look at it and you're like, "I want to do this 10 email sequence and it's going to be so awesome. I'm going to introduce all these new people to all these different things about my business. I'm going to tell stories, I'm going to show them videos, all that." It sounds amazing, but when you think about it in that big piece, you never start it because it just seems so overwhelming. But if you just sit down and say, "I'm going to write one email today. I'm going to write one email today, or I'm even maybe I'm just going to come up with the bones of what I'm going to talk about in three emails." Maybe you don't write it yet, but you come up with this is what these three emails are going to be about.
And then you may be like, "Now I'm excited to write this because I decided I'm going to tell this story about this thing and I start thinking about it." And then you're like, "I'm just going to write it." And so you may be able to go a little further than that, but maybe you don't. Maybe you're like, "I just wrote one email, I feel super good about it, and now I can do the same thing tomorrow and in 10 days I'll have this full sequence." And I was doing the same thing because I have this bootcamp coming up and I'm like, there's so many emails. It's like emails to let people know about it, emails to let people know what's going on during it. It's just like a summit. You have so many emails to plan in the beginning. And so I was like, "I can't. This document is 50 pages long."
And so I'm just like, "No, I'm just going to do these two emails today. I'm going to do two tomorrow and all of that. And yeah, it's going to take me a little bit longer, but I'm actually going to get it done instead of procrastinating and then doing a half-ass job at the last minute."

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. That's so true. Awesome. I love conversations like this, and again, it's a super good timing because I think that this is really a key framework that is going to help you apply all of the lessons, everything that you're learning where you don't necessarily have to do... Actually, the one last thing that I would love to dig into with you based on what you were talking about is this idea of your top three things per day. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what did you mean by identifying your top three things per day and when can people... When's the right time in their day that they should time block to do their top three planning, and what does that whole concept look like?

Bree Noble:
Honestly, the best time to do that is the night before because then you look over, "Okay, when did I get done to... What would be the best thing for me to prioritize tomorrow?" And you have a lot better a view of it versus when you get up, you might be grumpy, you might be groggy. It's always better to do it the night before. And even if you want, you can do it at the beginning of the week, like Sunday night or even Monday morning, as you start to get into work and you're feeling good, plan that out for the week. That doesn't mean your week is going to absolutely look like that, but at least you've got a structure. And so then when you get up each morning and you're like, "Okay, these are the things I put on here for today. Does that make sense still? Maybe I'm going to switch out one thing for something else." But what these things are, these are not ginormous things.
These are from those action steps that we talked about that you broke your goals down into, and maybe one of the action steps is as simple as create three images for my release that I'm going to use on social media or something like that. It's got to be very granular, but it's got to be very action oriented. And that's where you're going to actually feel like, "Okay, I did these three things. I created something." You're going to feel super motivated and accomplished, and you're like, "I can't wait for tomorrow when I do three more things and I create things."

Michael Walker:
It's so true. I think that that's like a superpower is everything that you're talking about right now is around prioritization and breaking down a super complex thing into its main three to five parts. And because of the fact that it is unlimited amount of things that we could do or ideas, and with social media, it's the Facebook newsfeed, if you scroll, it's going to keep on going. It never stops. It always more stuff comes. And the same thing with our to-do list, so it never stops. But if you do what Bree just mentioned and I identify out of all the to-dos, if there's only three things that you're going to accomplish today, what would those three things be? And you just circle the number one thing. And if all you did was that and you did those three things, or even just the one number one thing out of those three things, then you'd probably be further ahead than 95% of everyone else just because you did this one process and you identified those three things and that number one thing and you did the one thing.
I think this is a magic leverage point that you can use to literally save, free you time, give you so much relief, you don't have to do everything. It's like you only have to focus on the most important things. I really appreciate you coming on here, Bree, and sharing. This conversation's awesome. And I would love to go to our questions and answers to maybe go into any questions you guys had specifically around this idea with time management and productivity and goal setting. And maybe we could talk a little bit about how this applies to releasing your songs successfully and planning and managing a release when there's a lot of different moving parts.

