The Jim Kroft Podcast

A Modern Predicament

I found myself recently in a very modern predicament.

For the first time this year, I had the luxury of time. Work was quiet, and I was glad for it.

With the next recording session for the album starting in two weeks, I had a clear diary.

I planned to travel daily down to my office in Berlin’s Schönewiede, and there I would concentrate my full attention on my principal goal this year.

That goal—writing and recording 12 new songs—felt curiously close.

I had no idea how it had happened, but what felt like an impossibility earlier in the year when I was wrestling with internal doubt, writer's block and the void itself ,now felt on the brink of completion.

All I had to do was show up, enjoy the process, and see what would emerge from it.

And then, of course, life happened!

When Life Throws Curveballs

I was commissioned to shoot three music videos in Dubai, and then upon my return, to film one of the key dates in the German cultural calendar, the Mauerfall—the celebration of the fall of the wall.

Now don’t get me wrong—wonderful to have the work come in, but a disaster on the creative front!

As such, this Sunday, I looked at my diary and did the maths.

The only two days I had left to write for the studio session were Monday and Tuesday this week, with Wednesday dedicated to project planning, packing my gear, and writing this newsletter.

Gulp.

Before finding all this out, I had fled the city and headed to the Sächsische Schweiz, where autumn transfixed; luminous, glowing, and perfectly poised between the living and dying.

It was a rare moment of calm this year, which has been marked by a degree of divide and intensity as I’ve tried to balance competing parts of life.

Those parts don’t seem to always want to fit, and like so many moderns, it turns you at times into a hatchet job—a deranged juggler, desperately trying to keep balls in the air, while all the time knowing gravity has no care.

It can be that way with our dreams too, trying to fit them into a brutish reality, unimpressed by the yearning which walks within every human chest.

Up in the mountains, I felt things settle—revived and held as I stepped out of Donna in the morning, leaves crisp underfoot and dew cool against my toes.

The colours imbued a sense of reverence, as if all things were holding their breath. In these moments, there is no separation, just the sense you and the mountains were designed to be in each other's noticing.

Embracing the Challenge

It was only later that the jobs came in, and despite my best-laid plans scattering like leaves, I felt a sense of well-being—as if the mountains had imparted a sense that things were somehow as they were meant to be.

That evening, driving back to Berlin to listen to Fran Lebowitz in the RBB studios, I thought over my options regarding the upcoming recording session. Cancelling was not an option as the studio—“The Famous Gold Watch”—was booked until the end of the year.

And besides, it’s a personal value for me, that once I’ve put something creative in the diary, I keep it - no matter how prepared I am. It’s one way I make myself accountable to my own dreams.

So the only way to fulfil my goal was to commit.

I worked backward in my diary, marking out every free moment I could use to prepare for the studio.

It became clear that the only days available were the next two: Monday and Tuesday.

That’s when the songs had to be ready.

Now here’s the thing:

A song can be written in a year or it can be written in an hour.

Yes, sometimes inspiration strikes, as if, as Bono once put it, you feel God walking into the room.

But the reality is that songwriting is work.

And unlike other types of work, where your investment of time reaps small but tangibly clear results, songwriting works differently.

Some songs require that you invest countless hours and energy for no apparent result whatsoever.

Paradoxically, it is this seemingly lost time that is the staging ground for when inspiration eventually hits.

This is what I struggled with so much earlier in the year.

As you get older, you want practical and discernible results from what you do. The luxury of simply being within time—like I was incidentally in the mountains—feels more and more unviable.

Every bill sniggers at time wasted without an outcome. You’ve either used that time to do what you need to do for your life, or you haven’t.

And so this is why songwriting felt torturous as I recommitted earlier in the year.

Because I was committing to something you are not meant to commit to as an adult—a sense of play.

Earlier in the year, knowing what a demanding mistress songwriting is, I gave myself the timeframe of a year to write and record the project. I figured that would allow me to stay diligent with the exigencies of work, clients, and bills—while giving me enough space to pursue the songs.

It was a plan based on experience, and the strategy of giving myself a realistic timeframe has helped me not just to keep the project ticking, but to have just enough space to invite magic into the room.

However, my current situation, with having only two days to write two new songs, required a different strategy.

Confronting Parkinson's Law

And so, while driving the steadfast Autobahn, and chuckling at Donna’s belligerent joy in stacking up queues of angry BMWs behind her, I thought over my options.

It was then that it struck me—how uneasily songwriting sits with Parkinson’s Law.

Now for anyone not familiar with Parkinson’s Law, it is the idea that work expands according to the time given for its completion.

To illustrate this, you can think of my own new album as an example.

I gave myself the rigid deadline of a whole year.

