The Art of Timeboxing

Breaking your creativity into time-sensitive chunks usually can have profound effects.

When I am composing music as Melobleep, I often get specific with my time spent on certain tasks. This means I can quickly build up a bunch of elements that will help me to form a complete track later down the line.

So, what is timeboxing? In short, it’s basically about blocking out a certain amount of time to spend on specific tasks. The hack here is the mindset shift. This shift helped me to become way more productive and get out of the cycle of constantly producing 16 bar loops.

Say you start your productions with composing a drum loop. By giving yourself a time restriction, you have to move to the next task when your time is ran out, instead of when the drums are “done”. The thing is, if we all really reflected on our experiences of making music, we could all be guilty of spending too much time going down a rabbit hole of one thing.

Timeboxing in Context

I was first inspired by FACT’s against the Clock series. I loved how these amazing producers were able to craft some real earworms in a 10 minute deadline. So I shifted the idea and thought “what if I give myself 10 minutes for each part of this track?”

Having only 10 minutes to intentionally work on drums before needing to jump to the bass or the melody forces you to make big decisions. It also takes the anxiety away from those decisions, because the mindset is about working, committing, and jumping to the next part.

When I get started, what I’m doing sounds extremely rough around the edges. That’s ok, because I’m only giving myself 10 minutes at a time to work on single parts of my track.

By the time I’ve come round to them again, the whole direction for what I’m going to do might be different from what I thought. I’ve found that staying open minded and trusting your first judgement is great fun.

An Example of One of My Processes

• 10 mins writing down some ideas I’ve got on paper and the types of things I want to include in the composition, to reduce the need for additional decision making later
• 10 mins on making a nice, hooky chord progression
• 10 mins creating two basslines. The first one follows the bottom note of the chords and the second one is more of a counter melody
• 10 mins working on melody ideas, trying to do something simple and having 3–4 variations
• 10 mins working on drums
• Cup of tea
• 10 mins creating a textural element which gives the piece an extra bit of edge
• Repeating pretty much the whole process, taking 16 bars to 32 bars
• Go outside, or do something else
• Take all the ingredients I’ve created and start making something nice (basically doing the sound design). No time limit on this one

Preparation

Ideas do need time to flourish. That’s understandable, so I can imagine why there would be a reservation in working this way. However, if you approach timeboxing with a playful and open-minded attitude, there’s a lot you can transfer from your head to your DAW in a short space of time.

The enjoyable thing for me is the artistry involved in the whole process. When I am executing without judgement, I can then spend my time after timeboxing to edit with intention.

Great music often takes time, so this isn’t a call to constantly composing without due care. It’s more about intentional composition and building out all of the components you need for a finished track.