Bree Noble:
The release is a very big project, especially if you're releasing an EP or an album and if you're releasing... The way I recommend it is a few singles leading up to it, as breadcrumbs and getting people excited about the full release. There's a lot of pieces in there. And that's why you really have to create your plan and your timeline so you know exactly what you're doing when. And this'll probably go way beyond 90 days because we're talking about a full release. If you're starting before you've ever even recorded, maybe you haven't even picked the songs for it yet. If you're starting back there, this could be as long as a year process. And so you're going to want to map that out and you're going to be like, "Okay, the first 90 days, what am I doing? I'm picking my songs, I'm recording, I am figuring out my album art." That kind of stuff, like all the preliminary stuff.
And then the next 90 days are probably deciding on what you're going to do for your marketing, what stories are you going to tell? How are you going to do it? Are you going to create videos around these? Are you going to use ads? All of that stuff you're going to be figuring out, and also making sure that you're getting your mixes are getting done. And also thinking about, "Am I going to tour?" Where do I want to go? Start reaching out to venues. And also, do I want to do any crowdfunding for this particular release? And actually doing something maybe a 30 day crowdfunding campaign in there. Thinking about, am I going to do a release party? When do I want to do it? Some of the goal setting is actually... Or some of the steps and the goals are actually like making decisions. I need to decide what is my release date. I need to decide am I going to have a release party. Where is it going to be?
And so there's steps on the road to that. What are the steps that I need to go through to decide where I'm going to have my release party and what that's going to look like? And then you get into the 90 days, that's basically, I'm going to be releasing singles here and what goes around the release of each of those singles? What am I going to focus on for each single? Maybe one single, I'm going to really focus on hitting PR really hard and have it being around a particular story or something that relates to something that's happening in the world right then. Maybe the next release is going to be like, "I'm going to focus on promoting it on social media and I'm doing videos around it or doing live streams." Coming up with all this strategy is actually part of the steps because you can't start moving forward until you've made decisions, and then you can start planning it out and knowing exactly what you need to do to make those decisions turn into reality.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. And as you're talking, a really good question came in related around that last part of making these decisions, making the strategy, making a plan, and then the process of actually implementation. It's like we have the plan and now we need to start implementing actually showing up. And maybe there's a certain amount of discipline that's required that it's easier to go watch the new show, new Stranger Things just coming out on Netflix.

Bree Noble:
Oh, yes, coming out today.

Michael Walker:
It looks so good. I want to watch it right now, but I know I should do X, Y, Z. Maybe we could answer, Celeste had a question around, how do you actually make sure that you stick to the plan that you set and that you implement? And what are some recommendations for essentially making sure that the plan becomes a reality?

Bree Noble:
Accountability is key, because we'll square amount of our own plans if we can. Michael was talking about procrastination, so putting some accountability things in place for you, whether that's having other musicians that you get together with once a week and hold each other accountable. What did you do? Last week you said you were going to do X, Y, and Z. Did you do those things? That's really important if you want to take it a step further beyond peers. Having a mentor, having somebody that is going to hold you accountable. I have some students that I've worked with for years just because they want that accountability. They know that they're not going to do what they say they're going to do unless they have to report in. And so figuring out what is the kind of accountability that's going to work for you. Some people can be self-accountable, they can have a meeting with themselves once a week, and it's my personalized accountability meeting, and I sit down with myself every Sunday and did I do the things that I said I was going to do?
And if you're the kind of person that like the type A personality where it's like you actually feel bad when you look at your stuff and you're like, "I didn't do what I said what I'm going to do. I'm going to do better this week," that might work for you. Sometimes you need that outside, like a little bit of a shame factor, having to say to other people, "I didn't do what I said I was going to do." That's a big thing to keep you on track. And let's see, was there another part to that question? I just want to make sure I answered everything.