Now, though my reasons for this were very clear, Parkinson’s Law would simply state that the work has expanded to fill the time given for its completion—that is, a single year.

If it were given instead six months, then six months it would take.

Simply put, the longer you give something, the longer it will take to complete.

Considering it’s a productivity idea, I find it curiously poetic, this idea that there is an inherent expansiveness underwritten into human working life, as if it somehow reflects the universe itself, inflationary and ever swelling.

And so I found myself in conversation with Parkinson regarding my own predicament.

What would you say to it, dear man?

I listened to him above the din of the BMWs beeping their horns behind, incandescent with rage.

Parkinson said: Take a damn hacksaw to your problem and deal with the world as it is, not as you want it to be.

It startled me.

Perhaps this was an opportunity rather than an obstacle.

Instead of shrinking before my dwindling time, what if I could lean into it?

What if the disappearance of time itself could be the very provocation I needed?

And if it was provoking, then what was it provoking?

It struck me that limited time didn’t have to prevent me from doing my very best work.

I understood in that moment that though I had less time, I still had time.

And within the time that I had, I could bring one of two attitudes to it.

Either I could be defeatist.

Or I could use it to summon my best.

The idea that time was challenging me to bring out my best was elevating in itself.

I arrived back in Berlin, put on my suit, travelled across town, and enjoyed an evening lashed and uplifted by the immortal wit and wisdom of Fran Lebowitz.

Creating Under Pressure

The next morning, I woke with a jolt.

One of those mornings when you know it's do or die.

I felt enlivened and decided once again to don my suit. If you’re going to battle with the abyss, why not dress your best?

I bustled down to Mahalla — the arts community where my office is based — and its boss, Ralf, bantered: “No ties in Mahalla!”

“Piss off, Ralf!” I quipped back.

It felt good, as if this mini face-off was readying me for the creative tussle to follow.

The world felt alive with intention, and I found myself tuned to its meaning.

I thought of Hitchcock’s wonderful words:

“Today we are going to create something.”

Any day you get to create something is a good day.

Wrestling with Parkinson

As I entered my office, I thought of Parkinson’s Law.

I had two days, and my work, rather than expanding into it, had to shrink into it.

Now here’s the thing:

Creativity does not want to be bullied.

You will know by now that I am obsessed with creative process.

And that obsession came not just from an inherent fascination with how we create, but also out of the necessity of having to fight for my creative life.

Since 2013, I’ve had to battle to for my musical soul while it has jostled with life running my film and photography business.

This is why I’ve explored so many approaches to productivity.

Not because I have an inherent interest in getting more out of myself, but because I wanted to safeguard my own potential.

And that meant organising both my energy and my time.

I knew on some intuitive level that in order to keep myself spiritually alive, I needed to stay creatively alive. Every time I failed in that, I felt the poisonous ivy of the wider societal cynicism start creeping in. Guarding against that strangulation of the spirit felt as important as the basics of life itself.

And so here I was on this fine Monday morning, in the curious position of trying to superimpose a productivity law onto the creative process itself.

And of course, the creative process backhanded my intentions entirely—no, I will not subordinate myself to fucking Parkinson.

For an hour, all I felt was the rising pressure that I should be doing something. And there is nothing more ruinous to the creative process than the feeling you should be doing something.

Analysing a Creative Predicament

I thought this over.

How curious the creative process is.

But then I realised—

Is it really the creative process that is being fickle—or is it me?

I found this distinction helpful.

It was me that was putting this pressure on myself.

It was me that was resisting.

I had to be radically accountable to myself.

If I was to find what I was searching for, I needed not only to accept the challenge posed by Parkinson’s Law—compressing work into limited time—but to bring my own experience into how I approached that challenge.

Yes, creative work does not like to be rushed.

But equally, artists often fall into the parallel trap inherent in this aversion to rush—they feel like their work takes forever.

And sometimes it does.

I realised I needed to confront my own dangerous longing—the urge to sit and muse endlessly—and banish the notion that doing so was somehow beneficial.

One way or another, I was within constriction—simply put, my longing for it to be different was of very little help given my present conundrum.

A New Approach

The first thing I needed to do was to forgive myself.

I felt I had wasted the first hour.

All-too-often we allow a false start to eat into the rest of the day.

And so, I put it aside and instead gave myself half an hour to think about how I wanted to approach the day.

I realised that there was an aspect of Parkinson’s Law that was oppressing me. Parkinson’s Law is very helpful for crunching tasks that have a clear delineation—paying bills, writing invoices, answering emails, jumping on work calls, project management and so on.

These are administrative tasks that take well to being crunched.

A creative activity, on the other hand, is more nuanced. It asks for a sense of playfulness, of listening to what one finds inside, to reflecting, or entering the labyrinth one discovers in oneself.

