It would be nice to think that there is a 1:1 relationship between the amount of time you spend working and the amount of work which comes out of that time spent working. If you find that as funny as I do then you probably suffer with the same issue I have been - Inefficiency.

A long time ago I was told a joke by an old boss of mine about a woodcutter. The woodcutter went out the first day and cut down ten trees. Profitable and productive - excellent. Over the next few days he found he was working harder and longer but by the end of the week he found he was only getting six trees cut in spite of sawing harder and working longer. An older woodcutter told him he needed to sharpen his saw, to which he replied “I don’t have time for that, I’ve got all these trees to cut”.

Easy, so I need to sharpen up! But how? Here are some thoughts.

It would be easy to say go for a walk before work and turn your phone off. Both good suggestions but probably not enough.

In my case I don’t think the morning walk before breakfast, however right it sounds, is the right thing for me, though living by the sea it’s often irresistibly tempting. I think we all know that we only have half a day of genuinely productive work in us. The trick for me is to get the most value out of that half day and fill the rest of the day with emails, edit jobs and other less creative activities.

Cream Of The Morning Brain

I’m a morning person. I heard a phrase in a radio interview with a writer talking about her struggles with adapting to the first Covid lockdown. In it she referred to her husband bringing her tea in the morning and asking whether she was getting the ‘cream of the morning brain’. I thought that was a nice phrase and wondered who he was quoting. Having looked it up it appears that he wasn’t quoting anyone but I like the phrase so much I use it regularly, so I’m quoting him!

The reason I like it is that it perfectly describes my most creative time of day. Fresh from sleep (usually) it is a great time to get the ‘flow state’ creative people describe in which they can get work done in an hour which might take them four at a less favourable time of the day. This is why I don’t squander early mornings on a walk, and incidentally is one of the few advantages of not having a dog!

However, to access this ‘best self’ who in my case emerges around 6am and has always left the building by lunchtime, I find it’s essential to clear the decks for his arrival. How best to do that?

Sort Out Your Environment

The physical environment is really important. I’ve written in the past about how precious my desktop space is - as in the actual desk. Pretty much all I have on my desk apart from keyboard and mouse is a notepad and propelling pencil, written notes are important, almost always aide memoirs as if I don’t write it down straight away it’s not going to happen. Propelling pencils are great as they always work, no furious scribbling to get a biro writing, and you can rub out stupid ideas!

I also have a single Avid S1 which gets moved out of the way when not in use. Being as light and compact as it is it’s no more difficult than lifting a hardback book. But it gives me access to some faders and buttons, the bare minimum but I’d rather that than be balancing a qwerty keyboard on the faders of a console.

Apart from some headphones (open backed Austrian Audio Hi-X65s) that’s pretty much it apart from a line of drive caddies, a computer and my monitors, which are on desktop stands so they move with my sit-stand desk, but these are all out of my immediate reach.

So that’s my immediate physical environment, the studio is bright and well lit, which really helps and is detached from the house, which also helps. I have worked in loft spaces and spare bedrooms but being removed from the house is a luxury. On a purely practical point, I have a toilet and a small kitchen in my studio and being someone who drinks tea like a true Brit, you can work out how these facilities reduce disruption to my work.

So with my environment pretty sorted. Why am I struggling to get stuff done?

You Interrupt Yourself More Than Anyone Else Does

I need peace to work, I was never able to do my homework while listening to music so it amuses me that I now work at home listening to music! However, while external noise can be distracting, it’s internal noise which gets in the way far more. All you really need to get a day’s work done in two hours is focus and it’s you who will distract yourself far more that anyone else on any given day.

Standard advice applies here - Turn your phone off, throw it away, bury it in the garden, whatever it takes. We all know how much time we lose to our phones. But it’s more than that. If like me you use an iPhone and a Mac and also have an iPad, you’ll know how ‘phone call pandemonium’ breaks out across all of these if someone calls you. Most intrusive of all is the way an incoming call takes the focus away from Pro Tools, even if you’re in record! I should add that I record to print tracks quite a lot and this can happen during edits. I don’t have an artist with me!

Harvesting the aforementioned ‘cream of the morning brain’ has an added advantage, if you are working early in the morning you’re far less likely to be disturbed by other people. My biggest tip for avoiding calls, messages, all of that distracting stuff, is to temporarily disable notifications on your computer. I’m still running Catalina and part of my reluctance to update is that one of my favourite features of the OS has changed. On Catalina you can option-click on the notifications icon in the top right of your screen to temporarily suspend, apparently this has been changed in subsequent operating systems.

Start When You’re Ready, But Start

The other big obstacle I find lies between me and effortless productivity is really understanding the task. I’ve always circled tasks. This is just part of the process but those endless displacement activities we sometimes find ourselves doing are a part of it. If you’ve ever found yourself repainting the studio to avoid doing what you’re supposed to be doing you’ll know what I mean. However if we can ‘double up’ by using this pre-contemplative time productively by doing mundane tasks which actually have to be done as part of our working day then that’s fine. But if it’s getting in the way of deadlines then it’s not good. Time pressure makes some people work better. Not me.

Time Flexibility - Not Always Good

On the subject of time, so many of us either work for ourselves or work from home and with this comes significant flexibility. One of my pet rants is people posting pictures of a laptop running Pro Tools on the beach. I live under 10 minutes walk from the beach and I have never done that. Screen reflection issues aside the reason is simple. Are you working or are you enjoying yourself at the beach? You can’t do both at the same time and all the time you’re looking at the sea you’re not working. Do your edit, then go to the beach as a reward. That’s what I do.

Time flexibility sounds great but it can quickly become hours of poorly focused time spent checking Facebook and making cups of tea. The single biggest change I’ve made which has positively influenced my productivity is to be more disciplined about what I’m doing and when I’m doing it. You have flexibility in your day but you can still only do one thing at a time. Choose one thing. Decide on a small reward you’ll give yourself when it’s complete (in my case I refer you back to my comment about tea drinking) and just do the work. With the right environment you’ll get into that quiet place in your mind where you can actually get stuff done and if you’ve done it right you won’t be disturbed out of that productive place until you’ve made the progress you needed.

Or you can be shaken out of it by a three-way alert pandemonium from your phone, computer and tablet. If a person acted like my Apple devices do in my studio, I’d throw them out!