Journal of a full-time music producer/software developer/small business owner during the lockdown.

A quick journal from me about what I’ve been recently going through. Hopefully, it might help some people that may be going through a similar thing during this time or any time for that matter. It’s as much a ‘note to self’ as I need to start taking my own damn advice! ?

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Captains log 24th April 2020. Lockdown day 73284568…

Good work/music/art or anything else worth doing takes time to complete. I’ve come to understand that it is foolish to try and rush the process. Even if we are excited and looking forward to having projects completed, more often than not (from years of experience) pushing for something to be finished quicker ends up having the opposite effect and hinders the process in a negative way poisoning the creative mind.

It is healthy to have deadlines and hold yourself accountable and have others hold you accountable (to a point) but when you take on too much all at once sometimes, the whole creative process can become overwhelming. You can feel like you are going round in circles getting nowhere fast. No matter how hard you work and for how long, you can still constantly feel like somebody is telling you that you are not working hard enough. This then results in working even longer hours to try and not let people down and you end up not sleeping enough, not eating properly, not taking care of yourself properly, not spending enough time with your loved ones… and if you are not careful you can start making things very frustrating and difficult for yourself.

When this process is repeated over and over again for a long period of time (decades in my case!), no question about it, it will start to have a very negative impact on your mental health and your belief in being able to get to the end of your tasks without losing your mind. You start to doubt yourself asking if you are even cut out for this and can sometimes lose faith in being able to complete your work at all or move forward. You end up not being able to spend time with your family, friends, or have any kind of time for yourself to do anything that you enjoy or just relax. This becomes more and more frustrating as time goes on and you can start resenting your own working lifestyle choices because you want more time to spend with your loved ones. You can start to self destruct if these issues are not addressed.

Being mindful of your thought patterns and what your body is telling you is not just important when going through similar situations like this, it’s 100% critical! You need to adjust accordingly every step of the way so that it doesn’t become a huge problem.

Work on yourself constantly. Finding your own personal balance between everything is key, whether other people understand what you are doing or not. They can misjudge you and your situation and take the way that you have to handle things as a negative in their own mind. They can sometimes feel like you are leaving them out, or they can feel like you don’t see the work you do for them as important. Where this can be very frustrating at times being misunderstood in such a way, compassion is needed to see it from their perspective.

In this situation, it is good practice to try and make people understand what you are going through from your perspective and that you have to put certain systems into place and do certain things (eg; limiting your time on social media and emails, or structuring your time to work through projects in a certain way) to combat this situation from happening. Remind them that by implementing these systems and ways of working that it is only going to have a positive effect on everything. Most will understand and respect your decisions, but some won’t always be able too straight away and it will take time for them to see what you are trying to do and to see the bigger picture. You have to learn to be OK with that and not get frustrated by it and see it from their point of view. (It’s also good to remember that sometimes it is ourselves being ignorant and we don’t always understand what other people need)

The bottom line is, the more that you can breathe, the more your creativity can flow and the more will get done a lot quicker. Sometimes, the more you are pressured the less will get done. At least for me anyway. It’s not always like that and I love nothing more than smashing through deadlines and I turn it into a game/challenge. It’s satisfying. That being said, I’m learning now to not try and overdo it and wreck myself in the process, because that is just counterproductive on all levels.

This is my personal experience from many years of being stuck in this loop and letting certain mindsets slip sometimes because of being too busy to be able to think. I’ve now started to put new changes into place and re-design my lifestyle and mindset some more and work on this every day to try and find a balance that works for me. It’s an ongoing work in progress which will still probably end up evolving along the way, but I’m now starting to see already that it’s a necessary move and I’m already seeing the positive results.

This can affect anyone in a similar situation so being mindful and making changes to counteract it is crucial to your wellbeing. I wouldn’t wish high levels of stress and anxiety on anybody as I’ve been through for years and I still go through it now way too many times, so I hope somebody gets something from this and it has a positive effect.

Remember, everything will get done in good time if you just remind yourself to stay present, breathe, and most importantly…. you trust the process!

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That’s my 2 pence worth for the day.

After many recent conversations, I know that times are tough for a lot of people at the moment so we need to look after each other, enjoy time with our families, be creative, keep our minds occupied and just enjoy our lives. Once you are back at work soon and all this has blown over, you will be wishing again you could be at home and had the time off to relax. I have had no time off work other than a few snatched hours here and there to try and chill with Sophie and Rylie and to catch up with friends. Try and make the best of this lockdown even if it’s hard work sometimes. Keep moving forward and believing in yourself at all costs! Everything will get easier soon if we battle on!

I count my blessings every day to have such an amazing family, great friends, and to be in the situation I am in after all the hard work I’ve put in over the years. I have huge respect for all the people that have helped me along the way. Everything I talked about in the above journal is in no way me being ungrateful. I am very lucky to have been given so many opportunities and every single day I silently express gratitude for it all.

I’m going to continue to push myself further and at the same time start looking after myself better in the process. It brings me great satisfaction to be able to also help people to accomplish the things that they want to do where I can. I hope this can continue for many many years to come and we can all become something!

One love, my friends.

Riggs ?????

PS: I’ll only be checking in on Facebook, emails, and messengers just every now and again now for a bit, but I will get back to everyone’s messages asap!

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