Advice: Wipe Your Creative Hard Drive

This blog exists to promote the future of the music industry, both from professional and creative side of the business. We achieve this goal by sharing advice columns, editorials, interviews, and similar features based around the realities of life in entertainment today. We create 99% of our content, but every so often one of our brilliant friends will share a piece with us we cannot resist place here on the company blog. We thank Andrew Jones, the man behind Checkered Owl, for the article you’re about to enjoy.

As anyone who follows this blog knows, I spend a lot of time staring at a computer screen. Like most of you a big part of my day is heavily rooted in the digital world. Skype meetings, Facebook analytics, tour booking e-mails, video editing, tweet sending, blog reading, podcast listening, podcast recording, spreadsheet creating, Spotify or iTunes spinning records in the background…etc. And more often doing 2-5 of any of the above at once. And overall this works for me. These tools all let us get a ton done every day.

However after a while I can feel the ones and zeros collecting around my brain.

They pile up.

And slowly but surely they start to clog up the system.

Creative thoughts come less easily.

Fight it.

Just like your computer, every once and a while you need to clean out all that data, re-format, and come back working more smoothly. Put down the phone, walk away.

Then come back and work twice as hard.


This post was written by Andrew Jones, editor of Checkered Owl. It originally ran on his blog, but we loved it so much we felt it deserved to shared once more on ours. If you like his work and want to read more of his writing, or if you want to be super cool and offer him full time industry employment, reach out and connect with him on Twitter.

James Shotwell