The Six-Month Rule: Why Everything Takes Time and How to Plan Accordingly

In our instant-gratification world, we've forgotten a fundamental truth: meaningful results take time. Whether you're launching a business, building a creative career, or making major life changes, there's one timeline that consistently proves itself...the six-month rule.

Always be 6 months ahead

Everything worth doing takes a minimum of six months to show real results. And if you want to succeed, you need to be planning six months ahead. This isn't pessimism; it's strategic realism that can transform how you approach your goals.

Social Media Management for Musicians: Simplified

Print this out, put it on your desk or in a place you will see it to make sure you are getting the right things done during the day, every day.

Review, take notes, and measure results constantly

Maintaining A Positive Mindset for Clarity and Creativity

Life throws curveballs. We all face moments that challenge our resolve and test our spirits. During these turbulent times, it's easy for our creativity to go into hibernation, weighed down by stress and negativity. Maintaining a positive outlook isn't just about weathering the storm, but about unlocking a wellspring of innovation and fresh ideas. It's about cultivating a mind set that promotes creativity and productivity.

A positive outlook isn't just crucial for your mental and emotional well-being; it's a powerful catalyst for enhancing your creative spark. When your mind is cluttered with worry, there's little room for novel thoughts to emerge. By actively cultivating positivity, you create the mental space necessary for groundbreaking ideas to flourish.

So, how do you keep that creative engine purring when the world feels a little off-kilter? Here are some actionable strategies to help you stay positive, resilient, and ready to create.

Finding Your Creative Rhythm: Making Music Work with a Busy Life

Your life is a whirlwind. You're crushing it at your full-time job, nurturing relationships, chasing personal goals, and trying to squeeze in some semblance of a social life. So, how in the world are you supposed to be a productive musician? How do you carve out real creative time and actually make music when your brain is constantly buzzing with a million other to-dos? You dream of those early morning sessions or weekend marathons, but let's be real, those often don't work with your schedule. What's left? Often, it's just a short window at the end of the day.

But here's the good news: that short window can be your golden hour. You just need a program. You need to intentionally create the space, time, and mindset to be creative, productive, and most importantly, get your music done.

Unlocking Your Musical Potential: It's Ditching Those Bad Habits

We've all been there. Staring at a blank DAW, fumbling through scales with no real progress, or endlessly tweaking a track without ever hitting "export." It's frustrating, and often, we blame a lack of talent or inspiration. But what if I told you that your biggest roadblocks to becoming a more productive musician, to nailing those practices and actually finishing tracks, aren't about your innate ability, but rather a tangled web of bad habits and mindsets?

Let's break it down.

Bad habits and limiting mindsets just makes everything more confusing and difficult!

Stop Wasting Time: Practice Smarter, Not Harder

Practicing your instrument is essential for improvement, but not all practice is good practice. If you’re spending hours playing without real progress, chances are you’re practicing the wrong things, in the wrong way, or with no real direction.

Music is a massive subject. There are countless directions you could take—technique, theory, improvisation, songwriting, production, performance, ear training, and more. Without a plan, it's easy to waste time on things that don’t help you reach your actual goals.

If your practice sessions feel scattered, unproductive, or frustrating, it’s time to fix your approach. Let’s break down common practice mistakes and how to make your time count.

Unlock Your Creative Power: Simple Organization Habits for the Unruly Mind

Overview

1. Organization is a must for creativity
2. Create a very simple file system
3. Create schedule with short time frames
4. Make everything as simple as possible
5. Limit the amount of items daily
6. Write down everything
7. Make a time to organize notes only
8. Make a separate time to analyze notes
9. Make a separate time to plan and review

Let's face it, the word "organization" can feel like a creativity killer. Images of rigid systems and soul-crushing labels might flash before your eyes. But hear me out: organization isn't about stifling your spontaneous spirit; it's about creating a framework that supports it. When you're not spending precious energy searching for that one vital tool or trying to remember that brilliant idea you had last week, your mind is free to wander, to connect unexpected dots, to truly create.

Here's a super simple approach to bringing a little order to your wonderfully chaotic world:

Maximize Your Time and Progress: The Power of the 15-Minute Practice Session

We all want to practice our instrument and we always want to get better. You know how important it is to to practice and would love to have time to send a couple of hours going through some effective practice time.