This explorative quality is not linear in nature, or at least in its origin.

To find a good idea, you need to meander a little.

You need to have the courage to step out into the dark, to chuck away the compass, to get lost awhile.

And so, I decided to break the day into two halves.

The first half I would give myself over to play entirely. I gave myself the gift of doing exactly what the part of me stimulated by Parkinson’s Law did not want me to do.

The administrator in oneself hates this—that part of you that wants to achieve what you are setting out to do.

But here’s the thing.

Though some of our work requires that we chop wood, with creative work, you need to find that wood in the first place.

That’s why you need to venture out, and that’s why you need to bin all the parts of you that are conditioned by modern life to achieve, to do, and to accomplish.

Because creative work is about being, it’s about playfulness, and it's about keeping yourself open.

Redefining Parkinson’s Law for the Creative

Over the next four hours, I entered a state of being that I’ve not only been rediscovering this year but experiencing in an entirely new way.

It is this capacity to access whatever you find inside yourself, and then to respond to it.

This sounds so simple when you write it.

But it has taken a lifetime of work to be able to access it as fluidly as I have been able to do this week.

During this time of playfulness, I practised, noodled, wrote down hook ideas and song titles, and allowed myself to drift where my mood took me.

It was not about trying to do anything.

It was about saying “no” to all of the things I felt I should be doing on a Monday morning and instead giving myself over to a deeper access point.

Rather than feeling the pressure of being constricted by time, I found myself losing myself into time altogether.

I repeated this 4 hour period of playfulness on both the Monday and the Tuesday and was startled by the results.

Dividing the day into two halves — one for play and one for decisive action — was initiating an incredible breakthrough.

A key aspect of this was allowing myself this creative time — free from all the things the world tells you you should be doing.

Instead what about this question:

What do you want to be doing.

I realised that the way we operate in our daily life, expresses entirely the reality of whether we are owning our own lives or not.

I now had the basis of two new songs, each of which I think are the strongest on the album.

Each day at the end of this morning power session, I found myself emptied but elated. I would then eat some lunch with the other members of the arts community, and then I would reward myself with a little siesta.

I knew that the afternoon session would likely last deep into the night and I needed to give myself the rest I would need to operate at my highest level.

As you may know by now, I am big on the idea that we must manage our energy, not our time.

A key point too often missed by productivity experts and 'grind culture' bros is that good results depend far less on the quantity time you put in and far more on the quality of energy and intensity you bring.

And so, I drifted off on my sofa and dreamt deep dreams of an ever-expanding universe.

When I woke, I had the title for the new song:

Cosmic Skeletons.

It seemed to knit together all the ideas circling in my mind—the reverent awe which I had reconnected with in the mountains, combined with the wonder that we are electrified matter—cosmic skeletons.

After dragging a comb through my hair and swigging a coffee, the afternoon was about getting in league with Mr Parkinson.

On the agenda was structure, tempo, key, and chopping out some lyrics.

In two weeks, some of the best musicians in Berlin would be coming to play on the songs, and I had precisely the rest of the day to figure out how the songs went so they’d have something to play.

Something that helps me when I’m faced with overwhelm is this mantra:

“Start Somewhere”

Given my present situation, far more important than perfection was to move forward in any way I could.

I had conscientiously moved out of a time of play and into a period of action.

It was in this period that I found Parkinson’s Law particularly useful.

Not only for the obvious reasons you’d find in any textbook—like increased focus and a determination to complete my task within the time I had.

What proved most helpful was wielding a critical hammer to assess the importance of each micro-task in front of me.

Simply put, I was determined to keep the greater goal of ending the day with a fully realised song in mind—rather than the potential pitfall of having a perfect-sounding but half-formed demo.

I needed results and I needed them NOW.

Illustrating My Decision Making

When you are recording a demo it is easy to find yourself spending an hour skimming through endless synth patches looking for the perfect sound.

And while sounds are important, the reality is that you often choose something different once you're in the recording studio—different musicians bring their own gear, feeling and attitude after all.

As such, with every smaller task, such as choosing a drum beat or guitar sound, I limited myself to five minutes.

This already streamlined a process that can easily take days.

The other decision I made was that I would not record more than I needed to.

I would not layer things up massively with harmonies and interlocking instruments.

All that mattered to me was that the song itself was as good as I could damn well make it.

Even lyrics weren’t so important. I knew that if I could get a draft down—a shitty first draft—as Anne Lamott termed it, then I could refine these later, whether on the plane or in those stolen moments we find within the bustle of things.

Parkinson’s Law was helping me to compress time where otherwise it would have been expanding.

I found it incredibly useful to put each decision through the filter of how necessary it really was for the intended outcome.

