A few years back I worked for 6 months full-time in an advertisement agency. The job was great, the people were great, I had alot of great projects to work on … But I did not get anything else done when I came home in the evening. I just had no creative juice left at all. I learned back then that I either had to work as a freelancer (kinda what I am doing now) or had to get a well-paid job with less than 40 hours per week (but I can’t find one).
I really have great respect for anyone doing a fulltime job and still managing to get something together (be it music or something else) and I sometimes wonder how those people would take off if they could work full-time on their music/art.
However, what I can tell you personally : Get organized. You seem to be abit like me, having alot of ideas and projects all over the map, resulting in several areas of interest that are actually each a “full-time” hobby on their own. I can really suggest to get David Allens “Getting Things Done” (that’s a book), read it and use the parts fitting your situation. There is alot of business stuff that may not apply to you (it didn’t apply to me) and as with every non-fiction book from the US I didn’t really like the overall tone (too commandeering), but I actually learned alot from it.
What he basically teaches is to prioritize your projects, make a proper roadmap for every project, define the steps it takes to get this done, organize these steps and be actually able to postpone stuff or give it to someone else.
Like, when you say you want to finish those games, according to him you should first sit down and really map out what is already done and what needs to be doing to get it finished. What are you capable of, what do you need to learn to create the missing parts, is there anything that can or has to be done by other people (music, gfx) and if so, who could you ask ? This should give you a rough idea about the work and knowledge still needed so you can start reading into the stuff you need and/or are able to sit infront of your PC in the evening and know exactly what to work on. A major thing he preaches is something he calls “Getting it out of your head” by simply writing things down. This way you will be able to just stop working after a few hours and go to bed/spend time with your girlfriend because you can simply continue the next evening. You just don’t sit down wondering “Where was I yesterday ? What is it that I want to do ?” or divide your time working abit on this and abit on that. Post-it notes became a major part of my workspace and I have loads of notebooks filled with stuff I worked on and plan to continue to work on.
With this it is also easier to set projects on “hold” because you have all the information collected somewhere and can get it back at any point. I did start working on some VJing-stuff with a friend about two years back which did work out pretty well, then my friend moved away and I was kinda stuck. I did decide not to pursue this on my own because I had no footage and no idea about VJing-Software, so I just wrote all the ideas and stuff down and saved all the files (it was mainly reaktor on my end) into one spot and this project is now on “hold” until I happen to run into someone who can provide the visual parts and software to that project. That is really something I would like to do, but it is not possible at the moment, but it is also not something I am brooding over every other week, simply because I know I can continue to work on that whenever the opportunity opens up.
Or just recently I decided to make a band with a few friends and pursue a general idea and really work towards getting gigs and all, but I am currently too busy with other projects so it is also on hold for 3-4 months. But I already know and wrote down what has to be done after that time, find a guitarist, get a rehearsal room, start jamming and recording, I know a booking agency that I can ask to get us gigs when we are ready, I know a few labels I can send demos to when we actually recorded stuff and so on and so forth.
I am still not completely into this whole idea (and I definately don’t take it as religion-like as other people) and still miss things from time to time, but it did help me alot so far, not only with projects but also with a load of “daily life” stuff.
PS:Post# 1800. Wooh !
) about the things I have to study and the exams that I always feel stressed and never find the time to work on my personal projects (…making music, coding something nice, making a website etc etc).
)… the time for my personal project is veeery little (when I were in high school I had a lot of time, and I made a lot of music!!).