Work / Music Balance

for me, part of my strategy is remaining organized and eliminating anything that may impede the songwriting process.  that and being intentional about carving out time for writing, any time that i can - even if that amount of time only amounts to 5-10 mins at a time.

for one, i have a half-hour commute to/from work via rail, so much of my writing happens on the train.

i have all my music programs installed on my work computer - BGB w/ LSDJ, schism tracker, famitracker, audacity, EMS cart drivers, SAV management utils, etc., so that i can fire it up when i have short breaks.  even if i have 5 minutes to mess around, that's enough time to at least start a new musical idea. 

i now have much of that work synced through Google Drive so that i can save my work to the cloud automatically and continue it at home, or vice versa, with no fuss.

one more thing, i know this may be a luxury for some, but try to promise yourself that you won't work for more than X # of hours a week.  this is more of a general time/resource management thing at work but the greater the effort you make to not let your work bleed into the other parts of your life, the more incentive you have to write when you've gone through all the trouble of getting the time to do so.

I spend two to four hours a day on music, rarely taking a day off. If you want to do something, you'll invent at least a little time for it.

Last edited by chunter (Apr 4, 2013 12:26 am)

Have no social life/outside obligations/other hobbies and you're golden

These days I save it for when I have a long, uninterrupted stretch of time (i.e.-a day off) where I know I can spend plenty of time on it and still have time for other unproductive activities like listening to music, watching movies etc. I've been having a lot of trouble getting inspired lately, so it just sort of happens when it happens.

It was an IT support job in an office, but there was already a phone helpdesk before things came to me and most of the time they managed to sort it. I didnt switch through choice, it was because they eventually noticed that they had loads of people sat around with hardly anything to do.

Thanks for all your replies, there are some useful tips here. I suppose just sitting down and starting whenever I can is what is what i'll have to do for now but as Subterrestrial says, it does help knowing there is a long uninterrupted stretch of time so you can focus and really get into the flow of things. 

I suppose train rides are good places to record ideas, an android tablet with milky tracker would be nice.

Last edited by poisoncut (Apr 4, 2013 10:17 pm)

This Im finding that after spending 12 + hours a day on a computer for work the absolute last thing I want to do is see a computer, even for pleasure.