Exercising, keeping your mental health in check, eating a healthy diet, sleeping enough, spending time with friends and in nature are all hugely important in making sure that you actually have something to give in the first place, but this career puts negative pressure on all of that — it's easy to allow this work to swallow you whole and to never leave your studio, which is something I've had more than my fair share of, and due to that experience is something I really feel should be minimized as much as possible. Composers tend to romanticize the idea of, you know, never sleeping and doing a billion projects at once and bragging about how many minutes they can write in a day, but the objectively reality is that leaning into that too hard destroys your health and your personal life, as well as your music. And that's just no way to live or to conduct business. So you need to somehow counter that pressure as best you can. I meditate about 30 minutes every day, and nothing affects my life more positively than that. When you're busy, it can feel like you can skip it or something, but the benefits outweigh whatever time I feel like I'm wasting, always.
Beyond that, on the technical side of things, my philosophy is one of depth rather than breadth, and of a general lack of friction. We all know the instinct to buy a bunch of new gear at the start of a new project, which I think comes from a place of fear and an empty hope that new sounds or gear will somehow make our music better. But that usually just results in buyer's remorse and a fatter hard drive. So I really like diving deep into the tools I already have and seeing what else I can do with them, and only buying gear when it's really necessary.
I'm always refining my Cubase template, as I like my rig to get out of my way and to aid in achieving a certain sound as quickly as possible. I like having as much loaded up and available as I can, with one track doing one thing avoiding key-switches. I must confess that I don't use Expression Maps, as great a feature as that is. I like things to be super straight-forward, even if that means that your template is large. Though, a huge template can promote too much reliance on your bag of tricks and the associated stagnation, so I've started countering huge-template-itis by using more Track Presets with plugin chains I find interesting saved to them and mapped to Quick Controls for quick playability. I like the idea of having the foundation, the core, built out in your template — your orchestral bread and butter should more or less be laid out ready to go — I don't see the point in spending time hunting for a viola, and your bussing should ideally be set up for really wide batch stem printing. But you still need to leave space — literally, as in computer resources — to expand a good deal beyond that and let each cue follow your ear and your creativity. It's a balance and it's never perfect, but that's okay.
I'm also pretty fussy about moving fast within Cubase, which is thankfully very easy. Lots of MIDI-controller lane setups, key commands, generic remotes, logical editor presets and all, come together to make the lines between the processes of composition, programming, sound design, editing, and mixing blur and melt away. I don't really get married to this stuff so it's always in flux, always something I'm experimenting with to squeeze out a bit more speed and remove a bit more friction between the conception of an idea and the act of realizing it.
There's also the day-to-day computer-ish stuff — keeping your folder structures and naming conventions in such a way that organization occurs seemingly by itself; learning a bit of programming to do otherwise boring and monotonous, time-wasting tasks like batch-renaming files. Stuff like that. A little can go a long way here.
More than anything, maintaining a sense of play, joy, and wonder about the whole process is essential, if for no other reason than that being the whole reason I chose this career in the first place. The process of composing to a deadline can be extremely stressful, even if you do all this stuff, but ideally I'm giving myself the chance to, as much as possible, just have me and the project and the music to worry about. And then the creativity and the composing can have space to happen on its own, which unfortunately isn't something I can explain. It just happens. But you have to let it.