A road to success comes at a price. Take a DJ career, for example. Success as a DJ typically means five, ten, twenty gigs a month. Travelling the world and playing at the largest stages might be a lot of fun, but at the same time, it means sleepless nights in the clubs, countless hours in the airports, living out of a suitcase, and missing out on friends’ birthdays as they usually occur on weekends. My own gig schedule was never that intense, but over the last decade of my music career, I’ve spoken to hundreds of artists who have found themselves in that position.

No path to success is without sacrifices. One path is not ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than another; it’s a matter of priorities, and ultimately, the choice comes down to what you are willing to sacrifice. If you dream big, this principle applies across industries.

We often hear success stories and discussions about work-life balance, but more often than not, they come from people who have already achieved security and stability, having worked long hours in their 20s or 30s and sacrificed health and relationships along the way.

While sacrifices are inevitable, it’s worth considering whether they are intentional and align with your values. We sacrifice comfort for adventure, stability for growth, or leisure for mastery, sometimes without even realising it. Are you content with the trade-offs? Do they bring you closer to the life you envision?

These choices shape who you become and determine how far you go. In the end, success isn’t measured only by what you achieve, but also by what you’re willing to let go of to make space for what matters.

When I doubt about starting something new or continuing with my current pursuits, I find the following question useful: ‘Would I still do this if money was no object?’.

As we live in the monetary world where success is often measured by wealth, sometimes I find it challenging to see the true motivation behind my actions.

For example, my blog. It has around 6,000 monthly visitors, and over the years, it has helped me to land gigs and other opportunities. And at some point it made me believe that my blog is a content marketing tool (gosh, I cringe when I say that). At least that was a pretty reasonable conclusion given its outcome.

However, after asking myself the question ‘Would I do this if money was no object?’, I realised that it isn’t the case at all. I write not because of freakin’ content marketing, but because of the sheer joy of writing.

I love writing, and I love sharing my thoughts. Some people find it valuable, and that’s wonderful. Others don’t, and that’s fine too! Because I would still do this, even if money was no object.

Applying this question to other projects and areas of my life led to surprising results. For instance, I reconsidered my involvement in certain activities and found where my genuine passion lies. This is an ongoing process and I keep discovering my inner self, but the path is clearer now.

Try asking that question too. The insights you gain might surprise you.

As an early adopter who has been active on social media since 2011 (and created my first accounts around 2007), I’ve developed a long-standing love-hate relationship with social media, though the latter sentiment has increasingly grown in me in recent years. I am talking about Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, and more. While Twitter and LinkedIn are slightly different beasts, my concerns apply to them as well.

Let’s start with the business model of these companies, as once you understand it, the rest makes sense. It revolves around three steps: attract as many users as possible, keep them locked in at all costs, and show them as many ads as possible, which creates a vicious cycle of user entrapment.

My biggest issue with social media companies is that they intentionally create harmful products. If you find yourself stuck scrolling through social feeds for hours every day, it’s an intentional trap set by the smart people who design these sophisticated mechanics.

Take Stories, for example, a format that has been adopted by all platforms. This feature exploits people’s Fear-Of-Missing-Out (FOMO) at its worst. The same goes for the Feeds, which don’t even show updates from the people you are subscribed to, instead displaying random content meant to engage you. The fact that Instagram and others don’t have clickable links goes against the core fundamentals of the World Wide Web as a place where you can freely surf around with hyperlinks.

These platforms use manipulation techniques similar to those used in slot machines that offer intermittent rewards to keep users hooked. This unpredictability makes it difficult for users to disengage, always hoping for the next dopamine hit. Privacy exploitation is another major concern that grows larger in me. And again, it’s not a ‘bug’, but a feature of these platforms.

It’s bad, unhealthy, and I even dare to say harmful by design.

Now, you may wonder, how come I am criticising social media while posting on those very platforms?

That’s where the ‘love-hate’ part comes into play. I don’t want to demonise social media completely. Whether we like it or not, these platforms are powerful tools for spreading the word. They allow us to discover interesting content and connect with people across the globe that might not have been possible otherwise. However, it’s crucial to recognise that these benefits come despite the design of these platforms, not because of it. While they offer avenues for meaningful interaction, their primary design is focused on engagement and profit, at the expense of our well-being.

I think of social media as alcohol consumption. For those who choose to drink, it might be fun to have a pint with friends, but I think we can all agree that drinking for four, six, or even eight hours a day is considered damaging. Social media consumption should probably be treated the same way, at least for kids and adolescents until they reach the appropriate age. As a dad, I definitely don’t want my kid to be exploited by those products.

For me, I find being intentional about my social media usage is the key. I don’t have any social media apps on my phone. I use them only on the desktop, which alone I find eliminates a lot of obsessive-compulsive behaviour with checking the phone all the time. When I want to share something, I go to these platforms with that specific intention in mind. On average, my social media usage is about one hour a week, which is likely the least I can get given some of my obligations.

