A few years ago I was really struggling to organise my increasing workload (I had a day job as an in-house sound engineer for a tech company and my work as a freelance composer and sound designer was starting to increase) when I randomly picked up a copy of Deep Work by Cal Newport.

Trust me when I say I’m not a self-help book kind of guy, but Deep Work changed my professional life, at least in terms of time management.

Deep Work essentially argues that the ability to focus deeply on cognitively demanding tasks without distractions is today rarer than it has ever been, and it’s an important skill to master.

As part of a complete overhaul of the way I tackled work, in 2021 I started to painstakingly block time on my calendar (a fundamental aspect of Cal Newport’s strategy) and as a byproduct of this habit, I ended up with accurate data on how I was spending my time.

Since January is already out of the way, I wanted to reflect on how I spent my working time last year as a composer, sound designer and owner of a company that makes virtual instruments and, more importantly, what time-spending goals I have for this year.

I recently released the video below, if you watched it already you know I don’t like to set goals and instead prefer to set time-spending targets.

I track all my time by using separate calendars on Google Calendar, each task category has a different calendar and this not only means that I can keep a visual diversification of all my areas of work, it also allows me to log into a free tool like Google Calendar Hours Calculator (LINK) and extract data (you can download the reports as .csv files) that you can analyse.

So, here’s what 2024 looked like for me in terms of time management.

And here’s a table with the variations from 2023:

Working as a freelancer and business owner

Thanks to this data, now I know that this year I’ve worked 1928.75 hours in total, a 6% increase on last year, but better than 2022 when I worked 2050 hours.

Early in my career I did much, much worse (i.e. worked a lot more), I just wasn’t tracking it then.

If you’re thinking of going freelance or starting your own business consider that in the UK, where I live, a person typically works 1856 hours before taking into account holidays, and mine are hours of actual work, lunch and coffee breaks don’t count.

If you want to do it, do it for the freedom it gives you and to follow your passion, definitely don’t get into this thinking you’ll work less.

The focus on growing Sonora Cinematic

I started 2024 with a deliberate intention to dedicate a lot more time to my company Sonora Cinematic.

I started Sonora Cinematic in 2021 and it has been a rewarding side business ever since, after some thoughts I decided it was time to grow it into something more substantial.

Note that while the category Producing VSTs - Sonora Cinematic and Partners has stayed more or less consistent in terms of time spending, there is a considerable amount of time I devoted to two categories:

• Business Development, indicating all the time I spent ideating new products, negotiating deals with partners and distributors, developing a release and marketing strategy. This was a brand new category I didn’t have in 2023 and has been added to my calendar for this very purpose.
• Sonora Cinematic Marketing and Content had a substantial increase (+343%), and this was only my personal contribution to the business which doesn’t take into account all the precious help I receive from my amazing colleague Melanie not to mention all our other collaborators that help us on a project-by-project basis.

This worked out very well, Sonora Cinematic grew its revenue by 77% in 2024, and we have some amazing plans for this year.

The book that is not a book anymore

The blog you’re reading right now started off as a few sample chapters for a book I was writing.

Writing a book was the original plan, I even had several meetings with interested publishers, but I decided a blog was more appropriate for what I had in mind and given the diversity of topics I wanted to cover, so the time I used to spend writing the book are now under “Blog”.

Time-spending goals for this year

Compared the 2024 data to the previous year, I feel that my efforts are going in the right direction, with an overall improvement in productivity and time management.

I am also pretty satisfied (only took 12 years…) with the balance between having a somewhat regular amount of work from clients (mostly custom musical sound design, the work in this area has almost doubled) and working on my own business and projects.

But… there’s always room for improvement!

Work-wise, here’s what I’d like to change or do better in 2024.

Writing more music for media

One of my goals for 2024 was to write more music than the previous year. I managed… kind of… with about 15 more hours spent writing music in 2024 compared to 2023.

While I’ve worked on music I’m really proud of this year, from production music to promos and even a personal album that I didn’t do any promotion for but that I’m pretty pleased with 2024 was the first year in a long time I haven’t worked on any music for media, which is ultimately what I got into the industry to do.

This feels like a huge step back, especially since in 2023 I wrote music for a buff-ish game (not out yet) and the year before I did my second feature film.

Hopefully this will change this year, with things at Sonora Cinematic being more organised and a couple of big projects finished I should be able to go back to that or at the very least plant some seeds so that it can happen in 2026.

Spending less time in meetings

I was on a great path to spending less time in meetings in 2023, I ended up spending more in 2024 for the first time. Bummer!

More study, research and personal development

This is my most important time-spending goal for 2025.

It’s very natural that there is a learning time in our professional lives and a “grinding time” in which we do nothing but work.

We tend to sacrifice learning, forgetting that the skills we learn is what keeps us employed.

I’m determined to avoid falling in that trap and to stay curious.

There are a few things I want to work on this year and I’ve already scheduled some time to spend on these. Note that this is time I’m taking from my working hours, not time I take from my family:

• I want to expand my musical and sound design skills learning the electric double bass, a short scale upright I’m having a lot of fun with (and I’ve already sampled it a lot!);
• I’d love to get my Spanish to an acceptable level;
• I want to learn electronics: I’m currently working on a few basic circuits as a way to repurpose some spare parts I have from a broken unit.

Where do you find the time?

Well, good question!

My schedule is packed but I’m determined to do it. Here are a couple of things I’m considering:

• I’m doing less game audio and post-production sound work. It’s still something that interests me deeply but a man needs to pick his battles and there are only so many hours in a day. I think I’ll limit myself to taking on projects that really interest me in this area, where I think I can learn a lot or if it’s a cool credit I’d love on my resume.
• Sonora Cinematic has a very solid plan for 2025, recording sessions are scheduled and I’m outsourcing most of the editing work. I expect the hours spent on the business to go down with me dedicating most of my Sonora Cinematic time to creative decisions, sound design and content creation

These two things give me hope but there are a couple of challenges too:

• you’ll see a drastic reduction in time spent on admin and general overhead… I’m scared I optimised everything that could be optimised and there isn’t much room for improvement in this area.
• I’m determined to actually increase even more (already a +143% variation compared to the previous year) the amount of time I’ll spend on creating video content (YouTube and other socials), which will leave me with less time for other things.

It’ll be a challenge, but here’s what’s cool about time blocking: if you put it in your calendar, you make it work!

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31 January 2025

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