This article is brought to you as part of the ASCAP Wellness Program.

 

Even when the work you do is a labor of love, sometimes it can still feel like…well, labor.

 

No matter how much you enjoy creating, inevitably there are times when you’re just not quite feeling it. It could be getting started on a specific project, or finally addressing the mind-numbing admin tasks that have been collecting dust on your to-do list.

 

Fortunately, the feeling is universal and one that some creators have learned to navigate with quite some skill. Take, for example, Anne-Kathrin Dern. The composer and ASCAP member is no stranger to colossal projects, and she’s not immune to mundane back-office responsibilities, either. But over the years she’s picked up a few tried and true methods to keep her productivity on track, despite any feelings of dread or obligation that might arise from time to time (as they tend to do).

 

Here, Dern shares some of her most effective productivity hacks that allow her to maintain forward momentum and enable her to consistently tackle projects and tasks big and small.

 

Anne-Kathrin Dern’s Top 7 Productivity Hacks

Build productivity into your routine

If you worked a 9-to-5 desk job, you wouldn’t spend time each morning thinking about whether you’re going to go into the office that day. You’d just go. Sure, some days you might not be particularly stoked about it, but that’s just how it goes. So, as a creator, why should sitting down to get work done each day be any different?

 

“The part where you physically have to sit down and start doing it is the hardest part, but once you're doing it it's usually fine,” says Dern, who recommends treating productivity just as you would any other part of your daily routine.

 

“We don't really make the decision to brush our teeth, or to make coffee in the morning,” she says. “So I try to do exactly that with composing work. I just have a morning routine, and part of that morning routine is sitting down to start writing music—and there’s not ever a question of whether I'm going to do that or not.”

 

Just like any habit, establishing productivity time as a staple in your daily routine won’t happen overnight, but eventually autopilot will click in and you’ll be golden, Dern says. “Once you have it, it’ll just feel natural and you won’t have to actively make that decision anymore.”

 

Start with the end in mind

 

Sometimes just the thought of forcing yourself to start a certain task can be enough of a deterrent to keep you from initiating it at all. The thought of forcing yourself to stop doing that task, however, is far more palatable.

 

“What helps me is to put an end point on a specific task,” says Dern. Not only is this a great way to get yourself to engage with the task at hand, but with a clear time limit you’ll likely also find yourself focusing more intently and getting the job done a lot faster than you otherwise would. “So, say the task is writing or answering emails – not something I particularly enjoy,” Dern says. “If I make that an open-ended task it could last for hours, because there's a lot in my inbox. But if I say, ‘Okay, I'll set a timer, and for the next 30 minutes I’m going to answer as many emails as I can,’ I'm so much more focused and productive.”

 

To sweeten the deal, Dern will typically put some kind of reward on the other side of the finish line. “It could be food, or a walk, or like 10 minutes of internet time or something,” she says. “Just a little bit more incentive to get it done.”

 

Strike while your willpower is hot

 

“I always think it's better to do the difficult tasks first, because our decision-making energy goes down throughout the day,” Dern says.

 

Psychological researchers actually have a name for this phenomenon: “ego depletion.” It’s the theory that the amount of willpower we possess at any given time is directly tethered to our mental energy reserves; and as those reserves deplete throughout the day, our willpower wanes in tandem with it. The ego depletion theory makes sense of why we often find it easier to tackle a daunting to-do list item at the beginning of a work session versus towards the end.

 

If that hits close to home, then lean into this knowledge and work with your biology instead of fighting against it and putting tasks off for a later time when you know you’ll have a lesser chance of actually addressing them.

 

That said, if you don’t seem to have any issues being productive at the tail end of your day, stick with what is working. Newer research, published since the ego depletion theory was first popularized in the late ’90s, suggests this phenomenon, while highly common, occurs only in individuals who believe in it. In other words, if you believe that willpower is a finite resource, you are more likely to feel as though you have less of it as you go about your day.

 

Figure out when you’re naturally most productive

 

Regardless of whether your will to be productive depletes over the course of a session or holds steady throughout, there might be certain times of day (or night) when you are naturally more predisposed to get things done – and figuring out the best time for you can be a game changer.

 

Dern never considered early mornings to be a good time to tackle her to-do list – or to be awake, for that matter – until jet lag from a trip to Europe had her waking up 5am despite her best efforts.

 

“It just kind of stuck, because that turned out to be a really comfortable time for me,” she says. “Nobody’s writing emails, nobody's bugging me, I don't have to manage the team. It's just me, and I can get a lot of work done.”

 

Dern figured this out by accident, but you don’t have to wait until your next international flight to stumble upon your own prime time. Just set your alarm and see what an early start feels like. Or sleep in and try your hand during the night shift.

 

"Try to be productive or creative at different times of the day and see where it is for you, because I never would have thought that it's like 4:30am for me,” she says. “Everyone is different.”

 

Make a day of it

 

Imagine if all the tasks you’ve been putting off could simultaneously be wiped from your to-do list in one fell swoop. Would that be worth burning a day? Probably.

