Open Forum Friday – How Many Hours do you Work?

By Emmett Cooke on April 5, 2013 on Blog composer questions, composer roundtable, open forum, open forum friday

Hi all. Welcome to Open Forum Friday again. This week we’d like to discuss:

How many hours per week do you work and why?

Let us know in the comments below and we’ll discuss!

Written by: Emmett Cooke

Emmett Cooke is an Irish composer for film, tv and video games. His music has been used around the world by high profile companies including Sony Playstation, Ralph Lauren, ABC, CBS, NBC, Lockheed Martin and many more.

Roberto

Hi,

depending on the mood I’m working from 5 to 10 hours a day. I’m aiming for 8 hours but with a relatively large amounts of breaks, short ones eg coffee, news, and one or two 25 minutes for preparing a meal or exercises.

I know it’s a relatively long time for breaks but I think it works for me and my efficiency. Perhaps is this too much? What proportion for breaks do you think is good? This is an important issue for me because it has an impact on performance and financial result.

Either way the regularity of work helps me.
- Emmett Cooke
  
  Hey Roberto,
  
  Interesting – I’m pretty much the same. I’d rather do 5 hours of great work, than 10 hours of not so great work in a day. I sometimes take an entire week of work depending on my mood, but on average I guess I work a decent 30-40 hours per week.
- http://twitter.com/LASnark Jon Murray
  
  How many pieces of music do you usually produce in a 5-10 hour day? I’m just getting started and curious what I should be shooting for.
  - Emmett Cooke
    
    Hey John,
    
    I write about 1 and a half minutes to 3 minutes of music in a normal day of about 8 hours.
    
    Emmett
  - Roberto
    
    I think it’s something about a minute for me but it really depends on the inspiration :).
    
    The worst for me is to stay in one place too long and lose the perspective, especially when it comes to mix (I do not have budgets for hiring mix yet, occasionally some musicians). If something takes too much time, I usually start from scratch
    
    I’m happy when I finish a song in a week or two (includes breaks).
David Ashbourne

I work for a casino games company designing sounds and composing, and work 37.5 contracted to them, and can easily spend around 10 additional hours in a week working on my own endeavors; at the moment being a fifteen minute short film. (But have too make sure I have plenty of time for my wife, boys, and friends!)