This morning, as I’m trying to organize my time for the day, I’m thinking about the fact that both my careers involve large amounts of self-motivation. Except for a few summer jobs, I’ve never worked nine-to-five. Instead, I’m a professor and a musician, and neither of those organizes your time or your tasks for you. In principle that’s great, and it’s probably no accident that those are the careers I’ve ended up in. I can set my own schedule and make my own priorities. I love it that when a music friend contacted me to say she’d be suddenly in town later this week I was able to make midday plans to meet up with her at a free outside concert, without having to worry about taking time off. I love that I get to figure out what I want to write a song about, or where I can best concentrate when writing sections of the book I’m working on. In practice, though, having very little structure can cause difficulties. I know plenty of people in academia who didn’t get tenure, or didn’t get promoted, because once they left the (quasi-) structure of graduate school they had trouble getting their acts together to complete the next big project. And we don’t know (because they never got played) all the absolutely fabulous musicians who either don’t write more than a couple fantastic songs, don’t get the CD made (or made well enough) or don’t manage to get themselves on the radio or booked into concert venues. I’m at the beginning of a year of even less structure than usual, because I’m on sabbatical from my day job. That means I’m supposed to be writing a book (it’s what my sabbatical proposal said I would be doing). But I have few other obligations – no teaching, no committee work, fewer meetings (although not, alas, none; I have too much of the repressed Midwestern Protestant sensibilities from my upbringing to have completely dropped all of my academic obligations). That means that my time is really my own. Which can be daunting. Ideally by the end of next summer I’ll have the bulk of a book manuscript drafted. And a CD made, because that’s my big music project, along with the various tour- and promotion-type activities that go along with a new CD. Note, though, that both of those things are goals because I set them. And I set them because they’re things I want to do, and am excited about doing, and will – mostly – enjoy doing. But along the way there are many pieces of these things that I don’t particularly want to do, either because they’re not fun on their own or because of the psychological burden involved (I absolutely hate submitting to gig opportunities, for instance, because there’s a lot of stress involved about whether I’m good enough to get chosen). And also simply a lot of grunt work. To write a book, you have to (yes, I know it sounds obvious) write a book. You not only need the great idea, you need to write 100,000 or so words, and you need to gather information, do analysis, and have citations (for the kinds of books I write), and so forth. Even if I love having written a book, and even love some of the writing process, other parts of it aren’t fun, or are hard. So I set myself goals, and try to get myself into habits, or routines. That’s true of both the academic part and the musician part. Right now my goals include a daily (book) writing quota and the requirement that I do one thing (broadly enough defined that a blog post counts) for my music career every day. It gets me focused, and gives me a feeling of accomplishment when I’ve done the task for the day. And mostly, it keeps me moving towards the much bigger goals, which are more manageable when they’re broken up into little pieces that I make progress on every day.