The Power Of Goals And Deadlines For Songwriters

Deciding on whether to set goals and deadlines or not can make or break your progress. Here’s some quick tips to “getting shit done”.

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The Benefits Of Setting Deadlines

Hopefully you’ve read a previous post, “Limitations Are The Key To Success”. If you have, you know how beneficial intentionally limiting yourself can be; time is no exception! Deadlines are the key to getting stuff done.

Parkinson’s Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". This is procrastination at it’s finest. Ever have to write a paper due at the end of the semester, but you wait until the last minute to do it? This is Parkinson’s Law at work!

Had there been no deadline, you probably wouldn’t have done it. Seeing as though you could finish it in one week/one night, there’s probably some room for improvement on setting when that deadline is! Instead of finishing one paper by the end of the semester, you could have written much more if you so chose. All from setting self-implemented deadlines!

Set A Timer

Deadlines don’t have to be long, overall completion points. Simply setting a timer and giving yourself say an hour to do a task that normally would take you four can do the trick too!

Completing the task isn’t the goal here. Well, it sort of is. But giving yourself less time to complete the task will shift your mindset to the things that matter most. Suddenly you’re thinking big picture and not focusing on the small, insignificant details.

If you had 10 minutes to write a full 2,000 word paper, what would you do first? Probably rush to outline the whole thing. Make general, overall points and add important details under those. Then when that’s complete, you’d actually start writing the thing out in full sentences.

Obviously you wouldn’t get done, but you would be so much farther AND know exactly what to do from there, the thing that can hinder us the most!

And guess what - this can be applied to songwriting as well!

Give yourself an hour to complete an entire song, start to finish. You’ll probably go into coming up with the mood, theme, key, tempo, the big general things. The important things. Suddenly you shift to a macroscopic level and work your way to a microscopic level.

Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly Goals

These goals can really keep you on track for bigger projects. It may be hard to judge over a longer period of time, but try to keep those deadlines a little tight; chances are you’ll complete them if it really matters to you.

I’d start with the bigger goals; these will be more broad because anything can happen over a year’s time. From there, you can begin filling in the details at a more descriptive level.

Once you have all of your goals figured out, put them on a calendar with notifications! Do everything you can to stick to those goals. Make it as hard as possible to get off track. Since they’re deadlines you’re making for yourself, try to make it as much out of your hands as possible!

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With just these two steps you should see a dramatic improvement in your productivity. You’ll be more focused, efficient, and will have achieved more than you thought you could. You’d be surprised at how much we can improve our productivity! For something as open ended as songwriting, it’s most important to set goals and deadlines to actually get things done and get the ball rolling.

In fact, I've laid out what's most important when trying to write a song in a document I've made called the Top-Down Songwriting Pyramid - all you have to do is subscribe to get email notifications for new posts that have been published at the blog homepage! Don't worry, you can unsubscribe at any time, no strings attached! I highly recommend giving the songwriting guide a try though, you'll find that your songs will have much more purpose, direction, and impact :)

See you in the next article!

-Michael