But it's tough finding time, even 30 minutes open each day to get in a real practice session. Days go by and you find that there doesn't seem to be any extra time in your day to get a real good practice in, so you just skip thinking that you'll have time tomorrow to get it done. Before you know it, days turn into weeks and you haven't made any progress let alone get in some effective practice time.

The good news is that you really don't need those hour (or even longer) practice times. You can still get tons done and see real results by effectively scheduling and limiting your practice sessions. Enter "The Power of the 15-Minute Practice Session".

Limiting your practice sessions might seem limiting but you'll be surprised by the results when you're focused and consistent

The Practice Paradigm: How Exercise Principles Elevate Your Musical Journey

In the pursuit of musical mastery, we often focus intently on the instrument itself – the notes, the rhythm, the technique. But what if the most effective roadmap to accelerated development, enduring skill, and profound artistry lay not just in musical concepts, but in the very principles that govern physical exercise? 

By viewing our musical practice through the lens of an exercise paradigm, we can unlock a holistic approach that builds not just skill, but resilience, consistency, and a deeply mindful connection to our craft.

Idea Overload? How to Conquer the "Curse of Creativity" and Actually Finish Tracks

If you’re anything like me, your head is probably a constant noise. You hear melodies, chords and rhythms into your ears at all hours. Your brain is a glorious, chaotic mess of riffs, chord progressions, and half-formed lyrics.

But here's the kicker – for too many of us, that's pretty much where it all stays. In our heads. Welcome to the "curse of creativity"—the agonizing reality of having a mind overflowing with musical ideas, and never quite bringing them into the light.

Successful musicians drop tracks, release albums, and play gigs on a regular basis. You? You've got hard drives full of snippets, voice memos humming with potential, and enough unfinished demos to soundtrack the apocalypse. That allure of a new sound, a different genre, a more intriguing harmonic twist… it’s a siren song that always pulls you away from whatever you were almost working on.

How to Succeed

There are a ton of resources these days about how to succeed. There are as many articles and books on the subject it seems, as there are people. So why another article on how to succeed? How is this going to be different than any other article?

This is different because it deals with the most basic rule about succeeding. Every other rule and guideline is just a point based on this. Every other reason is an offshoot of this basic principle. It’s nothing new and has been said numerous times and a variety of ways. It needs to be mentioned again here though for all of you musicians out there. Mostly because I feel that musicians and artists are more familiar with this rule than most people out there yet don’t apply it to the other areas of their life. Most of all, they rarely apply it to their career.

The Musician Entrepreneur

Here's a bit of a newsflash for you, if you're a working musician you're automatically an entrepreneur! What's more, this absolutely nothing new. This is the way it has always been. From the time of Bach and Mozart, to Duke, to today, musicians have always had to take care of business. Some famous musicians were notoriously bad at handling business and  finances, while others were quite good at it. The problem is that even though this is standard fare in a musician's career, it's seldom discussed and rarely taught. It's one of those subjects that we're forced to learn on our own. Usually the long, hard way!

Keys To Becoming a Great Musician

There are many ways to get good at your perspective instrument and achieve some success in the music industry. It usually entails spending many hours in the practice room, going over the fundamentals. Then getting out there and trying to make some money from all of your efforts. Along the way you will find that there are some skills things that are more important than others as far as what it takes to be a musician. In fact, if you practice these essentials, it will be the difference between you being a mediocre musician and a great one.

How To Find Your Musical Goals

There was a comment recently about tips for trying to figure out your goals. This seems to be a tough thing for most people, especially musicians. There are tons of articles out there about how to get things done and succeed. They start off with you making a list of your goals and then move on from there. Unfortunately, figuring out your goals is usually difficult and timing consuming. Some people go through their entire life not knowing what they're goals are. Yet you're supposed to figure this out in a short time and then move on from there. Figuring out what your goals are like asking you what your favorite color is. It's all personal and one person's answers are going to be different than another. The key to figuring out what your goals are is all about asking questions; tons of them. Once you start asking yourself the right questions it will become easier figuring out what direction you should take.

