ideas – Cornerman

New ideas and a fresh perspective for 2025

It’s been a minute since my last post on here. I have been working on some new ideas and projects which are smaller in scope and easier to work on for me. My last few projects were way too big in scope and very complicated to get out to the world, for me personally at least.

Going into the new year I am putting no pressure on timelines and the focus is going to be on the process. With the goals as guidance. Whatever gets finished, gets finished. I don’t know how my energy will be and this way I will loose the frustration if I don’t reach my goals. I am pretty good in shaking these feelings of frustration but if I can avoid them I will.

My ideas so far are focussed on learning my tools. The output is less important, up until now I was focussed on the end result and I wanted to get there as fast as possible. The problem is that I didn’t get to know my tools, and time was lost in searching for ways to get my ideas out. I am turning this around, I will let my learning process dictate the ideas I can work on and finish.

So how I am going about getting my learning process in the right shape for me. Let’s see.

Consistency

The most important thing in getting better at anything, which I lack in making music, working on it consistently. All other things I ever got any good at, I worked on in a continuous way. With music, somehow that has always been an issue. I think because I have always done music as a hobby, as an outlet. And never had any intention of releasing anything. This has somewhat changed and I have had periods of consistency in working on music. I have already talked about not viewing it as a hobby anymore, but more as a project. Which has been somewhat successful in getting more consistency in me working on music.

But this has not been enough to get anything going in a way I can easily get my ideas translated into music. Which is always an approximation because you can never get it to sound exactly as it sounds in your head, well at least I can’t.

So more consistent in learning my tools and fixed amount of hours, and getting the work in is the most important for this year.

Minimizing the set of tools

I don’t have a big set of gear, but nevertheless it’s too much. It’s too much to learn in a year. I have always been looking for new gear and interesting ways to use it. The problem is I tend to switch way too much between the tools. One day I make music with these 3 devices, the next day it’s a totally different set of tools.

I have to make a few decisions on what I am going to use and not change it anymore. I have been contemplating selling everything else, but that’s not how I want to gather the discipline.

Small goals

The last few years I have been working on one big project, which is cool as thinking about concepts and sketching is a very nice way to gather my thoughts and make sure I can work on music when I can’t stand sound. Which is pretty often unfortunately, but it also holds me back. Simply because of the size and scope.

I now have to define smaller projects, things I can actually finish and be in line towards the bigger goals. defining a growth path for myself with smaller, manageable milestones.

I am hoping this will make it easier to maintain the workflow, consistency and eventually leads to results.

Moving forward

I have always been doubtful on my musical skillset, the amount of deleted or abandoned projects in my folders is pretty large. I intend to work on releasing more music, whether it’s finished or not. Just to see if I can let it go and call something a demo, work in progress, or finished product and share it.

How I don’t know yet, as the landscape for releasing your creative output is constantly shifting. But this will be something to think about in the future. I am also working on a new format to talk about my music on here. Writing more about the process and progress and the tools I use and am learning how to use. I have not yet found a way to do this and keep it fun to read.

But I will, until next time.

Cultivating ideas and creative resources in music making

As soon as inspiration hits, you want to make sure the idea doesn’t evaporate into thin air. I have talked about working on your skills routinely which will lead to periods of inspiration and productiveness. Everything feels like its effortless.

Make no mistakes, this is the direct result of all the hard work and sharpening your skills. Showing up regularly and putting in the time. As with anything you will get better with practice.

A lot of ideas get left behind. You simply don’t have time finalizing all these great ideas. It therefore makes sense making notes and sketches of all these ideas in a way they form the future working stock. For all the days things don’t flow effortlessly.

There are a lot of ways of locking in ideas for future use. You can write them down, record them on your phone, sketch the essence. The most important thing is that you can remember the initial idea and work on it later on.

I have had a lot of failures in getting a structure set up for getting ideas down for future reference. I settled for pen & paper, advantages over digital forms are the physical actions and ingraining it in the brain.

But when reading it weeks or months later a lot of the time I could not make out what I originally set out to do. Not a big problem as it always has a starting point in it somewhere. But it kind of took away the enthusiasm.

So I opted for a format, a standardized way of writing ideas down and making sure I knew what I had set out to do. I start with giving the idea a title. Then I write down the concept, and the technical side of things. Which tools to use and how to use them. Then I set the length , speed and other characteristics of the song. Last but not least I draw the song in a time line fashion, breaks drops and other things.

In that way I have way more detail and I can work on the idea while writing it down. I can then do preparations and recording later on with more focus.

It has greatly helped my creative proces, as with anything, this way of doing things suits my personality and workflow. It’s just to give you an idea what might work. It took a while for me to get there, bit experimentation will get you there and is half the fun.

Showing up – Plan your path towards your goals

Showing up?

Showing up is half the work, which is half true in itself. Because without a rhythm to your showing up, the act of showing up gets harder and harder.

Bit of a confusing sentence right ? Everything in life moves according to a rhythm , breathing is a rhythm , the sunrise a rhythm, you move in a certain rhythm.

So in order to become good at anything, working on that skill needs a rhythm. And in order for a rhythm to become a rhythm, planning it is necessary. Even for people who hate planning. Mostly it is not the planning people hate. But the showing up. Planning something leaves a lot of room for perceived failure, and that feeling is what you want to avoid. Postponing any activity feels bad. Especially an activity you want to be good at, have a passion for. Dream of doing.

