Hi Colin,

I play in a couple of bands, and perform mostly on weekends, with the occasional weekday outing. These shows can come and go, and sometimes I’ll have weekends with 3 gigs, and then whole weeks can pass without a single one. Playing live music always leaves me on cloud 9, despite rarely earning more than £60 for a show. It’s a buzz that I love, and never fails to put me into a great mood.

I am beginning to map out the process of making my living through music, but until that point I am stuck in a boring IT support office job, which—to put it mildly—I do not enjoy. There isn’t enough work to keep my mind engaged, the work that *does* come through is tedious and uninteresting, and 8 hours a day spent this way have been starting to affect my mental health.

Monday mornings after a busy weekend of music with nothing to look forward to at the other side of the work week are particularly difficult. Long stretches of an office job without any musical work can affect my mental state to the point that I lack motivation to practise, write, and perform.

So my question to you is how can I protect myself from these periods of sluggishness and low mood? Do you you have any advice for holding onto the momentum and motivation built up by a string of live concerts, while still having to work my day job to make ends meet?

Many thanks,

Bill

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Hey Bill-

First off, good on you for identifying the issue and deciding to do something about it. That is truly one of the trickiest aspects of the situation you describe, and by having figured out that it’s a non-optimal situation and thinking about how to remedy that non-optimality, you’ve carried yourself a great deal of the way between where you are and where you’d like to be.

There are a few more things you might consider that could help you get even closer to a consistently energized and productive version of what you have, today.

One is to ascertain what it is you enjoy so much about the performances you’re doing so you can amplify and expound upon those things.

It’s unfortunately quite easy to look at some broad activity and accidentally misattribute the enjoyment we feel for that activity, and as a consequence invest in something other than that which we actually enjoy. It’s worth figuring out precisely what you love so much about your weekend music adventures so you can get more of that, specifically.

This is important because, especially if you have a smallish amount of time to invest, you’ll want to be efficient with that time. It may be that what you really dig is being in front of a crowd, which might mean that there are other activities you could add to your life that would allow you to get some of that same enjoyment in a different way. It could also be that playing music is what provides you with the most joy, regardless of who’s listening; in which case you’ll probably want to forgo potential public speaking opportunities in favor of learning new instruments or production tools you can utilize in your future jam sessions.

Part of the goal here is to figure out where your time and energy is best spent, with “best” defined by your personal standards: what you find to be most fulfilling about playing music and extrapolating on that.

After you’ve ruminated on that question, you’ll be in a good spot to figure out a lifestyle framework that allows you to spend more of your time, energy, and resources on those aspirational focuses.

A lifestyle framework, in this context, just means figuring out how you’d like to structure things so that you’re able to invest your time and energy and other resources optimally for the outcomes you want to see, while also keeping things like rent and your bills in mind.

This effort can result in all kinds of lifestyle adjustments, from the casual to the dramatic.

On the more casual end of the spectrum, you can set aside more time throughout the day for the production and performance of music, whether that means waking up a little earlier to get an hour or two in before work or subbing music in for other non-work things that are currently occupying your time, like evening Netflix-binging.

On the more dramatic side of things, you could figure out how to transition from your current employment setup to something that’s more oriented toward the music you enjoy.

This might mean a complete shift in career, which would almost certainly require a transition in terms of income, expenses, and an update to your CV. It might also take a while to find a new job, settle in, and see if that new position grants you the freedom you desired, or whether it has you spending your time fulfilling yet another set of responsibilities that get between you and the things you would prefer to be doing.

Somewhere in the middle is the less dramatic and more easily implementable (in some ways, at least) option of transitioning from full-time IT work to something a bit more flexible.

An important caveat for this latter option is that it would almost certainly result in less money coming in, at first. So the tradeoff would initially be gaining more time-freedom in exchange for less monetary-freedom; which is doable for almost everyone, to some degree, but your specific circumstances would dictate just how much of one you could afford to trade for the other.

There’s a point at which the time-freedom granted by this type of transition actually results in overall less freedom, too, because although you have more time for your music you could also become more stressed about money and perhaps have to give up other things that are important to you (living in a particular area, nicer food, having health insurance, etc); so keep that in mind when considering how far down this road you walk, and how quickly you walk it.

One more perspective that might be useful here is to think of any work you do alongside your music as your Medici-fund: money you are earning to fund your non-earning or less-earning work. You are a benefactor, investing your resources in your music.

It’s just a tiny change in the way you frame the things you already do, but I find that work done for money sometimes becomes a little more tolerable when you consciously recognize that such work is what grants you, for example, the freedom to make music some of the time.

And sometimes—nowhere near always, but sometimes—a tweak in perception can be more powerful (or at the very least, doable) than a complete reshuffling of one’s lifestyle.