The order matters because each step narrows the next one: a title fixes the mood, the mood picks the image, and the image and artist name together make six track titles feel like a record instead of a list. Skipping ahead to the tracklist first usually produces six vague themes instead of a week.
Step 1: Start with a phrase you already said
The title comes first because it decides what everything after it has to be - a phrase like 'Not Today, Probably' makes you reach for a different photo and a different band name than 'Gas Station at 6AM.' Finding it is mostly listening: open your messages, your notes app, or your memory of the week and pull a sentence you actually said out loud, verbatim. Keep the grammar exactly as you said it. 'I'll deal with it Monday' is a better album title than a polished rewrite of it. The usual failure is reaching for something poetic and invented, which produces a title with no week behind it - and then steps 2 through 4 have nothing to match. If nothing surfaces, use the most repeated sentence of your week, even if it's boring.
Step 2: Match the image to the title
Once a title exists, the image has a job: it has to feel like that title. That's a mood test, not a quality test. The most common route is your camera roll - find a photo taken during the week, crop it square, and check whether it survives being boring. Blurry, badly lit, taken from a bus window: all fine if the mood holds. If nothing fits, build one instead: photograph a table, a window, a shoe, and let it be plain. Desaturating an image is the fastest way to make an ordinary photo look like a record sleeve. What people get wrong here is choosing their best photo of the week rather than the right one - a beautiful sunset on a record called 'I'll Deal With It Monday' fights the title, and the whole project starts feeling like a photo album instead of a release.
Step 3: Name the artist, not yourself
By now you have a title and an image, so the artist name is really a question about who made this. Naming that person something other than your own name is the point - a small distance lets you describe the week honestly instead of performing it. Good names come from collisions: a place plus an object ('Tuesday Kitchen'), a job plus a plural ('The Night Shift'), a habit plus a number. Say your candidates out loud; a band name should be easy to say and slightly funny to explain. Skimping on this step costs you something specific. If the artist is a joke you don't believe in, tracks in step 4 turn into punchlines and the liner note in step 5 has nobody real to thank. Pick one that's sincere enough to carry three minutes of attention.
Step 4: Six tracks from six real moments
Here's where the project stops being a mood and becomes a record. Six is the number because it's an EP: long enough to need variety, short enough that every slot matters. Write titles from actual moments, not themes - 'Waiting Room, 4:12 PM' beats 'Anxiety' every time, because a moment has a time and a place in it. Then sequence them the way a real album would: open with the loudest or most eventful track, put the strangest one fourth, close with the quietest. If everything happened on one day, spread the tracklist across the week by using smaller moments - a phone call, a receipt, a walk. The failure mode is writing six versions of the same feeling. Read the list back and ask which track sounds nothing like the others; if there isn't one, replace a title.
Step 5: Thank one person or thing
A record credits the people who helped make it, and one sentence is enough to do that here. By step 5 you've built a title, a cover, an artist, and a tracklist, all of which describe the week - the liner note is the only part that points outward. Name exactly one person, object, or circumstance, and be specific about what they did. 'Thanks to Marcus for driving me to the airport at 5am' is a liner note. 'Thanks to everyone who supported me' is a form letter. Generic gratitude is the most common way this step gets wasted; a list of names is a list, not a thank you. If the person also appears in a track title from step 4, even better - the record starts to feel like it has a cast.
Step 6: Get it out of the screen
Nothing above this line exists until it leaves the screen. Choose the format that matches who it's for: print it small and tape it inside a kitchen cupboard if it's for you, set it as a phone wallpaper if you want to see it daily, or send the image and tracklist to whoever got the liner note in step 5. Printing at 10cm square is cheap and makes the whole thing feel finished. If you send it, send the whole package - cover, band name, six tracks - rather than just the picture, or the friend sees a photo instead of a record they're on. The predictable way this ends badly is leaving the finished album in a notes app where it joins everything else you meant to do. Finish the sequence while the week is still recognizable.
A reminder sitting in a phone vanishes the moment it is dismissed and leaves no trace of the week behind it. A strip of paper taped where you actually look at it visibly gets shorter as steps come off it, and it stays there until the last one is gone.