So we don’t plan, and set ourselves up for failure. Not failure in a sense that we are bad at the very thing we want to be good at. But failing because we never got started.

So how do we plan ?

People tend not to plan activities, but cram the day as full as possible, doing as much as possible. And call it planning. That’s the opposite of planning. Planning needs room, breathing room. As a person you will not be at your best all the time. Most of the time, how you feel and how your energy flows depends on a lot of things you can’t control. Cramming your days as full as possible leaves more room for external factors sucking your attention and energy away.

The first step, set one new goal

There is a lot things that can be said for having multiple goals, but as we plan for the first time, in a new way, we forget we already have goals in our life. Maybe not goals defined as goals. But time is being consumed. You have your personal life, work, and maybe already a sport or other physical activity you do. All of these things already have a place in your diary and a rhythm to them.

So think of one new thing you want to master, be good at, improve your skills on. For me that is making music. Which always lingered in the distance and I defined it as a hobby, but never put in a consistent amount of time and work. Yet I loved doing it whenever I got around to it. So think about that one thing. Your passion as it is commonly defined.

Write this down as your focus point for planning.

The second step, measure your real time consumption.

Keep a diary and measure how long every activity in your agenda really took versus how much you planned for it. And make notes on what kind of taks it was. Household shores are tasks you will have to do. And never plan enough time for. Also make notes of how all activities outside of the obligatory ones contribute to your new goal. Be honest.

You don’t plan the binging of this new series on Netflix or any other subscription thing. Note the hours, also make note of how many hours you spent on social media not doing anything towards your goal.

Make detailed notes, how you feel, if you where happy at the end of the day, how energized you felt at the beginning and at the end. Do all this for 2 weeks.

The third step, deleting activities and compressing time slots.

Now its time to start deleting all those excess activities and limit time spent on things, its ok to wind down with social media, watch some tv at the end of the day. But limit the hours you put into those things.

Household shores need doing, get the notes out and see if you planned these realistically or did they consume more time ? Allocate time appropriatly.
Also, plan ahead, do the groceries with a list you made earlier, plan making the list. And so on.

Delete any activities that drifted you away from your new goal, and are not absolutely necessary. Combining these 3 should make room for spending at least a couple of hours on the new goal. Make sure you plan these new activities at least 3 times a week, in order to get that all important rhythm.

Last but not least, plan leisure time. Grab that book, watch that movie, go hang out with friends, do date night , do nothing. Leave room for doing nothing. Plan rest! Really resting is very important, just sitting or lying down. Doesn’t have to take long.

Plan days or longer with no plans at all, play in those days. Do whatever you feel like. Be a kid again. This is a great way for experimenting without limits and ingraining new paths of thinking into your subconsciousness.

Make sure rest and recovery are done in between the ‘harder’ activities that take up a lot of energy. All tasks with a high level of concentration can only be done for so many hours a day. Science has it marked down to four a day, if you are practiced. I will do a separate blog on focussed work. But don’t overdo it on complicated tasks. Especially in the beginning.

The finish

So we now know what we want to achieve. We have the goal. We measured our activities. We know the realities of executing all tasks in a week. We downsized on the amount of activities and limited our time we spend per activity.

We booked in time for rest and recharging. So what’s next, make a default planning for the week, set a fixed day for doing the planning for next week, lets say Saturday evening. Execute the planning, and keep a diary om the progress.

Next week I will dive into the structure of planning and how to build up a routine.

Zero

Back to zero, this lockdown for me is a forced rethink of what I need to do, or love to do. I have had a forced reset after my brain injury and after a few years I have a pretty solid base. And I got into a rhythm again. I sometimes forget to focus on the goals I have set after my return to the ‘real world’.

After adjusting to the lockdown and getting my head around it, I have spent some time going tru my notes and thoughts just after my revalidation. It was very much focussed around learning and getting some old ideas done. Mostly focussed around creativity and music. It’s has been hard getting started on those things for some reason. This part of my goals has been overshadowed by the day to day stuff I need to do. So I am now need to set some time for it.

This new crisis has also made me think we as a society need a reset, a bold start from scratch, back to zero.

It has also shown the fragility of our system and the need to rethink a large part of it. For me a lot needs to get back to zero. Start to rethink the whole idea of how we need to organize society and how we do things.

The focus on economic growth and keeping big business happy is long overdue. The metrics we use for calculating our output is one of the past. The cost of every crisis lands on the weakest shoulders. Most people haven’t really recovered from the financial crisis of 2008 and are now here. It might seem as if there was a recovery but most people just got back to a level of were they were in 2008.

The main problem is the inability for most people to get there financial situation more stable, workers rights have steadily been downgraded, the gig economy is not one that benefits most workers. And thus most people. Combining this with the every growing privatizing of healthcare , utilities and so on it’s a risk cocktail that has again landed on the same group of people.

The risk for society as a whole has gone up as well, the governments around the world have stepped in at an enormous cost for the future , all in a all in bet for quick recovery. Which might not happen.

So while this is all pretty gloomy it also gives us as a opportunity to force a few long overdue changes. The most important is the mindset about how we measure the wealth in our society. It needs to be a new mix of economic growth , health and happiness of the people and nature. A focus more on the quality of life and things rather than just things and masses of them.

It’s just a thought but these levels of leverage on financial , environmental and human risk our current system is very much unsustainable. Hopefully this new crisis will give way to forward thinking and real problem solving. I for one hope for the best.