Michael Walker:
I think that answer was so good and that's so important because that is great. So many of us, especially as musicians, we're great. We're very inventive, we have great ideas and we're great at planning, but then sometimes where we can fall short is around the implementation and the discipline and actually sticking with it. And to your point, accountability I think is one of the most important things. And I know for me, having a personal trainer that I go to the gym with, same thing with your coaching clients, having that accountability. And this isn't just a theory or an idea, statistically, they show having accountability, having someone that you're reporting to, even just keeping track of... They did the study where if you're going for a walk or if you want to start walking more, then they had people start keeping track of their steps and they didn't ask them to start walking more. They didn't have to. They just documented what happened.
And just the fact that they had this metric that they were counting how many steps they were taking, they naturally started walking more because they had that accountability. They knew it was being reported on, they knew it was being tracked. I think a lot of what you're describing too comes down to this natural human driver of what motivates us as humans. And I think that there's a lot of truth to this idea of we move towards things that bring us bliss and we move away from things that bring us pain naturally. And I think that's why the only way to get yourself to do things like work out, for example, if working out you, that brings you pain in the short term. That's part of working out in a lot of cases. Sometimes you can do it in fun ways, which helps you overcome it.
But for me, like going for a run every morning, if you focus on the discomfort of going for a run and that's all you're thinking about, then the pain outweighs the pleasure. And so it's just almost impossible to get yourself to do it. You don't naturally do that thing, it's an uphill battle, but if instead you're focusing on the pleasure. For me, going for a run, if I don't do it, then I know that I don't feel good throughout the day, just physically in my body. My energy isn't as... When I'm here for this event and I'm talking with amazing people like Bree, I know that I need to feel good and be like at peak performance. I'm definitely going to go for a run in the morning and that's because of the pain and the pleasure balance. And so having accountability like Bree is mentioning, I think it adds a little bit more to the potential pain that will come from if you don't do the thing versus if you just do the thing, then it's-

Bree Noble:
And another aspect of that, the whole pain thing, that's where putting your money on the line is important. If you don't have skin in the game, and if you put money down, like you were saying, having a personal trainer, you're going to show up and you're going to do what they tell you to do because you spent money on this. And so whether it is, like in my experience, if I hire somebody to help me with something, say it's PR or for me, Facebook ads or somebody, an outsourced person, they're going to expect me to deliver them things so they can do their job. And so I may be really dragging my feet on, "Oh, I need to create all these videos." But if I've got somebody out there that I'm paying money and they're saying, "I need these things in order to do what you paid me to do," then I will do them. And it's maybe even someone on your own team. You hire a virtual assistant and you're paying them, but then you become this bottleneck where they can't do their job because you didn't do X, Y, and Z.
And so they're just sitting there, you're paying them, and they're not doing anything. That is going to get you to do what you need to do, that's going to keep you accountable to get your stuff done so they can get their stuff done, so you're getting the value of what you're paying for.

Michael Walker:
That's so smart. I think that there's ways to almost, I don't know if hack is the right word, but there's ways to leverage our human psychology ourselves. If we're intentional about this. If you sit down and for all of those big, scary, hairy goals or whatever they are, if you just personally write down, here are the three worst things, most painful things that are going to happen if I don't do this thing. And you just write those down and then you write down, here are the three biggest, most pleasurable, best things that are going to happen if I do this thing. Then that process, even just in your own mind, it gives you this ammunition, this fuel, it'll come back to and be like, "Oh yeah, this thing is going to make me feel good. And if I don't do it, I'm going to feel bad."
And if you do that in the right way, you can focus in a way that's going to actually drive your behavior to automatically do the thing that you want to have happen versus procrastinating because maybe there's a perceived pain of unknown or discomfort from going after that thing.

Bree Noble:
That's why when I talk about release strategy, I talk about both the enjoyment of the experience and you created this amazing thing and you want to enjoy sharing it with other people, and you can't enjoy it if you haven't planned, and you're always trying to play catch up and all of that. And then number two, the regrets that you would have if you didn't do it in the way that is going to be the most successful to get it out to the most people and feel like you really did it justice, so that's that pain and pleasure.

Michael Walker:
It's true. And everything we're talking about here, this also applies... This is just about influence, influence and influence of ourselves. This is probably the most important thing, is your ability to sell yourself on yourself and your goals. But then also, this is the same way that you motivate and you influence other people too, is when you think about them, you think about what's going to drive other people's behaviors? Naturally, they're going to move towards things that feel good, that are pleasurable to them, that move them away from pain. And so this is just a foundational part of marketing as well, is how do you market something and drive influence? You do it by focusing on the benefits and the pleasure and the outcome and the why, the purpose of this thing that they can get. And you also focus on, here are the pain and the negatives, and here's all the things that could, and maybe you're experiencing as a result of not having that thing.
And that's as long as you're doing it in an authentic, transparent way where it's like you're not... The thing that you offer should be something that actually moves them closer to something, like to a higher state of pleasure or bliss fulfillment and away from pain. But I think that there is something magical about taking that approach, using it for ourselves to motivate ourselves, but also using it as a way to essentially help other people get what they want. Was it Zig Ziglar that said, if you can help other people get what they want, then you can have anything that you want?

