One of the problems with personal studios can be that you don’t have to pay an hourly rate to use them. (It’s also one of the benefits, but run with us here…) You can spend as much time as you want to work on a part or a project. Unfortunately, many times this leads to putting off decisions and ultimately never completing a project.

Here’s a trick that can help: set a deadline that will force you to get the work done. It can be a “soft” deadline that you assign arbitrarily (“I want to finish mixing in three weeks…”), but unless you’re disciplined it’s pretty easy to ignore that sort of deadline.

A hard deadline, such as an event you must attend, a performance, a release party, a session scheduled with a mastering engineer, or similar “milestone” that you must hit will give you real motivation to finish things up.