Finding Time For Recording When Music Is Your Side Hustle

This is a guest post by Caleb J. Murphy of Musician with a Day Job.

If you don’t manage your recording time, it will manage you. And it’s especially hard to record music when it’s your side hustle. I know this first-hand.

Since 2009, I’ve released about 100 songs. So I’ve had plenty of time to learn (by trial-and-error) how to record music when you’re doing music on the side.

I record music late at night. You might be the same way. So I have to be intentional and have some sort of plan or else I find myself wasting my precious time. So in this post, I want to share some practical ways you can find time to record music.

Know When You Work Best

Everyone is productive at different times. There are night owls, early birds, and the weirdos who can get stuff done in the middle of the afternoon.

If you’re a night owl but you try to be creative at 5 a.m., you’re out of luck. Things just won’t go well. Science backs me up on this.

There’s something called a chronotype. People have different chronotypes, from night people to morning people to somewhere in between. A person’s chronotype tells us when their circadian rhythms naturally occur, which affects when they naturally want to go to bed and wake up.

You can even take a questionnaire to see what your chronotype is.

Knowing your chronotype—when you’re most alert and creative—can help you be more productive. For example, if you know you work best at night, then you’ll probably have the most productive recording sessions at night.

So figure out when you work best. That way, you can squeeze the most productivity out of the little time you have.

Schedule Your Recording Time

When you’re doing music as a side thing, one of the best ways to stay consistent and productive is to schedule stuff. Without a schedule, your busy life can become chaotic. And if you want to make music, you have to make time for it.

So, look through your calendar and see when you have time to record (that also fits your chronotype). For me, it’s in the evenings after my kids go to bed. For you, it might be early in the morning. Or Sunday afternoons. Or every other Thursday.

Whenever it is, create an event in your calendar (or write it in your paper calendar if you’re from the old ages). Set a reminder for yourself. Do everything you can to keep that appointment with yourself. And it may only be a half-hour or an hour. That’s okay. I’m a big proponent of baby steps—taking small but intentional steps consistently.

Do a little bit today. Then a little more tomorrow. And so on. Pretty soon, all of those little steps will have added up to something great.

Chunk Your Recording Sessions

“How you do anything is how you do everything.”

That’s a saying most likely from Zen Buddhism. And it’s powerful when you apply it to your music career.

How you make music today is how you make music over time. How you build your music career right now will mark your career overall. So instead of focusing on all of the things you have to accomplish in order to be uber-successful in music, stop.

Just think about today. Deal with tomorrow when it comes. This is where chunking comes in handy.

Chunking is when you take a lot of information and (you guessed it) break it into chunks.

You’ll hear people mention chunking when they’re talking about memory. Breaking long strings of info into chunks helps you remember better. This is what we do with phone numbers and birthdays. You can remember a bunch of numbers because they’re broken up by dashes or slashes.

Now let’s apply this to your recording time.

Figure out your big idea with your recording. What do you want to accomplish? Record an album? An EP? Produce other musicians? Then break up that big idea into smaller chunks and do one chunk at a time. These chunks could be small enough to do in 15 minutes. Then you can do one chunk a day if that’s all you have time for.

Bob Wiley would call them “baby steps.” Anne Lamott would say, just take it “bird by bird.” I call it doing one thing a day.

Start With Small Recording Goals

Author and speaker Jon Acuff writes about small goals in his book Finish. He says you should cut your goals in half.

He did a small experiment to demonstrate this. He asked the participants to take their weight-loss goals and divide them in half. So, for example, instead of a person trying to lose 100 pounds in a year, they would have a goal of losing 50 pounds.

“The people with smaller goals were 63% more successful,” he writes in Forbes. “Go big might be a good slogan for a gym wall, but if you really want to win, go small.”

His whole idea, which I wholeheartedly encourage, is that achieving small goals will keep you motivated. They’re easier to reach. They’re not as overwhelming. So when you accomplish a small goal, it feels good. Then you just set a new goal and be on your way.

So instead of saying, “I’m going to record for three hours a day, every day,” cut that goal in half. Shoot to record music for an hour and a half every other day, or two hours a day for five days a week.

Whatever your recording goals are, make them smaller than you think they should be.

Create A Recording Plan

Alright, so how do you apply all of this? Well, you’ve got to make a plan for recording music. Or else you won’t get much done.

If you’re not sure how to manage your recording time, a plan can fix that. And there’s a way to make a long-term plan that’s not overwhelming.

There are three basic steps to creating a recording plan:

Step 1: Decide what your Big Picture is.

When it comes to recording, what’s your end-goal? What’s your Big Picture? Do you want to record an album? An EP? A kick-butt single? Decide what that is. You won’t be able to move forward today until you know where you’re going.

Step 2: Create clear goals.

Once you have your Big Picture, you’ve got to figure out how to get there. This is where goals come in.

When creating goals, here are some suggestions:Each goal should move you toward your Big Picture (record an album, EP, single, etc.); Make the goals smaller than you think they should be; Create goals based on your output rather than the outcome (which you have no control over); Keep track of the goals you’ve accomplished so you can see your progress.

Once you have goals, you can break them up into things you can do today to move forward.

Step 3: Move forward today.

Now that you know what your big idea is with recording, and you have goals to get you there, it’s time to figure out what happens today. Break up the goals you created into daily tasks; things you can do on any given day.

Let’s say your Big Picture is to record a 5-song EP. One of your goals could be to record one song by the end of the month.

So for today, you could: Plan out the production of your next song; Spend 30 minutes recording one instrument; Give yourself the freedom to experiment with a sound you’ve never used before; Edit/comp a track you recorded during your previous session; Find a reference track for your next song.

These are just some ideas of tasks you can do on a daily basis. It’s obviously not a comprehensive list.

The idea is this: by knowing what you can do today, you’ll move toward accomplishing your recording goals, which will move you toward reaching your Big Picture of finishing your recording project.

By having a clear-cut recording plan, you’ll be able to better manage your recording time. You’ll have more focus and direction.

And maybe producing music won’t always be your side hustle.

Caleb J. Murphy is a singer-songwriter and music producer based in Austin, TX., and the founder of Musician With A Day Job, a blog that helps part-time musicians succeed.

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