The Musician's Most Important Skill

All too often we talk about how to practice and perform. You might think that the most important skill a musician could have is great dexterity or, a great imagination, or maybe even great creativity. Where these are important, that there is one skill that is the foundation of all that a musician must do. It's our memory. Memory isn't just used by musicians to remember tons of songs; it's used in every aspect (improvising, composing, performing). Musicians must remember songs, chord progressions, fingerings, lyrics, scales, idioms (licks), performance notes (dynamics, inflections, phrasing, breathing, etc),  recording techniques, engineering facts, song forms, theory, stage moves, gear settings, recording settings, software applications, etc. And this is just the musical applications! This doesn't include any of the marketing, PR, business activities that we have to do on a daily basis. Memory even comes into play in our ear training because ultimately, the ear is using our memory as reference point for all of those chords, intervals and sounds.

How Not To Practice

There are many times when we set out to accomplish our goals but it either takes too long or doesn't happen at all. When it comes to music, we all know how important it is to practice. Yet, there are many things that we do that undermines our ability to get better, grow and learn. This things may not seem all that important at first but their effect over time can be monumental.

Practicing Quickly

We know what we want to do. We have a basic idea of what it is and how to go about it. So we try the exercise a couple of times slowly and then plow ahead and see how quickly we can pick it up. It's not perfect but it's close. The speed is almost there but there are a couple of problem areas. So we keep plowing ahead and forcing it to work. This is in fact contrary to what we want to do. Every time we practice something, it gets reinforced in our brain. Practicing something at a fast tempo, incorrectly, over and over again just reinforces the bad technique. That's why it's important to practice slowly. When you practice slowly and deliberately, you are reinforcing good technique (i.e. the neural pathways in your mind). The tempo doesn't matter; it just matters that you are doing it correctly. Practice slowly and get faster gradually. Ironically, if you practice this way, you'll get better sooner.

Musician's Top 10 Getting It Done List

Being a working musician is tough. You're pretty much on your own. You have to take care of all of the business, networking and finances. On top of that you have to find time after a busy day to try and be creative and make some great art. Here are a list of things to help you keep focused and on track.

1. Move away from abstract ideas to actionable goals - There was a study done with two groups of people. Both groups where given a set of tasks to complete. Group A's tasks where clear and concise (like go pickup this, go here etc.); whereas Group B's tasks where a little more abstract (like having to pick out 'interesting items'). Group A completed all of the tasks whereas Group B had trouble completing the list. It's much easier for us to complete concrete, measurable goals. This especially applies to musicians because so much of what we do is abstract. For example your goal maybe to write a song. That's not well enough defined and also may not be something you can complete in one go. A better goal would be to finish a first draft of a pop song or ballad. This applies to everything; your writing, business and practice sessions.

Musician's Top 10 Guide to Learning Music Theory

You've decided that you want to learn some theory or some new concepts on your instrument. You may start out reading a book or checking out something online but then lose interest quickly. It's kind of dry and nothing you read seems to have anything to do with what you're doing on your instrument. Here are some things to help you out and make your time learning theory a lot more effective.

Working Solo: Problems & Solutions

In a past post we talked about some of the problems with goals setting and planning. As a musician most of the time you're going to be on your own when it comes to trying to get things done. It's tough trying to get things done at the best of times but being on your own makes it that much harder.

What To Do

The toughest part of planning is trying to figure out what's important and what needs to be done. There isn't just one way to the top in the music industry; there are many ways of getting there. So what do you need to do? What's your first step? What's your next step? What needs to be done first? Of course the answer to any of these questions has a lot to do with where you are now and what you want to accomplish. You're going to have to do some research and development. Most companies allot a certain amount of time in research and development and as a business, you're going to have to do the same. That means spending time everyday doing some research in figuring out what people in your industry are doing to make it.

Yoga for Musicians

I have to admit, I love yoga. But before you think I'm going to get all new-agey on you let me point out some practical applications and conventions from yoga that we can apply to our art.

Getting Into It

Yoga practice is a lot like music practice; its a set of exercises to set the mind and body in a specific direction. It's done everyday, it follows a regimen, and it can be done practically anywhere.  With every yoga practice, there is a mind/spirit connection. You try and be in the moment. Focusing all of your energy on the matter at hand. You take time to notice how your body feels while trying to quiet the mind. There is the constant 'practice' of working on something, keeping focused, working hard and getting better everyday. It becomes a ritual but not automatic. It becomes an important part of your day. It becomes part of you.