A lot of people struggle to maintain work-life balance these days. Of course, what’s one of the top suggestions for ways to focus on personal fun while you’re not working? Picking up a hobby — like learning how to play a new instrument.
But what if your livelihood revolves around playing instruments?
If you’re a professional musician who spends your life on the road, traveling, and playing music around the clock, you may find that work and personal life cross over a lot. If that’s the case, here are a few suggestions for actionable ways that you can regularly separate your musical career from your personal life.
Keep Your Life on a Schedule
You may think pinning yourself down to a predictable schedule will stifle your creativity, but often the opposite is true. An unstructured life filled with an endless procession of gigs, practices, and administrative responsibilities can be downright overwhelming.
If you want to remain productive, spark creativity, and keep some semblance of personal versus work life, set up some sort of a schedule. For instance, use a calendar app like Google Calendar to keep track of work activities. This will enable you to focus while you’re on the job and also help you identify times that you have open to plan personal stuff.
Once you have that work-life scheduling structure, you can plan practically anything from a night out with friends to a weekend away with your kids to a wine tasting or some other fun stay at home date night with your significant other.
Track Your Finances
This may look out of place on a work-life balance list, but the reality is, as an independent musician, the buck starts and stops with you. If you don’t make ends meet, you’re going to have to keep working until you generate enough cash.
Even worse, if you don’t know how much money you need, you may never feel like you’ve earned enough.
Make sure to create a budget and keep a tight lid on your business finances. That way, you’ll be able to genuinely unplug and rest with peace of mind knowing when you’ve earned enough to cover your overhead, pay your taxes, and meet all of your personal needs.
Set Up Clear Boundaries
With COVID-19 shaking up the traditional way to go about our professional lives, it’s easy to slip into a cycle of always being tethered to work. After all, if you work in the studio, on the road, and at home, you’re never truly away from the office.
That’s why you should find ways to set clear boundaries between life and work. A few suggestions for ways to kickstart this process include:
- Setting specific work hours and then avoiding calls and messages outside of that time.
- Turning off notifications when you’re not on the clock.
- Creating a “virtual commute” to start and end your workdays.
Setting up clear work-life boundaries is a powerful way to help find and maintain that daily balance.
Make an Effort to Connect in Your Down Time
As a musician, it’s easy to feel both creatively tired from playing music and physically exhausted from being on tour. As such, it’s easy to spend most of your downtime doing as little as possible — and doing nothing at all is certainly a recommended way to spend some of your personal time.
However, if you want to maintain a clear delineation between work and personal life, it’s also important that you direct some purposeful effort into the latter. After all, the pressure to pay bills and build your career will naturally keep you focused on work.
When it comes to maintaining relationships with family and friends, though, it’s easy to let things slip. To combat this tendency, look for ways to actively engage with those around you. Plan date nights, have friends over to hang out, or set up a movie night with your family.
When the holidays roll around, don’t slink away into secluded hiding, either. Embrace the change of pace as an opportunity to engage with others outside of work. You can even use video chat to get in contact with senior family members who may currently need to social distance over the festive times of the year.
All of this to say, don’t just use your downtime to recover from work. Use it to actively engage with others in your personal life.
Finding Balance as a Career Musician
The ability to take care of yourself is a key component of a musical career. That doesn’t just mean paying Uncle Sam or finding a steady stream of gigs, though. It also means knowing how to tap out, figuring out when to take breaks, and learning how to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
So refer to the above list, look for the items that you think will help you the most, and then start taking actionable steps to restore a sense of balance and sustainability to your lifestyle — before burnout and stress force you to do so down the road.
Courtesy of Indiana Lee
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