Fall Out Boy mondegreens, Beethoven, and a Succession soundtrack theory

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For the past several months I have been actively and experimentally figuring out how to handle the day-to-day aspects of juggling multiple concurrent projects, which is not a new problem to anyone by any means and is something I am well aware that many smart capable people have already figured out for themselves. Annoyingly, it seems that the key to finding a way to manage these things is to know myself, which I have to say is incredibly aggravating. I don’t want to know myself. “Myself” is a chaotic mess of competing motivations, overly complicated about simple things and overly simplistic about complicated things.

One of the more stymieing issues for me with multiple larger-scale projects is that when so many of them involve practicing and learning or refining music at the piano, there is an element of unknowingness that is endlessly frustrating to someone with control freak tendencies. While I have a decent idea of how long it takes me to properly get music into my fingers, it is impossible to pinpoint when any given work is going to “gel” or how much everyday maintenance a piece may require to stay in the zone of peak performance, and most days it’s hard to have faith that the tiny dust motes of progress I’m making will add up in time. All of this makes planning a super-stressful prospect for me. Again, I know this is a problem so many musicians have figured out, but my problem is that I haven’t figured it out yet.

Against all of this self-inflicted anxiety, it has been revelatory yet intensely shame-inducing to realize that in order to function for long stretches, I need periods of time every day in which I do literally nothing. This is not special or new; “build in rest to avoid burnout” is just common sense, and also something I advise people to do all the time! And yet putting it into practice feels wrong. I have tried so many strategies and hacks to force myself to be doing, doing, doing nonstop through the day and none of them work. The only thing that does is actually scheduling 30-minute blocks for myself that are written down as “do nothing time.”