Did you work on your project today? Do you plan to? Did you work on it yesterday? What actions are you taking day to day to ensure you get your creative work done?
As artists, we have our heads in the clouds but can struggle to keep our feet on the ground. By that I mean with all the day dreaming, there requires physical work to get our projects done that isn’t always easy. There’s no avoiding the practical steps that must be taken in order to actually complete our projects. We have to ask ourselves honestly: Do my day to day actions align with the work I want to achieve?
What are you doing day to day?
Sometimes we don’t even realize that weeks and months go by where we haven’t even touched the work we should be doing. This is how we have projects that have been on the “backburner” for years. It’s time to move those pots up to the front and actually turn the heater on because if we take a bigger picture look at it, our same actions now won’t breed a successful result for those projects. Something has to change.
If you resonate with what I’m talking about, I hope this blog can help you implement some practical strategies to start ensuring progress on your projects. This is something I have struggled with for the past few years as a young artist and still do to this day. Here is what I have taken away from this journey and how I set myself up for completing my projects.
First thing’s first, you need to keep it simple.
As I look back at all the journal entries I have done about getting work done, beating procrastination, setting up systems to make progress on my work, I notice that there’s too much fat. Cut the fat. Don’t over complicate it. It’s a lot simpler than you think. I would write out whole paragraphs and plans on how to get my work done and the types of systems I would follow in order to get work done everyday. But often I would not follow through due to being too overwhelmed with every step and almost “too prepared”.
Get really simple. Take a notepad out, or sticky notes, and simply write down steps to take in order to get your work done. Draw little checkboxes next to them so you can check them when they’re complete. We’re going very traditional here.
Keep this list by your desk or wherever you do work. Now schedule when you will get each step done by. Writing a song? Great. It may look like: Step 1 – Finish writing song + lyrics. Then you can schedule that you’ll work on it for an hour and a half every day. You give yourself the week to finish it, which means you have over ten hours to get it done, that’s if you work on Sunday (I usually don’t schedule work for Sunday).
Step is done? Great. Move to the next one. But make sure you have these steps all listed out before. If you’re recording the song, you can write a step to record instruments. And another one to record vocals. One to mix and master. Schedule all of these and look at your timeline.
Keep it simple. Keep that list of steps with the checkboxes in front of your workspace so you’re always reminded of what needs to get done day-to-day.
Others may work better without this system, but it’s meant to avoid mindlessly spending months working on a song that you’re not even really working on because you’re not being intentional enough. If something resonates from this type of simple system, then take it and run with it. Whatever it looks like, I feel it’s best to keep things simple because at the end of the day, they actually are. Everything is very simple. Just do the thing. No hacks or shortcuts, just do the thing everyday and show up. And even if it’s not everyday, make sure you have some level of consistency. If you work better with longer sessions of 6, 7, or 8 hours on end, then just make sure you’re in the studio at least once or twice a week. Not once every three months.
Routine
Next, it’s best to get into some kind of routine. A beautiful part of the artist’s journey is that it is deeply intertwined with your soul’s journey, meaning it’s a very personal one. It is one of spiritual evolution and self improvement. Creativity is a way of life and making art goes deeper than just the work itself. It spreads to all other areas in life and something like getting into a routine is great for both your life as an artist and your life as a human.
Personally, I have struggled with precisely planning my days in the past with specific times for specific tasks. But a new mentality that has helped me is
“design your days, don’t plan them”.
Design your days so you can get a feel of what they’ll look like and what you will achieve. But you don’t necessarily have to schedule every single specific task. Not only can it feel too rigid but if one step is missed, your whole day can go off schedule which is not a great feeling. Design your days so you know you’ll get certain work done by a certain time, but the order of tasks and what time each task is specifically done can be felt out by the day.
Now that being said, you need a level of strictness with yourself. If you start your hour long timer for a deep work session and then something comes up, you need to stick to your work, unless it’s an emergency or you feel deeply intuitively that you should put work aside. Other than that, stay disciplined and stay in the zone.
Journaling
Journaling will inevitably be brought up in a blog like this. I have talked about journaling a lot throughout all of my content. Journaling in the morning to write about your goals and plans can help set yourself up for success. Journaling at night to reflect on the day can help you realize what you can do better and what you can keep doing right. I also find that journaling at the end of the week to review the work week as a whole can help you see how you did compared to what you wanted to get done after the week. You can recognize which habits, good or bad, had the biggest impact on your progress and what you will do about them going into the next week.
Act as IF
Finally, a lot of this is a mental game. A principle I like to follow is “Act as If”. This is something I want to go deeper into in another blog post. The idea is that you must assume the responsibility of the life you want. If you want to become a financially successful songwriter, then act as if you already are. What would that look like? It may look a lot different than what you’re doing now. You would be taking your craft very seriously, likely working day-to-day, and ensuring progress on your projects.
If you can get your mind right, all else will fall into place. This is the type of head space where you can fall in love with the process. You can enjoy the work now as opposed to being obsessed with the end goal. Acting as if you’re a director making films will get you excited for your work as you romanticize your work life. And guess what… what you’ll likely find, and what I anticipate to find as I am finding now, is that the true magic is already here with us, it’s not exclusive to that ideal point in time where we’re finally “successful”. We can have just as much fun now as we think we’ll have once we have actually “made it” as an artist.
If you truly love what you’re doing, then you’ll love it now and later. Remember that you get to do this, it’s a gift. Act as if you are already that person. You’re already Him. lol. You’re that guy pal.
This is a day-to-day thing. It’s a mission. Don’t forget that and please ask yourself honestly if you’re actually aligning your day to day actions with what you want to achieve.
Get back on that horse. Go to work and dream on. I hope this resonated, best of luck everyone.
DREAM ON,
Tozak
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