The effect was not just that I found myself in an unusual flow, but also that the positive energy unleashed through the feeling of forward momentum had the effect of giving me time back in areas that I might otherwise have lost.

For instance, something had been bugging me when I started demoing “Cosmic Skeletons.”

Right at the point of completing the demo, I realised what it was.

Because I had streamlined my process, I had arrived at a place where I could have an overview of the whole song—to see the forest rather than the trees.

At that point, I cut out a whole section and tried out several new variations, eventually leading to a far more fulfilling and lucid song structure.

I had managed not just to borrow aspects of Parkinson’s Law for my own purposes, but also to challenge its limitations and assumptions too.

What surprised me was that my process worked on both days—meaning that I now have two brand new songs ready for the recording session.

How the hell did that happen? I asked myself!

I had managed to transform panic into empowerment, but beyond this, to show myself that I had found a system which I could potentially replicate in the future.

Lessons Learned

For me, this is the key point I want to remind you of today—

When it comes to productivity systems, we should remember to use them not just to get things done, but to fulfil our own potential.

If you refine your creative process by experimenting with strategies and tactics pinched from productivity systems, you will find what works for you.

What I leave you with is this:

Work will never end because it will always find new ways to expand.

In the modern world, our to-do lists don’t conclude—they just grow endlessly, like Hydras.

My personal issue with productivity laws is that all they seem to do is speed us up in order to do more.

There is a myth that doing more actually means you are getting it done.

This is not the case.

All doing more means is that you end up doing more.

And if all you are ever doing is increasing the workload as your to-do list piles up, then the inevitable outcome is premature ageing, burnout, and exhaustion.

That is not a way to live, or a value to live for.

I think I had such a positive experience of Parkinson’s Law not because I adopted it willy-nilly, but because I challenged it at its core.

My highest personal value isn’t tied to the outward markers of success—the kind most valued by society, defined by wealth, status, numbers, and the societal game.

What matters to me is exploring my highest potential as a human being, and with that, the hope that I can use it to put something positive into the world—something that moves people, that gives them courage for their own journey, and brings new perspectives to their outlook.

To do this means trying everything and challenging everything too.

That means keeping what works and discarding what doesn’t serve your own creative process or life experience.

A Story That Inspires Me

Finally, I'd like to leave you with a story which inspires me.

Years ago, I wrote a song called One Sees the Sun, inspired by my hero, Dostoevsky. I'll save that story for another day, but a passage from his biography came to mind as I wrote today’s newsletter.

After his release from the Gulag, Dostoevsky spent years in poverty. By 1866, while writing The Gambler, he was caught in a whirlwind of debt, creative pressures, and personal struggles.

Heavily in debt from his own gambling, he signed a publishing contract with a steep penalty: if he did not complete his new novel on time, he would forfeit all future royalties to his publisher.

To meet this deadline, he employed a stenographer named Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. Fueled by the terror of losing the proceeds of his sole livelihood, he dictated The Gambler tirelessly through the days and nights leading up to the deadline. The intense pressure made him laser-focused, instilling an efficiency and resolve that carried him through. Not only did he meet the deadline and write a great novel, but he found love—he and Anna were married and remained together for life.

For me, this story is a reminder that constraints are not your enemy when it comes to creative work, and pressure does not have to limit your potential.

Though all of us like to take our time with things, we too often forget the assumption written into the idea that we can spend more time—and that tomorrow will be waiting for us.

The idea you have today will no longer be here in the same form tomorrow. And more so, one day tomorrow will not be here at all.

If there is one thing I’ve learnt this year, it is to remember that being in time is also about living fully in time. And to live fully in time means giving form to whatever dream that gnaws at you in your chest. In the end, all of us have a fixed deadline, and that is the time the gods choose to give to us.

That is not just a reminder, but my own provocation to you.

Let the pressure of this, our brief stay, coax you to live it as fully as you can.

While there were a few times while in the studio I wanted to tell Parkinson to sod off, at the last, I was grateful that, like ol’ Dostoevsky stomping on the roof beams back and forth, his ideas gave me a useful tool to drive forward my own project—wherever it is leading me.

I hope that with whatever you dreaming, that you take a step to consider it like Parkinson did work.

Do not let it ever expand away from you.

Rather, take a first step to bring it down from the realm of dream and into your life.

To realise a dream you have to stop allowing it to ever inflate, and take the first step towards compressing it.

That is how works of art are made.

That is how novels are written.

That is how start up’s are built.

That is how, one day soon, my new songs will leave my studio, and make their way to their intended audience — whoever that may be.

Thank you for accompanying me on the journey.

I am wishing you love, courage and great days ahead, my dear, fellow, Cosmic Skeletons.