Back against the wall

I had my back against the wall this week once again. I’ve got in to pretty smooth routine in the past few months with balancing time between, writing and posting blog posts, writing, recording and releasing songs, promotion and playing live. I let my self slip with one thing though. Few weeks on a row I woke up on Thursday morning with no song written or recorded for the Friday song challenge (more like schedule at this point). So I locked my self into my office/studio for hours until I had a finished song, sent off to be mastered. My mastering engineer is very understanding and accommodating with my crazy schedules 😀 But then again, I am loyal weekly customer 😉

But once I let this happen once, my unconscious mind had this “ah sure, there is always tomorrow” attitude, and the song writing was hard to concentrate until I really had to. It’s like anything in life, we only get it done when we know we must. Now don’t get me wrong, I was writing bits and bobs of songs all week, but to finish one of them seemed to be a bit of a struggle.

This week I am playing a festival in Denmark with Sliotar on Friday night, which means I’ll be flying out to Denmark on Thursday, and I get back to Dublin on Saturday late afternoon, just in time for our show in the Porterhouse. This meant I had to have the song done before I go. And I could feel my mind once again struggling with it. And the more I felt the pressure of the deadline, the harder the songwriting seamed to become.

But eventually I just forced to me self to sit down and write the song, and not stop until I was done. And of course the song came out. In fact I am very happy with the song. As a songwriter I like to tell stories, but this time it was a case of write what you know. And once I did that, I was off to a flying start.

So why am I writing this to you? Because I believe there are several lessons here. The fact that we allow that one extra day just in case, is a smart move. But if we do it all at the time, we will just end up using it. So setting up schedule even for a creative work will make you more productive.  Also breaking away from your usual schedule can be beneficial. In fact anything that breaks your everyday life usually has a positive effect on creative stuff.

And most of all, not to my self, learn to prioritise better! 😀 Time management is an art form on its own, and if you want to be successful, you need to get good at it.

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get EIGHT of his songs for free go HERE