The Project Log
If you're producing music solo, you know what it’s like to feel like you’re not making progress even when you’re putting in the time. You're doing everything yourself and you're doing it in your spare time, so you can't usually knock out big chunks of progress in a single sitting. A lot of the work is invisible until the song is done. So even when you're making real, consistent progress, it's easy to feel like you're not. Because you can't see it.
I was doing research about indie game development last year (that's a story for another day) and I ran into a video on YouTube by a developer called Juniper Dev. She was talking about how to stay motivated when making a game by yourself. Similar to music producers, solo developers deal with long timelines, tons of minuscule tasks, no team to keep them accountable, and (seemingly) nothing to show for months of work. Her solution was simple: at the end of every session, write down what you worked on and the date. No matter how small or insignificant. If you worked on it, you write it down.
I thought the concept could be just as useful for music production, so I started doing it for myself. I call it my Project Log.
A focused hour in the morning or fifteen minutes before bed can add up to real progress over weeks and months, but because some sessions don't move the needle in an obvious way, it's easy to look up after a few weeks and feel like you've been spinning your wheels. The log makes that accumulated progress visible, and it's very cool to see.
Recently I spent a couple of my morning sessions just bouncing tracks down in preparation for mixing. It's a boring, unglamorous task. It doesn't feel like progress in the grand scheme of a song. But I committed the time, got it done, logged it, and moved on to the next thing. If I wasn't keeping track, that's exactly the kind of task that is easy to forget that I did. The project log is like a receipt for the work.
There's also a secondary benefit I didn't expect: it shows you where my time is actually going. For a while I was juggling two blogs, rebuilding my website, recording vocals for a collaboration, working on vocals for another side project, and building out audio reels for my website. When I look back at my log, I can see that I was heavily focused on the "brand" side of things for a while. Being able to see what I've been doing every day is nice because I can make an intentional decision about when to shift my focus. Without the log, I'd just be going off “feel”.
My one recommendation if you want to try it out is to keep it simple. The last thing you need is another system to maintain. My project log lives in Notion because I’m in there constantly. I just set up a table with two columns: date and a quick note about what I did. Use whatever is going to cause the least amount of friction for you.