5 Principals to work on your art everyday
I share the 5 principals that allowed me to work on my art everyday. I am mainly a musician and composer and I used to wait for inspiration to hit me before working on anything. And when I sat down to work on music, I would often quickly distract myself by scrolling through social media.
Apart from waiting for inspiration to work on music, I also work a full time job and often exhausted after work. I would normally use my evenings to mindlessly scroll social media or watch tv until I fell asleep.
This problem of not working on my music was that I believed “Art shouldn’t feel like work.” I don’t want to feel like I’m clocking in and performing tasks when making my art. It’s also easier for me to relax and unwind after a stressful day at work.
Months would go by and I wouldn’t even make time to just play around with a guitar or a drum set, I’d just be on my phone believing that a great idea would come. But it never did. Luckily I realized this and decided to start showing up everyday for myself and my art. If music is what I love to do then I must figure out a way to do it everyday.
Over time and through inspiration of some books and films, I developed these Principals to work on music at least 1 hour a day.
The Principals
Have a Setup
Schedule Uninterrupted Time
Make it easy to start
Track your progress
Don’t Quit!
Have a Setup
To me, having a setup means having my tools at the ready so I can just start creating. As a music composer and producer, I like to keep my setup minimal so I can travel with it and setup anywhere (Read Blog on my Minimal Studio Setup). At the minimum, I have my laptop which runs Logic Pro X, SSD of Instrument Samples, a small midi keyboard and studio headphones. With these tools, I can do 80% of most musical tasks. I recommend looking at what you need at the minimum to start working on your art whether it be canvases and specific paint and brushes or notebooks and specific pens.
Schedule Uninterrupted Time
This one for me is probably the most important step and the hardest to follow. Most of us live very busy lives and it’s hard to justify spending time for yourself everyday when there’s always so much to do. However I’d argue that if you look at the amount of time you spend everyday on work, life and fun, there is most likely at least an hour of time you can dedicate to your art.
Now you may be thinking, one hour is practically nothing. What can you really accomplish in an hour? It may not be much but at least it is an hour of uninterrupted time you gave yourself and after a week, that’s 7 hours of work dedicated to your art. Soon you can increase the time as you take a look at your schedule and find time that can be put aside for your art.
For me, I work about 2 - 3 hours a day on my music. When I figured out I didn’t want to do anything after my day job except scroll through social media and be a couch potato, I decided to work on my music first thing in the morning before work. I usually wake up at 5am and am in front of my setup at 5:30am. Then I work to about 7:30 or 8am. Since it is so early in the morning, I’m not banging on a drumset or blasting a guitar through an amp. So for times when I need to play loud, I go to a rehearsal studio twice a week for 3 hours each day. One session is after work and one is on Sunday morning. For the last couple years I’ve been going to The Hive Music Hub. It’s a monthly membership studio and I have scheduled time slots reserved every week. This keeps me accountable as I am investing in a space to work. Check out our article about The Hive Music Hub here.
So I am averaging around 14 - 21 hours a week on my music. Now is that time very productive? Not as much as you might think, but it’s uninterrupted time to sit and create until more inspiration appears. I don’t go on on social media during this time and I don’t read work emails. It’s time specifically for my art. More on that in the next principal.
Make it easy to start
You’ve scheduled time but you still get interrupted by notifications on your phone, emergency work emails or just the random things in life that come up. This is why it is important to make “starting” on your art, very easy. I am a major procrastinator and as soon as I wake up, the voice in my head is already telling me to go back to sleep or check updates on my phone etc. That voice in my head will give any excuse to take the easy route instead of doing the difficult task of working on my art.
So to make “starting” easy on myself, my prep work begins the night before. Since I start working at 5:30am, usually the night before, I make sure to close my email app and close all tabs for the day job. Then on my phone, I have it set to “Do Not Disturb” automatically at 9pm so I don’t receive any email, text notifications. Now you may not be able to do this for your job but I’d recommend looking for ways to silence these notifications on your phone. For me, if it’s an emergency, someone would call me and not text so I don’t worry about it as much.
