What'cha Workin' On? July 2025

What are your hopes for productivity this month, whether in work or in life?

I've had some things pick up recently, so apologies for not properly maintaining this fledgling series. Partly it felt a little redundant, like I was just typing out things that were already in my day planner with more detail. HOWEVER, I am a pretty big documentarian, and I find it's encouraging to have journals, spreadsheets, summaries, just things to look back on showing the pile of work that's been done, since the day-to-day/week-to-week/etc sometimes only feels like a treadmill or just tiny incremental growth & progress.

Pseudo-philosophy aside, perhaps a birds-eye view of what I'm hoping to accomplish this month will be more actively useful to me, as something I can refer back to for "ope, never got around to that" as well as "oh nice, forgot that I finished that up back in [INSERT MONTH HERE]". Onward!

1.) Teaching/Scheduling:
I have begun teaching in Columbus one day per week at a new studio started by a vocalist friend of mine (https://www.theswainstudio.com/). With in person teaching now filling up most of my energy Wednesdays & Thursdays (plus a few scattered remote students on other days), am finding that I need to do better about planning reasonable amounts of editing on the other dedicated 'studio days', especially if I add another day of teaching in Columbus come fall.

So, July goal - test out a couple weeks of routine, now that teaching days and studio work days are more delineated.
Mondays: Uploads (youtube.com, social media, patreon, gumroad), communication, invoices/billing, setting up pro tools sessions & premiere project ingests/footage alignment, editing for the realtor I run social media for, mixing. (Recording Day 1 if needed).

Tuesdays: Lesson planning & transcribing, clean ground floor in preparation for Wednesday teaching. Video edits. (Recording Day 2 if needed).

Wednesdays: Teaching, lesson logs, video edits OR transcribing.

Thursdays: Teaching in Columbus (+ 1.5hr commute). Plan weekend catchup work.

Fridays: Writing, set up for demo recording if that's part of the weekend or next week's work. Video Editing final exports, thumbnails, & filesorting.

Saturdays: Transcribing.
Sundays: Plan week. Make sure all assets (videos, thumbnails, captions, pdfs, mp3s, collab posts) are finished and scheduled.

(As always, this leaves off the things that are a given/every day, so actual practicing at the instrument eats up a couple hours of course. brushing cats. showering. you know)

2.) Recording/Filming:
Piano was tuned last week so I have had a glut of recording to work through while it still sounded fresh. Rest of July will be editing, and writing/transcribing/practicing for the next batch.

• Finished recordings: GD guest solo tracking + addt'l live take, Sports live playthrough, Blumen idea live demo with James' drums, Aashdurg acoustic idea collab, musical theater samples for a demo reel next month to try and get more recording work making backing tracks.
• Still to record: Sports lesson vid, Cloudkicker lesson vid. Some string stuff.

3.) Writing & Engraving work:

• symphonic tech prog instrumental project thingy (Vilera) that I need to clean up the musescore files for the 3 movements of session work recording in August.
• Bluehew part writing to their demo.
• Aashdurg tinker with that c#min idea and send it to them.
• Loam finish first etude and send it to them to write their layer.
• Catch up on requests on requests spreadsheet (5 or 6)
• The Contortionist, Reimagined transcription.
• Cleanup Zelda transcriptions that got delisted from musicnotes and set up a bundle for gumroad/patreon.

4.) Mixing & Editing:
At the time of writing this, I desperately need to organize and sort my footage from the past week, so I can't even really make a quick list of what's priority for editing right now. Of the like, Big Projects, I know I'll need to do the lesson vids, Sports playthrough, GD solo playthrough, and Gentle Alarms set of vids & mp3s, but unsure of priority beyond that.

TBD: Some Notes/GGD Demo, finishing CoastalDives long form analysis vid, musical theater demo reel, AAL Apeirophobia harpsichord layered cover.

Okay bye. Posting soon about looking for ways to help smooth out the constant barrage of folder navigation and remembering what goes where & when. Just finishing the documentation first that I can use as a checklist for every project, then will turn to the wiser minds around here that have more savvy to available tools that exist, trying to keep this manageable as everything splinters further now that I've added patreon.