The beginning of the year is always a time for change, especially introducing new habits, mindsets, and workflows to our lives and careers to make it better than last year.
Therefore, here are a few things I’m doing this year, and some that I’ve done in years past that can elevate your 2025 to be better than 2024
4 THOUGHTS FROM ME
1. Stop focusing on yearly goals.
Looking back at my yearly goals from 2024, I’ve changed them along the way, which made me think I needed a different system for keeping them more current and updated. Therefore, here’s what I’m doing this year, and here’s what I recommend:
- Build quarterly goals instead of yearly goals. Your life, motivations, and goals can change after life events that can completely change your schedule, which makes yearly goals a bit of a stretch. Instead, develop goals to achieve in the next 3 months. These are (a) less likely to be derailed, (b) smaller and, therefore, less daunting, and (c) give more opportunities to celebrate small wins during your year, which often can boost your motivation;
- Break your goals into weekly milestones. After setting your goals, you need to create a workflow during your week to achieve them since, otherwise, you’re just dreaming. So, break down your goals into weekly milestones now. For example, ‘3 tracks in the next quarter’. Ok, so you need to produce one track every month, which means one track every 3 weeks + 1 week for mixing, which means one week for the drop 1, one for the break, etc.
Therefore, your next milestone towards that goal is to make a track section per week, which is a lot less daunting than 1 track per month, right? - Track your progress and adapt it if necessary. Create a spreadsheet or somewhere to track your progress towards your goals. After 2-3 weeks, review your milestones and progress and adapt them to keep them updated with your life, which can avoid making you frustrated for not achieving a goal because something got in your way.
If it does, adapt your goals in your 2-3 week review and, as Dory from ‘Finding Nemo’ would say, ‘just keep swimming’; - Share your goals with others. We’re more prone to keep up with our goals when we share them with others, which is something we can do in our discord server. Click here, share your goals, and we’ll help you keep track of them.
2. Develop your ideal week.
One of the biggest issues with music production is finding time to do it, and I don’t blame you. Even working with music full-time, it’s hard for me, and that’s why, this year, I’m changing a few things in my week. Here’s what I’m doing, and what I advise you to do:
- Make music your #1 commitment besides family and work. You don’t skip work or family time regardless if you’re sick or healthy because it’s important to you. Therefore, if music is important to you, you should also treat it as a commitment, and not a ‘when I have time for it’.
- Block time in your week for the things you value. What does your ideal, yet still realistic, week look like? How many hours per week would like to spend producing? Block it on your calendar as if it were a ‘task’ you can’t skip, and let others know this is a ‘busy time’ for you.
Instead of just wishing you had more time, plan your week to have everything you want to do, and not what ends up happening; - Change your schedule for your ideal week. If you arrive tired after work, instead of wasting time on Netflix, go to bed early and wake up earlier to produce, or take a nap and produce later. Find a workflow that allows you to live your ideal week, and not just dream about it.
- Work in Micro Sessions. One of my friends, Pinkowitz, doesn’t have long hours to produce, so he produces in chunks of 15-20 min because ‘between parenthood and work, there’s not much free time. So, learn how to produce in smaller chunks of time.
Track how much you can do in 20 min, and, for future sessions, while at work, or cooking, plan your next session to avoid wasting time thinking about what you’ll do next while in a session. Focus on small progresses for each session and, 20-min at a time, you’ll make your song come true.
3. Make what is tough your priority.
We often like to go into repetition mode when we learn something that we’re proud of in music, but you can’t stop there as this would leave us stagnant. To always make progress and keep on developing:
- Make a list of 10 things you’re struggling with and tackle them. Rank from 1 to 10 and, for the next song, focus on fixing at least 1 of them. Regardless if the song is good or bad, if at least one of your issues was fixed, consider this song a win.
- If you’re not able to solve something, seek help. You don’t need to feel ashamed if you’re not able to solve an issue without help, like fixing your kick and bass. Instead, seek help from a friend who does kick and bass better than you or a mentor who you admire and fix it. Most producers think the main issue is “not knowing how to fix it”, but often, it’s more about running away from it, and this will start to haunt you.
- Start with what you’re struggling with. If you’re struggling to enhance something, that’s exactly what you should practice next. Instead of just making another song and trying to miraculously get better:
- Gather 3 tracks that you love how different that ‘something’ you’re struggling with is, and try to copy it to your song;
- Find a genre that is really complex on what you’re struggling with, and then try to learn how they do it through tutorials on youtube.
Both these techniques will expose you to new techniques that you can later implement in your own songs
4. Learn how to let things go and focus on what matters.
In December/24, I was planning to finish one track, but Splice reached out to me and offered me a massive project that I couldn’t say no to. This changed my schedule a lot, and here are already a few lessons that I learned from it that you can apply to your life:
- If anyone offers a project that doesn’t align with your goals, say no. Regardless of the project, you have to learn how to say NO to what is less important and YES to what matters to you. That’s why having your quarterly goals is so important as a new goal will often make you drop a current goal.
So, ask yourself which one will give you the joy, and then let go of the thing that won’t help you achieve that now; - Let go of the small things in your music. Let me tell you something, nobody cares about 0.5db in the adlibs/ear candy of your song, sometimes even on the main lead. Instead of stressing over small details, focus on developing more songs as doing so will give you more chances of achieving your goals than overthinking and trying to make one perfect;
- Let go of what could hold you back. If a project, a collab, or a grand activity like ‘finding your sound’ is getting you stuck on one song, let it go. You’re not letting go of the task, especially the ones listed on point #3, but sometimes we can get stuck on a song because we’ve worked so much on it that we (a) overthink it, or (b) don’t want to trash it.
Instead, move on to a new one since that can free you from what’s getting you stuck and help you move along faster than before.
3 QUICK TIPS FOR YOU
What else can you change in your life to enhance your music and your career?
1. Change your identity rather than boost your motivation.
Change your identity rather than trying to boost your motivation. Trying to boost your motivation is entirely dependent on your mood, which can change wildly depending on the day, and other variables in your life.
By getting producing music intricately ingrained in your schedule, and making it part of who you are, adding/keeping production habits will be more natural, and your music will end up more authentic, and your audience will respond to that, giving you more motivation to keep doing it.
2. Seek feedback from people you want to be like, and reject all the rest.
Instead of asking everyone for feedback, ask only the people that you would love to be like as they will be the ones telling you ideas and opinions that would match with who they are, i.e., who you want to be.
3. Find ways to get closer to the people you look up to.
Surround yourself with people that make you want to be more, and not who cherish you as the one on the top. If you’re the one on the top, you’re not learning from anyone, so always have friends that challenge you to be more.