I deleted social media from my phone but if you can’t do this, I believe there are apps or settings that can block social media apps at certain times.
In the evening, I make sure to clean my desk so it’s organized and neat for the next morning. If I’m going to be playing guitar, I make sure everything is plugged in and the tuner is close by. If I’m currently working on a song, I make sure to leave that project open on my computer so I can pick up where I left off.
The other thing I make sure to have first thing in the morning is my coffee. I love black coffee! Sometimes my favorite part of working on music is to just sit with my coffee, a notebook and write down ideas as the sun rises. As much as I enjoy drinking coffee, I don’t like spending time making it. It’s one step I don’t want to do first thing in the morning so I invested $25 dollars in a simple drip machine that can be programmed to brew coffee. I prep my coffee beans and water the night before and set the timer for 5:15am. If my alarm doesn’t wake me up at 5am, the smell of delicious coffee is sure to wake me and motivate me to get up.
Now you may not be a coffee drinker but I would look for things as little motivations to help start working easy. Whether it be a favorite snack at the ready or a specific music playlist, we all have something that will help make it easy to start working.
If you sit down ready to work and that voice inside your head starts asking for a coffee and a muffin, you’re not going to work because you’ll want to now go get a coffee and a muffin. But if it’s already there waiting for you, then there’s no excuse to not work on your art ;)
Now that I’ve done my prep work in the evening, when the morning comes, I can easily start working on my art.
Track your progress
At the end of each session, I like to spend a couple minutes writing down how much time I spent and what I got done. This can be done in a spreadsheet or journal. So when I look back, I can see the progress I am making. When I didn’t write these things down, it was hard to tell if anything I was doing was working and all I can see ahead of me was a large amount of work I still haven’t done. Now I can look back and see that I have been showing up for myself and art is being produced. Even if it’s a week where I missed a few days, I still see progress being made.
Don’t Quit!
Creating a habit is very hard. Inspiring articles, videos and quotes won’t switch your brain into being a productive artist. I remember every New Years, I would watch inspiring videos on exercise and health then would be motivated to workout everyday and diet. Then usually after a week, I get burnt out and go back to my old ways. This is why it’s important to start small, take baby steps and over time, you’ll see the progress and it will feel easy to do. Soon it is just a part of your day that you can’t go without making art, like eating or sleeping.
There will be days missed. There will even be weeks missed. What is important is that you don’t let it discourage you. If I could leave one tidbit of inspiration, it would come from a sports analogy. I am a huge baseball fan and learned that baseball is about failure.
“The game of baseball is a game of failure because it’s so difficult to play. A 300 hitter, a superstar fails seven out of ten times at the plate. So what does that tell you about the game and its difficulty?”
Rich “Goose” Gossage
That means the top baseball players fail 70% of the time but it doesn’t stop them from showing up and putting in the work to play the game. So when you show up to work on your art and you may not produce anything or you struggle with finishing something, remember that it is part of the process. The important thing is that you showed up and didn’t let anything distract you when working on your art. As true artists, we dedicate our life to the craft. It goes beyond successes and failures. It is just is part of our fabric. So everyday, find some time to work on your art or create blocks of time a few days a week. Whatever works for you but know that it is productive time you gave yourself.
Conclusion
So to recap, these are principals and not rules.
“A rule says, “You must do it this way.” A principle says, “This works … and has through all remembered time.” - Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting.
There are probably a billion other ways to help work on your art everyday but this is what worked for me. Overall, I think most of what I’m fighting against is myself from starting. It’s me against me and only I can get myself out of my own way. No one can do that for me so I must look within and see what can work. All of this life is an experiment and when I decided to dedicate my life to making music, I stopped being hard on myself. Since it’s a life long process, I take it day by day and find a way to show up for myself and make something.
So take what you will from this article and create your own principals and steps to work on your art. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below.
Thank you for reading
