One of the biggest struggles that musicians constantly face is lack of time. Even if you spend your entire day on your music career (and few musicians do) you still run into major time crunches and something important usually gets cut. Here’s 5 tips to fit in your stuff when you’re in a crunch: 

1. Group and conquer.

Divide up your most important stuff into groups (i.e. e-mail, practicing) and do them in a single batched time. By grouping them together, your more likely to work efficiently and quickly which will give you more time.

2. Pick the most effective medium.

If you work 3x as fast on your laptop than your phone, don’t be afraid to take along your laptop to meeting or gig. When you have a moment free, pop out your device and knock out a couple of to-dos that would be ignored. 

3. Look for opportunities. 

Most free time slots pop open when you least expect them, and few of us take advantage of them (read: I prefer being lazy). When something pops up, check your to-do list for something that you couldn’t quite fit into your schedule and do it. You’ll save massive amounts of time by cutting out the little stuff this way. 

4. Set a timer.

If you can induce a little bit of adrenaline/focus, you can probably do better work in shorter amounts of time. I like setting a timer or deadline for myself (for instance, I have 5 minutes right now to finish this blog), and I find that if you condition yourself to “sprint” occasionally, you’ll be amazed at your work output.

5. It’s okay to not get to everything. 

If you can’t do all of your to-dos in a day, no problem. It’s okay to bump stuff to the next day. Don’t be a perfectionist when it comes to task management- shoot for consistency over volume.