- The author took a three-month sabbatical in summer 2020 to finish an album, transforming their music-making process.
- Previously, songwriting felt sporadic and unrepeatable, but during the sabbatical, they produced many songs through daily focus and tutorials.
- Music-making shifted from a hit-or-miss hobby to a systematic, boring routine involving collaboration with online techno producer communities.
- Tasks like jamming, recording, cleaning up, sketching arrangements, and mixdowns became mechanical 'chores' performed daily.
- The key was putting in hours, switching tasks when stale, filing results, and taking breaks, leading to finishing multiple songs per day unnoticed.
- Quality judgments became detached from emotional attachment, allowing for discarding or editing ideas freely in a large volume of material.
- The author discovered no correlation between session satisfaction and output quality, with favorite tracks often from frustrating sessions.
- By the end, they finished 40 tracks, released an EP, and continued producing after returning to work, finding joy in the permanent music despite the chore-like process.
- The routine was internalized through sheer quantity of work, making music systematic and bureaucratic, a realization only possible through intensive practice.