Bree Noble:
That's right. Yeah. That's actually when people ask me on a podcast, what's your favorite quote? That's always the one that I use.

Michael Walker:
Wow, I love that quote. It is, it's so good. And I'll use this as one final opportunity to... I'll probably come back to this because every time I talk with someone like you, Bree, it's like it's the thing that keeps coming back is, how if you focus on providing value and serving other people, then that's really the thing ultimately that counterintuitively is going to bring you a lot more success than if you're just focused on me, and how can I get the most out of the situation? Flipping the script and thinking, how can I help other people get what they want? How can I provide value for these people? What is it like for them? What do they want? How do I create this for them? Then it just flipped that switch.

Bree Noble:
Yep, absolutely.

Michael Walker:
Cool. All right, man, I love seeing the chat come in throughout this too, I see Campbell says, "This session is absolute gold." Great questions, everyone. I see a lot of people throughout... Dakota just said, "Justice." Okay. I don't even know exactly what that means, but it's almost like very dramatic, justice. Awesome. Gabby, Jan, Kara, Lion, Drew, Galves, got such a cool crowd here. Maybe let's answer one or two more questions and then I would love to dig in a little bit too... I know that, Bree, you have two different things that are going to be super valuable for everyone that are here. One is a freebie and a resource based on what we talked about, with goal setting and productivity and time management. And I'd also love if you could talk a little bit about your program that you've created with Rock Your Next Release for anyone who's interested in actually having a good course or a guide to release their music successfully.
Maybe let's start with one final question from the community, and then we'll go into the freebies and the resources. All right, so this is a great question. Helga was wondering, with my music career right now... It sounds like the question is, "I don't really have a team, I don't have other people yet, and in order to be successful, I need a team. And how do you find a team? How do you find the right people that are going to help you with your music career? For you personally, Bree, how did you find your team? Did you have to search for her team or was she herself approached by others for collaborations?"

Bree Noble:
I found my team in several different ways. First of all, the first person I brought onto my team was actually my daughter. She was 11 when I brought her onto my team and she started creating social media images for me and stuff. And then she started doing more stuff and then she started managing my Instagram. Over time she took on more. But there are people around you in your own circle. I remember back when I was booking, I actually had my mom do some booking calls for me. And then she would also, when I would get email addresses at shows in the old school days where I had physical pieces of paper, I'd run a contest and have people fill it out, put it in a hat and everything, and then she'd enter them into the computer. There are people around you that either want to help you for free like my mom or like my daughter, that I could pay her $5 an hour back then when she was 11 and take some things off your plate.
Then second person I hired was someone within my community, so somebody that belonged to my academy. And she just happened to mention on a call one day, my husband's really pushing me to get a job, but I really want to have more time to focus on music. And so I reached out to her and I'm like, "Hey, you want to work a job within music?" And so that worked out really well. And then third person I hired was somebody who had a specific skill that I needed help with. She was like an independent contractor. She had a specific company that did this one thing and I hired her for that. And then finally I hired a virtual assistant to be my generalized customer service manager. And I found her on... She's from the Philippines and she's amazing. And I found her on a website called OnlineJobs.ph. Actually I wish I had it here now because I actually have a small mini course where I talk about how I did all of this, it's called, How to find, hire and train a rockstar assistant.

Michael Walker:
Okay, wow. Maybe people can Google it or go to your website and check out that because that sounds like it can be really helpful.

Bree Noble:
Just send an email if you're interested in that and I'll send you a link.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Awesome. It sounds, in order to build your own team, one, I think it's pretty normal. I know I personally went through this and it seems like most people go through this phase early on where it's like you're wearing all the hats for your business or for your music careers, you have to go through that initial stage. But then as you grow a little bit, then maybe you have some people in your community or your fan base, your audience who, if they were presented the opportunity to work with you directly and help you out and be a part of your team, they might be interested in joining and connecting with you. And-

Bree Noble:
They already know your brand. They already like you.

Michael Walker:
A 100%. And I wanted to just reiterate that point, because I think that's so smart, especially for you as a musician. You're really cool, especially to your fans, you're awesome. And them getting to spend time with you and connect with you personally and be a part of your team is really exciting. And you're probably going to have quite a few fans who would take an internship role just for the opportunity to connect with one of their favorite bands and get free tickets to your shows or get VIP access and things. And I think that if you could find people that want to join your team in exchange for them getting VIP access to your shows or them getting, it's almost like a trade of service.

