5 things to help you keep going as a musician

If you want to stay encouraged and motivated as a musician, I have five resources to share with you.

Check them out below…

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Chunking: A Simple Method For Doing Big Things

Chunking could help you take control of your music career. 

I was using it before I realized I was using it. And it’s extremely helpful for me. 

People usually implement chunking to remember large amounts of information.

But as musicians, we can use it as a tool for productivity and work-life-music balance. 

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How Music is Maximizing Your Productivity

Listening to music has been a crucial part of our global culture development since the beginning of time. We listen to music to celebrate, to mourn, to run and to improve our mood. But have you ever tried listening to music for productivity?

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How Your Choice Of Music Affects Productivity

Imagine movies or TV shows without music. No music to cue the scenes or to add the suspense, the drama, the romance, etc. It’s hard, right? Music, for sure, makes the world more colorful. It adds life and personality to everyday things. It’s regarded as one of the achievements of the human creativity.

Music affects us in so many ways. In fact, some studies prove it benefits our health significantly. Certain types of music improve sleep quality, reduces stress and anxiety, decreases pain, boost memory, and many more.

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5 Reasons Why Taking Extra Time to Plan Each Day Will Make You a Happier Person

We all know how hard it is to keep up with tasks. The sheer quantity of things itching for completion each day is a point of contention for everyone I know.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by how much work there is to be done and just dive in, rather than to take a second to step back and organize all the work before doing so. I would argue that taking 5 to 30 minutes each day (depending on your quantity of tasks) to organize and lay out your tasks will allow you to be more productive while you tackle them. Because of the 5 reasons below, I suggest you take a second to revamp your daily routine if it doesn’t already include planning time!

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The Weekly Batch

Musicians are expected to be everywhere these days. We’re interacting on social networks, following up on blog comments, keeping our profiles on countless music sites up to date, and checking our stats and analytics with a variety of online tools. It’s enough to make a lifelong indie yearn for a label - one with a marketing department!

Most of these items don’t need to be addressed daily, but they do need to be performed on a regular basis. Tasks that have to be done on a given day, I schedule. Everything else is relegated to The Weekly Batch™ (note: not actually trademarked). I tackle the entire list as a single to-do item on Friday afternoons, when I find it hard to do much of anything else. Here’s my latest iteration:

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Avoiding Avoidance

Do you ever dodge your creative work? Say, your practice time arrives, and you race off to do some chore. It might be a chore that you detest, but now it calls to you. Then, instead of refining your music, you start cleaning the house or doing whatever. If that scenario sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Artists of every sort contend with avoidant behaviors. Why do we sidestep doing what we love? The answer often stems from the nature of creativity.

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Getting Started

Whether we plan to create the likes of a recording, composition, concert tour or promo campaign, we have to launch our project and work on it regularly. But we all know that creative ventures often fizzle because we, the would-be creators, stall. We convince ourselves that no one will care. We procrastinate. In the end, far too many of us never get started on the things we hope to create and thereby cheat ourselves out of meaningful accomplishment.

Personally, I don’t intend to miss out on forging a meaningful life. I’m committed to doing the creative work that matters to me. The key to my output is that I live by the following six habits that enable me to get started on my projects every day.

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The primary job of a manager is to take care of your lazy artist…

When a westerner (an American for example) walks by the office of a co-worker, and the co-worker is quietly sitting there doing nothing, the westerner’s first reaction is that the co-worker is lazy and probably slacking.  On the other side of the world, when an easterner (someone from Japan for example) walks by a co-worker, and that co-worker is doing nothing, the easterner’s first reaction is that the co-worker is most likely engaged in deep thought whilst grinding away at a solution to some problem…

I want to say two things in this post: 

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What happened? A rant about the work ethic of many musicians

What ever happened to true effort, the desire to learn and develop ones ability? What happened to the problem solvers? What happened to the ones that could look at a problem or at something going wrong and continue on in the mode to make it right or at least better? What happened to the hunger that was followed with the effort to do that extra work, take that extra step or go just a little more above and beyond? When did the laziness set in, the complacency, and when did the expectations grow to the point where some think it should simply come their way and they deserve all they want with as little effort as possible.

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