Last year, I read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It is a wonderful, realistic perspective on time and time management. One thing that resonated with me was his chapter on patience and the loss of the ability to carry out longer projects — to really stick with them for the time they need to come into being.

I have personally found it difficult at times to sustain a project, or to continue feeling engaged with what I am doing if it is a longer commitment. Part of this difficulty is that my primary motivation for being in the studio has been to transform a work in progress into a completed track, rather than solely focusing on the process of writing music. In other words, the purpose of being in the studio is to attain something in the future, as opposed to finding a fulfilling experience in the present moment.

This relates to notions of mindfulness, internal motivation, flow states, and delayed gratification, and I believe the ability to carry out fulfilling work lies in finding a balance between these factors. This would entail doing creative work that is still working towards a future goal, but is also engaging in the present moment, and ticks all the boxes for facilitating states of flow.

I remember a while back seeing a post somewhere on social media of yet another piece of software being hailed as the thing that will give producers the ability to pump out full tracks in minutes, or something along the lines of this. What I do remember clearly, though, is the top comment on it: “What’s the rush?” I found this perfectly summed up an issue with how music production is marketed, but also how creativity itself is marketed or valued. There is such a focus on the quantity of work, rather than the quality of work.

I believe that what is more important is for composers, producers, and anyone else involved in creative work to cultivate the patience required to allow projects to come into fruition. Sometimes pieces of music need to be sat with or shelved for weeks, months, or even years before their issues and potential ways to elevate them reveal themselves. If producers only aim to create many, many tracks as fast as possible, they lose sight of the importance of the ability to slowly chip away at a project.

I have felt this with my own creative work, but I have also seen it in the context of my education. Sometimes it has taken me weeks to fully grasp a concept I have been studying. I always feel that there is no way that the process could have been sped up: it often simply needs to take weeks or months. The idea that I could learn something and it will immediately click is unrealistic — it needs to circulate in my thoughts, my subconscious, and coalesce with my prior knowledge before reaching the point when it locks in and I understand it. It simply needs to take time and cannot be rushed. This is why I’ve always been against book summaries and ‘gists’; ideas require time and immersion to properly take root, something a book can provide, but a quick summary cannot.

This points to two perspectives of the goals of studio work: should the goal be to spend 3 hours in the studio, or to complete a project? Of course, it should be something in between these: probably to spend 3 hours on the project. The point is to consider whether there is too much of an emphasis on leaving the studio with a finished product, or simply to have spent the time on creative work.

The results of these considerations concern the deadlines imposed on a piece. “Spend three hours on the project” is a goal that doesn’t yet set an arbitrary deadline. If the goal is to come out of the studio with a full track, this sets a deadline of 3 hours on the piece. This will inevitably limit the scope of the piece. I believe that deadlines are extremely useful, but should not be applied to a project until its possible end shape is clear to the composer. In this way, the composer knows what the product could look like as a finished product, judges how long it might take to get it to that level, then creates the deadline.

I have tried various creative challenges aimed at these two approaches: write for 3 hours every day for two weeks, and write a piece of music a day for two weeks. Personally, I enjoyed the former the most, as the required goal was a fixed time commitment. I couldn’t make those three hours shorter or longer—it was just a three-hour block that I worked within. On the other hand, ‘a piece of music’ could be anything, and I found myself a few days just getting in the studio, recording a little improvisation on the synth, and calling it a day. In the three-hour block, that improvisation would have gotten more layers added to it, been edited, further processed; more work was required due to the nature of the challenge. On some days, the three hours flew by, but on others, it felt like a slog, but I did find it easier to get interested in what I was doing, as I had no choice but to keep writing for the three-hour block, whereas on the track-oriented challenge, I could make the day’s session finish anytime I wanted by calling the track I was working on ‘done’.

I personally get much of my creative inspiration from authors who create giant series of books — especially fantasy and science fiction epics. The writer’s ability to sit down and chip away at a book is something I find admirable, as it demands the author to acknowledge the fact that this thing they’re working on isn’t going to be finished until well into the future, which means that the gratification from writing “The End” isn’t coming anytime soon.

So where do they get the gratification from? The act of writing itself—the time spent on the creative task, in the creative process. This highlights internal motivation, a key theme in Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, where motivation is derived from doing the act itself, as opposed to an external reward such as a salary or, say, income from the sales of a book.

In the field of music, I feel that we see this less often today. There are definitely still plenty of artists who spend a lot of time on longer projects, slowly inching towards a finished record of intricate music. But there tends to be a focus on immediacy of output — of staying relevant on people’s feeds.

We see the ‘long game’ approach to creative works in classical music. The best example is Wagner’s Ring Cycle — a massive cycle of operas spanning 15 hours of music, which took the composer 26 years to write.

To me, this type of prolonged creative process requires patience, internal motivation, and regular creative work, while also keeping an eye on the broader picture: working on the trees (the daily work in the studio) without losing sight of the forest (the broader body of work you’re creating, and the reason why you’re creating the work). I often wonder if relevance worth sacrificing in order to create truly creative work? And I often lean towards yes.