The Project Log
If you're producing music solo, you know what it’s like to feel like you’re not making progress even when you’re putting in the time. You're doing everything yourself. You're doing it in your spare time, so you can't exactly knock out big chunks of progress in a single sitting. And a lot of the work is invisible until the song is done. So even when you're making real, consistent progress, it's easy to feel like you're not. Because you can't see it.
I was doing research about indie game development last year and I ran into a video on YouTube by a developer called Juniper Dev about how to stay motivated when making a game by yourself. Solo developers deal with this problem constantly. The long timelines, no team to keep you accountable, and (seemingly) nothing to show for months of work. Her solution was dead simple: at the end of every session, write down what you worked on and the date. No matter how small or insignificant. If you worked on it, you write it down.
I thought the concept could be just as useful for music production, so I started doing it for myself. I’m calling it the Project Log.
The idea pairs naturally with something I've written about before: the value of micro sessions. A focused hour in the morning or fifteen minutes before bed can add up to real progress over weeks and months. But because very few single sessions move the needle in an obvious way, it's easy to look up after a few weeks and feel like you've been spinning your wheels. The log makes that accumulated progress visible. You're not just trusting that it's adding up. You can actually see it.
Recently I spent a couple of my morning sessions just bouncing tracks down in preparation for mixing. It's a boring, unglamorous task. It doesn't feel like progress in the grand scheme of a song. But I committed the time, I got it done, I logged it, and now I’m ready to do the next thing. If you’re not keeping track, those are the kinds of tasks that are easy to forget that you did. The project log keeps them visible.
There's also a secondary benefit I didn't expect: it shows you where your time is actually going. Right now I'm juggling two blogs, a website rebuild, a collab song, the next City/Ruins track, and building out my audio reels. When I look back at my log, I can see that I've been heavily focused on the brand side of things lately. I’m fine with that, since it's front-loaded work that'll be done soon. But being able to see it means I can make an intentional decision about when to shift my focus. Without the log, I'd just be going off “feel”.
I fell off using it for a couple months, even though I was still getting things done. I just kept forgetting to update the log. But I picked it back up about ten days ago, and have turned it into a bit of a game, which has been helpful in making it stick. I make time to work on something every day, so I don’t want to break the streak.
My one recommendation if you want to try it out is to keep it simple. The last thing you need is another system to maintain. My project log lives in Notion because I’m in there constantly. I just set up a table with two columns: date and a quick note about what I did. Use whatever is going to cause the least amount of friction for you. A notebook, a sheet of paper on your desk, or a note on your phone could do the trick. The format doesn't matter. The habit does.
Give it a shot for a couple of weeks and then read back through it. There's something genuinely satisfying about seeing just how much you've actually been doing.
Do you have a few select information sources, or do you tend to bounce around? I'd love to hear from you.