Music on My Mind(set)

As I write this paragraph, I’m listening to the ‘Lo-Fi Café’ playlist on Spotify. Lo-Fi is a casual beat and melody type of music I’ve discovered this past year. Known for setting a low-key tone that promotes focus and attention, I can anecdotally say it’s true. It’s an enjoyable rhythm to listen to while I work — be it writing essays, toiling away at daily tasks, or other passive ‘desk’ work — providing the soundtrack to my workday that helps relieve distraction.

I bring this up because I’ve been recently thinking about music and its relationship to my mindset while I work. More specifically, it’s influence on my writing projects and how important the proper mindset is to all my creative projects.

On a recent episode of my podcast, Entertaining the Idea (ETI), my co-host Anthony Hudacs and I played a game we created, called The Musical Challenge. In it, we each gave the other five songs to create a story with, in any way they choose.

Curiously, he used the songs beats and vibe to inspire his story, while I went tactical and drew ideas from the lyrics and their interpreted meanings. This was interesting to me because this is the opposite of how we both typically work. He uses the insight and background of content to find meaning, where I use the feel of a song to set the tone in my stories.

Or more specifically, I use the vibe and emotion of a song to find and set a specific mindset. When I write stories and scripts, I need to feel a certain way emotionally, framing my voice and the tone of the story I am creating. Music is what helps me the most in getting there.

This comes from watching movies or TV shows, with them eliciting a particular sentiment from me, creating a strong emotional resonance with the story. There are many aspects that factor into the intentional tone of a show— from frame composition, to lighting, to color grading, to editing. But for me, the largest influence is the musical score and soundtrack, which establishes a tone that is much more obvious and palpable.

And that feeling I get from watching a show, is what I want and need when I am creating a story. I want the intention of that emotion trickling down to the reader and audience, through my words, with or without a musical accompaniment.

For me, this means my mindset is so important to hone with a proper articulation. To do this you need to be present in the world of your project. You must ignore the real world around you, pushing out all the distractions and remove the friction of extorting and forming your ideas.

This is especially important when you have limited time in your day, and you need to shift into a project at any moment from the other tasks in your day. I don’t, have the luxury of a slow ramp up waiting for a flow to happen. I have a set amount of time devoted to writing and must be able to jump into that world quickly.

This instant mind shift does not come natural and takes time and practice to acquire that skill. This can be aided by tools like music because it blocks out everything else around you and in your mind to help focus on that task at hand — writing.

But music alone isn’t the only strategy to help shift mindset quickly. The best practice that I have employed is writing every day. By writing every day, especially for larger projects like a script or book, you work your writing muscle making it stronger and quicker. Much like exercising your arms or legs each day.

Additionally, you actively keep your current story front of mind each day, which shortens the onboarding ramp into the story each time you pick it up. It is fresh and relevant, and you don’t need to go back as much to catch up from where you left off.

And there are other tools and strategies to get you in the proper mindset, like watching movie clips or other inspiration videos, along with productivity hacks like using the Pomodoro Method to set a block of focus time.

But for me, with all the different tools and strategies I use, music is my go to for instant mindset provisioning. Much like having a know director helm a pilot episode to set the look and tone of a series, I like to start my journey by finding the right song that captures my intention of the story. This will be my anchor track to revisit continuously to get that instant feel when I press play.

Having services like Spotify and Apple Music further enhance this experience, allowing me to constantly discover new songs for a variety of moods. I have an ample list of saved songs to create playlists tailored to those different moods of each story I am working on, while having an ever-changing variety of beats to explore.

Now I know music isn’t for everyone when they write or work on creative tasks. Some find it distracting to the mindset they want to inhibit, needing the silence to focus and be present in their work. That is absolutely fine.

What is important is to find what helps you jump into your project’s mindset to enter and be present in that world quickly. Whatever it is, be it music, photographs, a video or trailer, or maybe complete silence, search it out and discover what works for you.

Because being able to move quickly in and out of different creative projects and the worlds they inhibit is crucial to getting the work done while maintaining a continuity of voice and tone that leads to a quality story.