Being distracted hacks away at our ability to be creative and get things done. We're in a time when distraction plagues us. We can be all alone in a quiet room, yet emails, text messages, phone calls and social networking sites tug on our attention until we give it to them. And that usually takes about three seconds to happen.
The human mind has an amazing ability to focus on one thing at a time. Multi-tasking is actually very counterproductive, in most cases. In order to create our best work, it's necessary to be in an environment where we can easily focus, without distraction for an extended period of time.
Before you sit down to dedicate time to a song, turn off anything that beeps to get your attention. Close down your cell phone, email, social networking sites and anything else that could take your attention away from your song. Forget about owing it to yourself, you owe it to the song.
The most productive way to work is to take one to two hour blocks of focused time and dedicate them to your song, and your song only. No email, text messages or conversations. After that dedicated period of work time, you'll want to take a break, where you completely unplug from the work you were doing. Lay down, or have something to eat. Get yourself into a clearly defined rhythm of work and play.
I typically structure my work time with two hours of focused work, followed by a half hour break. Then it's back to another two hour work block, and so on. The two hour block is completely focused on my work task at hand. When the break hits, I stop looking at the work completely and let myself unwind. It's important to let yourself have a defined work/break rhythm in this way. You should use a timer when you do this so you don't get lost in the work block, or the period of rest. When the timer hits, immediately stop your work and take a break. Time your breaks as well.
I found myself becoming so much more productive when applying this method. I once decided to take two days to write some newsletters for my website. On Monday, I put in four two-hour work blocks, each with a half-hour break in between them. I did the same thing on Tuesday. In that time I focused only on writing content for my newsletters. After the two days I had ten articles completed. For sending out a weekly newsletter to my email readers, that gave me enough content for two and a half months, all in two days of work, because I focused my efforts. Doing this will let you hit your goals much more easily and efficiently.
Too many times, we don't allow ourselves to focus our time in this black and white manner. Instead, we live in a world of grey, where we say we worked for eight hours, but it's hard to know exactly because a lot of that time was spent on our phones, and on the web and we can't even really quantify how much time we spend on what. I guarantee your productivity will sky rocket if you start implementing this way of thinking and writing songs.
To learn more, download my free EBook here: http://www.SuccessForYourSongs.com/freeoffer/
Anthony Ceseri is the owner of http://www.successforyoursongs.com/, a website dedicated to the growth and development of songwriters of all skill levels. Anthony's writings appear as examples in the book "Songwriting Without Boundaries: Lyric Writing Exercises For Finding Your Voice" by Pat Pattison, an acclaimed lyric writing professor at Berklee College of Music.
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