 

“Sometimes what I will do, when I want to get it all out of the way and feel really accomplished at the end of the day, is schedule all the stuff I don't want to do into one day,” Dern says. “I won’t be writing music that day; it will just be tax stuff, accounting, correspondence, meetings and really random things, like running backups, making updates on my computers – just all the random tasks that otherwise would interrupt my writing.”

 

The time away from other projects might just give you the buffer you never knew you needed, to recharge your creativity and come back with a refreshed perspective.

 

It doesn’t have to be a horrible experience, either. On these days, Dern will put on some music ("Everything’s better with music,” she says; even taxes) or queue up a Netflix series. “Enjoy yourself a little bit. Just get all of that stuff out of the way, so the next day you know all of it is done. And for the next couple of days you can focus only on the creative.”

 

Automate!

 

One of the unique challenges as a creator is that delegating work is usually not an option. It is your brain and your creativity that drives your work, and you can’t exactly farm that out. Automation, on the other hand, can be a lifesaver for taking mundane back-office tasks off your plate. It’s a strategy that has helped Dern offload hours of tedious labor from her schedule.

 

“For example, as an accounting app, I'm using QuickBooks,” she says. “It's connected to my bank accounts and automatically downloads all the transactions; I just have to categorize them. It tells me when to pay taxes, it tells me how much I need to pay in taxes, it runs my payroll, it does all my invoicing, it does all my 1099s.”

 

From accounting to calendar scheduling, there’s a whole world of apps and tools out there designed to help you free up your time by eliminating unnecessary legwork.

 

"Some of these apps are really worth it,” Dern says. “It just takes so much work off my plate,”

 

Break big projects down into smaller workstreams

 

It’s a lot easier to get yourself to sit down and work on something that you know will take 30 minutes compared with something else that will surely require hours of your undivided attention. For Dern, the key to tackling the larger projects is to disassemble them and group their parts into more manageable mini-projects.

 

Recently, Dern, who also creates videos for her YouTube channel, was faced with the task of producing a “making of” video about one of her film scoring projects. The undertaking as a whole was incredibly complex, she remembers. “We had three full hours of orchestral session footage that I needed to comb through, along with another half hour of B-roll footage from that session. Then we had all the team members’ interview footage, and each team member also had B-roll footage. And then, of course, I also had to throw in some footage from the movie we're talking about – so combing through the whole two-hour movie and picking the exact shots that I'm going to be using. And then creating a narrative out of all of that.”

 

“It was just such a daunting task,” she says. “It required hundreds, if not thousands, of edits. And just lining all of that up, having so many hours of footage, and knowing at the end of the day it was going to be like a 15-minute video.”

 

To get the job done while giving it the care and attention she knew the finished product deserved, Dern decided to divide and conquer. “I would say, ‘Okay, today I'm just going to get the narrative down and put all the interview clips into the right order, and I'll leave some gaps where I know I'm going to be playing music and session footage.’ Then, the next day, I'd be like, ‘Okay, today I will be editing the first hour of session footage.’ And I’d just break it up into pieces,” she says.

 

"Otherwise it would be so daunting, I would never do it.”

 

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Anne-Kathrin Elisabeth Dern is a German film composer and CEO of e-Quality Music Productions LLC, currently residing in Los Angeles, California. She is mostly known for her scores to the animated Netflix Original Fearless (2020), the Netflix Christmas movie The Claus Family (2020), Disney's Four Enchanted Sisters (2020) and SONY's Help I Shrunk My Parents (2018), as well as her collaborations with Klaus Badelt, most notably on the animated movie Leap! (2016) and the iGG video games Castle Clash (2019), Lords Mobile (2018) and Galaxy Mobile (2020). Dern also contributed music to both seasons of ABC's musical comedy series Galavant (2015-2016), as well as Microsoft's HALO V: Guardians (2015), and wrote additional arrangements for Warner Bros. Ocean's 8 (2018). She has collaborated with and assisted composers such as Christopher Lennertz, Alan Menken, Steve Jablonsky, Ryan Shore, William Ross and Pinar Toprak. Additionally, she has interned at Hans Zimmer's Remote Control Productions and was a selected participant of the 2016 ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop with Richard Bellis. Dern's most recent releases include the comedy-adventure sequel Help, I Shrunk My Friends (2021), the Hallmark romance Her Pen Pal (2021) and the Hallmark drama One Summer (2021). She is currently completing her work on the horror movies Devil (2021) and Have.Hold.Take (2021), and the Netflix sequel The Claus Family 2 (2021). Additionally, she has been signed to write the score for the WWI drama The Last Front (2021), starring Iain Glen and Sasha Luss.

 

Visit Ann-Kathrin Dern online at annedern-filmcomposer.com

 

Subscribe to her educational YouTube videos here.

 

Ann-Kathrin was recently nominated for an ASCAP Composers’ Choice Award for her contributions to Women Warriors: The Voices of Change.