Plan Your Daily Routine and Take Control of Your Creative Work Flow

By Daniel Pak
@pakrocks // daniel@pak.rocks // pak@totemstar.org

School's out for the summer! I've been playing a lot of Lego, soccer, and 'ukulele with my kids and visiting with family in Minnesota. Its been wonderful! But after a week or so of fun in the sun, I always start to get that itch. The need to write. And especially in the summer, when there is much less structure in my daily schedule, it's so easy to get distracted, racking up hours swiping aimlessly on social media and being lured into late night binging on Netflix.

Planning a daily routine is crucial to a productive creative work flow. I was reminded late last night while reading a Universal Audio blog on producer/composer Che Pope (Kanye West, Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean), who talked about balancing being both a producer and a business person at the same time. He talked about handling business calls and emails in the morning and focusing on music from the afternoon on. Last summer I made sure to block off hours in my calendar to spend time in my studio and write, with my phone and wifi shut off so that I wouldn't be distracted by calls, texts, or emails.

Pope's interview reminded of a great infographic I was hooked on a couple of years ago, titled The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People, which shows the daily schedules of people like Mozart, Maya Angelou, and Pablo Picasso, all based on their diaries, letters, and other documentation. Check it out and be sure to hover over the colored blocks of time to see the specifics of what they were all doing.

Everyone has a different daily routine that works for them, but the important thing is to figure out what works best for you and to stick with it. Keep those songs coming!