Maintaining creativity when your home goes from birthday suit to business suit
I work from home. And yeah, it’s fantastic in SOOO many ways. But, it’s confusing when you also play in the same place you work. Play and work can sometimes be friends but play without work is an important divide.
Your home was a place for your birthday suit (to clarify to non-native English speakers, “birthday suit” means as naked as the day you were born)
Back in the day, you went to your office, did your shit, felt super accomplished in your first pig kidney transplant into a living human (or something obviously equally important), and so forth. At the end of the day, you frolicked home while listening to the radio or a podcast or a book or possibly a delightful Medium article to get subliminally inspired. Once home, you’re stripping down to those gender neutral tighty-whities, cooking up a saliva inspiring meal, and loosening your mind from work mode to (in this specific case) songwriting mode. You then head to your Lil Cozy Home Music Studio™ stewing in all those succulent creative juices.
Your home now wears a business suit (maybe no pants for the risktakers)
Fast forward to 2020.
I’m done with work. I’ve been sitting in the same spot for a solid amount of butt-numbing time, I just want to order some food and chill. I go to my Lil Cozy Home Music Studio™, I see my bass, I see my practice amp, I see my lyric notebook, and I try for maybe one minute to visualize picking up any of them. Instead, I sigh, and walk to the couch.
Separation of mirth and state (don’t get me wrong, I am very, very happy at my job, this is just the best pun I could come up with)
Put your music within arms-reach of your workspace
This is the first thing I did and while it does improve the issue a bit, I still found myself just playing my instrument without even bothering to plug it in and commit.
Stand up
Sitting down feels like rest, standing up, SURPRISE, feels like action. The more and longer that I stood, the better I felt about walking around my space (also, bonus, if you get a treadmill under your desk as suggested in this fantastic article).
Create more than one musical space for yourself (even if it seems ridiculously tiny or inconvenient)
I have my instrument at arms-length if and when I have a random idea but, there are times when I need to finesse a melody or add layers to a mix. For this, I threw out everything from my closet and created a little recording space. I realize that this one in particular is a stretch, not everyone has this amount of space or a second machine to work with but even the act of going from one room to a room within a room helps to activate a new part of your behemoth of a brain.
Have a weird schedule and be flexible
WFH is not a 9–5 job, especially if you work on a globally distributed team. Make your schedule work for you but still be available when it counts. By taking time for yourself and your hobbies, you show up to work in the best way. So when the mood strikes, stroke your genius. The caveat being that you should always be aware of what time it is and of your alerts.. (my deepest apologies to my coworkers who have absolutely experienced my hopefully infrequent-but-probably-too-frequent-meeting-rescheduling, “how to not disrupt workflow with musicflow” is another article desparately waiting to be written).
Get a pet like this amazing article suggests
Just do it, I’m serious, but don’t be a dick and neglect it. Adopt a dog if you have the means, adopt a snake if you want to leave for more than 5 days at time with a self-maintaining tank. I have both. But my dog, Bonzo, always disrupts my workflow which, originally, I thought was a bad thing. Now, I either take him out for a walk, or I let him outside and work on music.
All in all, with the incremental changes made above, I’ve found that between meetings, instead of worrying and prepping for the next one, I grab my guitar and fuck around and in so doing, subsequently release some much needed anxieties that I didn’t even realize I had. 10/10 highly recommend but still evolving the process, please, let me know in the comments what has or hasn’t worked for you.