Bree Noble:
No, that's a really good point because I do have someone else that works with me that we work in trade, she got access to my programs and stuff and she did community management stuff, so that is also a great way to do it.

Michael Walker:
A 100%. And similarly, if you guys are in our community or on our email list, and you might have seen some emails, we almost always will reach out to our community first if we have for building an NFT marketplace or we're looking to build a software. We'll send out an email and say, "Hey, we're looking for X, Y, Z." And usually we'll do a test initial project where we bring on some talent and we do a test project, and we'll do it in exchange for one of our offers, either like a program or software or something. And it's so helpful because the people who we start working with, a lot of times they already know who we are. We already built a relationship. Everyone on our team right now is a musician themselves, and so everything that they're creating is for themselves and for helping other people, so there's that alignment.
And so I think that the same thing totally applies to you and your audience as artists, as musicians. If you can bring in people who are so excited to connect with you and be a part of your team and maybe moderate your social media channels for you and connect with fans and help sort your email address for you and just be a part of your team. And they're excited to do it in exchange for your diamond offer and they get to come to your next music retreat that you do that's like a $5,000 offer and they get it for free. Then one, it really doesn't cost you that much to hire someone like that. And two, they probably get way more value. At least they didn't have to spend $5,000. They only have to work a few hours a week and they got $5,000 worth of value.
And three, they're the kind of person that understands your fan base and your audience really well because they themselves are a fan. It's a great line of contact to really start building your team. I just wanted to really iterate what Bree just mentioned there, because I think that's gold if you're looking to start your team. If you haven't built any sort of audience yet, then maybe you probably shouldn't be looking to build a team until you build an initial audience and maybe one of your first... And you could maybe find some help with virtual assistants or something like that too.

Bree Noble:
Find a family member, college student. Go for that first if you don't have an audience.

Michael Walker:
Super smart. Yep. Cool. Hey, Bree, you're awesome. Super appreciate you coming on here. And again, I think that all of this stuff is relevant to everything we're talking about so that people can apply and consolidate and actually take all the golden nuggets and move forward with it in a practical way. Thank you so much for you and what you do for the entire musician community. And for anyone who is interested in diving deeper or learning more about the time management work that you do, maybe you could talk a little bit about your freebie, the resource. And I would also love to talk a little bit about Rock Your Next Release and your program that you created and who might be a good fit for that.

Bree Noble:
Absolutely. I did provide you with my goal setting process, and it is found at profitablemusician.com/goals or the link that Michael provides you. And it basically takes you through that whole process that I just mentioned earlier of going through from all the things that you want to do, crystallizing them down to the five things. And then you can go from there into breaking that down into further steps and doing what we talked about in this session. But that will be your initial step for the goal setting. And then as far as the Rock Tour Next Release, I provided a link there that you can get a really good glimpse of what is inside the program. The program, it takes you from the beginning to the end for an album or an EP release. It takes you through all the eight areas that you have to focus on when you are releasing music, everything from the planning part and budgeting and creating your actual product, how you get that out into the world, distribution and all of that.
And then all the marketing channels, the social media and email and Spotify playlists and all of that. And are you going to do a release party? It goes through every single thing. And so if you go to that link, you look over on the left and you'll see all the different lessons. And we also provide you with a lot of templates and done for you cut and paste kind of stuff for social media as you're going through your campaign, you're releasing your different singles and doing all the things that we talk about in the program. And as well as templates for reaching out to venues to do the support tour and things like that. It's got all the resources that you need in order to take your release from start to finish, just concept to full release, and then even taking you a few months beyond that release as you promote it.

Michael Walker:
So awesome. Thank you so much Bree behalf of all of us. We super appreciate you being here and for sharing that free resource with the goal setting. And if you guys have resonated with Bree and especially if you're getting ready to release your music, which as a musician, you almost always should be thinking about your next release. I would highly encourage you to explore and see if the program would be a good fit for you. I think that learning from a mentor that can give you a map or give you some guidance, if you're the right fit for it's going to help save you a lot of time and from trial and error. And ultimately it's just going to give you a great ROI of your time and energy and your money. It's something I'd look into, explore it if it's something that you're getting ready to release a new song and otherwise, let's give a big round of applause for Bree. Thank you so much.
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guest today. And if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us, that really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take the music careers to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.