Creative Work vs. Office Duties

You need to plan in quite some time into your work schedule for communication and organization. Don’t believe that you can compose/produce music without interruption during your “scoring weeks”. It might not seem like much on first sight but in the sum, these “quick phone calls with the production”, “short emails just to send over demos”, “quick organizational meetings”, “short skype sessions” eat up a huge amount of time.

It gets particularly worse when you’re a person who needs some time to find his/her way into the work and gets thrown out  of the creative flow every time the phone rings. Be prepared for that and try to find a way to deal with it. I would not recommend things like unplugging/turning off the telephone etc. as this might upset quite a few people and can even cause desaster when there are some important changes made on short notice.

One way to deal with it is to move your main working times away from “regular office times”, so do creative work late at night or early in the morning. I know many colleagues do it but of course, it depends on whether you can deal with such times and also if you can arrange it with your private life.

I personally try to reduce interruption during work times to the bare minimum and try to answer important emails or phone calls in the most effective way but unfortunately, the occasional client who want’s to discuss extensively will occur. In these cases, try to find a polite but clear way to let them know that you should rather be spending your time on getting work done.