 Figure out how to balance paying the bills along with pursuing your creative endeavor is one of the hardest parts of life. The fact is the reason most creators don't get their creative work done is the things they need to do to pay the bills, drain them, and then they have no creative energy left for their creative endeavor. But oftentimes this stems from not scheduling your creative life properly. In this video I'm gonna talk about some lessons I've learned for scheduling my creative life and have helped me so I get my creative work done regularly. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon and this is Muse Formation. The hardest balance in my life is that I have businesses that need me to do work and then I have creative endeavors that need my brain to not be drained or else they don't get done. One of the boundaries I can't get around is that despite my ability to work a 16 hour day recording bands with little resistance, trying to do two hours of writing after a 10 hour day of recording doesn't give me results I'm ever happy with. This realization led me to develop a schedule where I work at my recording studio for as long as possible so I can take days off to write. Since my productivity is uninspired, if I've expended my energy recording for long hours, I had to find a way to make this work so I make progress on writing while still getting paid. So I have to do these long 16 hour days one day and then I work on my writing the next day and then I do some more recording after I'm done writing since I don't need as much creativity for things like mastering. You may have experienced a similar case with your day job and if so you need to figure out ways to engineer your life to balance with paying your bills. Many artists do their creative work by waking up early before work. Others chill out for an hour or two after work and then begin to create. Figuring out a pattern instead of hoping for the best is the way most people find to be creative more often. Personally, it takes me a long time to wake up in the morning. I'm not a morning person. So my best time to work happens from hour four to 14 of being awake each day. This means I do chores, email, and other boring work early in the morning so I can create up my ideal work hours of the day. Analyze when you work best and try to engineer your life around it. Yes, it can be weird to friends that I'm never free on Monday because I try to do that 16 hour day every Monday. So I have Tuesday afternoons to always be creative. The other thing I do is guard my creative time since it's super important to me and also what I need to do to keep things happening in my life. There's a great saying from entrepreneur Ramit Sethi. Show me someone's calendar and I will show you their priorities. One of the most effective ways to get your creative project moving is to make your creative project a higher priority. Merlin Mann talks about that if your creative outlet is the most important priority in your life, your calendar should reflect that. He says, just as when you wouldn't leave your best friend bleeding if they got hit in the face with a hockey puck, your creative life bleeds when you don't prioritize it. If you say your music is the most important thing in the world and you spend five more hours each week playing baseball or video games than you do on your music, that's not factually true. While it may be true in your aspirations, this means you need to change your time delegation. I actually try to track my time roughly and look back and see if it reflects my priorities. I don't get crazy and use software. I just look back at the end of each week when I'm about to go out on Friday night and think about what I did and if it was an inline with what I should be doing each week by looking at how many hours I spent on each thing. It's essential to view your time as a pie chart where there's only a finite amount to give and every time you give more priorities, something else, something else gets time taken away from it. When one commitment takes up more time, another commitment gets less. This means you may need to tweak your calendar to show that your music is indeed what's most important. I try to schedule my entire week on Monday and make sure I've scheduled time that reflects what I need to do. I may have to cut back on social or creative time if my to-do list is behind or I need to do something like taxes. Whereas if I'm behind on my creative projects, I will allocate more time to them during the week and maybe not go out and see friends as much. Oftentimes, creative time only happens if you book it. This is why so many people choose to work with a collaborator. If you don't work with a collaborator, force yourself to get work done with deadlines and commitments like booking a mastering engineer on a certain date for your song or performance where you'll have to play the song. Many artists talk about guarding their idea time and while they book time to execute their ideas like recording sessions or band practices, far too often they don't guard the time it takes to get inspired and create new ideas. It's said that you don't find the time to create. You make the time to create. Without making sure this time isn't interrupted, it will always get eaten up by other circumstances. I even go as far as to shut my phone on do not disturb mode and I use an app called Freedom that I pay a little money for each year that it won't allow me to look at social media, reverb or YouTube since yes, I am a YouTube addict. Cause really oftentimes the person I need to guard my creative time from the most is myself. I hope this was helpful. Let me know in the comments if there's anything that you didn't see and hear that may be helpful. I'd love to hear from you. Thanks so much. That's it. Am I missing anything? Is there any way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I want to answer them. So leave them in the comments. I hope you liked this video and if you did please like and subscribe and get notified for my future videos since I'm gonna be breaking down the concepts in this video along with tons of others on promoting your music and how to make music you're more happy with. As well, I have a Facebook group that's linked below that has only helpful information. No one tried to sell you anything, playlist or con artist, only helpful information for musicians looking to be better themselves. If you want to learn more about me, make a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do, head to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on any of the socials. Thanks for watching. One last thing, if you liked this video, there's two playlists here with tons more videos that you'll probably enjoy. One's about how you promote your music and the other's about how you make songs you're happy with. Otherwise, you can hit the subscribe button here to see the rest of my videos. Thanks so much for watching.