I must be a terrible ‘friend’ because I rarely ‘like’ or comment on other friends’ content, though I’m trying. That makes me feel disconnected at a time, and even selfish, I admit. But that’s the sacrifice I am willing to take for the sake of my mental peace.

Social media are likely here to stay, so I need to learn how to live with them.

One of the most noxious inventions popularised in the productivity space in recent years is the notion of Inbox Zero. With this technique, you are supposed to clean your email inbox down to the magic zero counter and, ideally, keep it that way. Every new email landing in your inbox is a distraction that should be micromanaged.

I love email, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful tools on the Internet. However, Inbox Zero is the most anxious-provoking, dopamine-driven, health-damaging way of dealing with email.

Not every email has to be or should be archived, deleted, or moved away. Why have this burden? Loosen it up, let it flow. Automate the rest, and respond to what’s best.

Don’t want to read yet another newsletter that you don’t even remember subscribing to? Unsubscribe once – and you’re done. Find those newsletters interesting, or do you want to keep track of your receipts? Set up rules to automatically mark those emails as read and move them to designated folders. Do it once, and your inbox will become a much more pleasant place even without you making the manual effort on every single email.

What do you do with the rest of your emails? Workgroup conversations, notifications, and all sorts of emails that don’t require you to take action? In most cases, you read it – and you’re done. It’s as simple as that, without the extra micromanagement.

What about the other types of emails when you do need to respond? Well, you respond now or flag it to reply later, set it aside for batch processing, whatever works for you. But unlike the Inbox Zero technique which requires you to have obligations on every single email, here you only take action when it matters.

Many task manager apps have a ‘due’ date as the only date you can set for a task. This means you sort tasks by their due dates to see what’s on your plate for a given day.

I find it astonishing that Apple Reminders, Todoist, TickTick, Microsoft To-Do, AnyDo, a bunch of other task manager apps and even behemoths like Asana and Monday fail to understand that the due date is not a ‘do’ date.

If a large task or a project that requires many work hours is due today and you only see this on that day, chances are you are in trouble. Many people end up with dozens of overdue tasks in their task managers, leading to an even bigger mess and more anxiety.

The due date is essentially a deadline. It’s a date when the task has to be completed. A finish date, not a start date.

The only task manager I know that gets it right, and the app I’ve been using for years, is Things by Cultured Code. In Things, you can separately set a deadline (a due date) and a ‘when’ date, which is the date when you intend to start working on that thing. I wish more task managers had this feature.

Regardless of your tool of choice, be mindful when setting up a due date as it may not always accurately reflect when you should start working on the task.

I’ve finally got rid of Google Analytics from all my websites. It’s no longer here at dsokolovskiy.com, daniellesden.com or psytranceguide.com. Yay!

There were many things I didn’t like about Google Analytics for a long time: it’s a service run by one of the world’s largest companies whose business model relies on intrusive ads; it conflicts with all modern privacy regulations like GDPR (and even declared illegal in certain countries); it’s bloated, with an outdated UI that is overkill for small websites like mine.

Upon my recent research, I was surprised to find how many alternatives are available today, even though it once seemed that Google Analytics had a monopoly on the market. That may have been true several years ago, making it the default option for me, but fortunately, that’s no longer the case.

In case you’re curious, I’ve switched to a service called Plausible. There are other good services around now too, but I liked this one after giving it a 30-day trial. It’s a simple, open-source, lightweight script that doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t collect personal data. I also like the way the dashboard looks, which is an important factor to me too.

This service isn’t free. It costs me £19 a month for my current configuration which is more than I pay for hosting and domain name services combined. However, if you think about it, Google Analytics wasn’t ‘free’ either, I just paid with a different currency – the privacy of my website’s visitors. I’d rather pay with money; at least that feels fair.

A couple of years ago when I started jogging to eventually be able to run a half marathon, I used to look at my pace as a key metric to measure my progress. Any pro runner would laugh at reading this, but I thought the faster I could run, the faster my body would adapt to sustaining that pace for a longer distance. I know it’s naive, but at least there was some logic in that thinking. Besides, running fast felt ‘cooler’.

No surprise I barely progressed. I made it to the 10-kilometre runs, but couldn’t progress any further. I looked at my pace which improved over time, but I couldn’t understand why I didn’t come close to my goal after months of running.

Then I made an effort to learn a few things, bought a running watch, and switched my attention to a whole different metric: heart rate. Turned out that if I stayed below a certain threshold of my heart rate, I could run way longer! There is another thing called cadence, which is another important metric I never even heard of before at that time (a number of strides per minute), and understanding them both has helped me tremendously. After that eureka moment, I was able to run 20 kilometres and beyond in no time.

That made me think about how often we are looking at the wrong metrics, in any domain of our lives. For example, music producers measure their career progress by the sales charts. Content creators gauge their success by the number of page views. Professionals assess their progress by the number of completed to-dos. And the list goes on and on.

Whether you are a DJ trying to build an international career, a marketer building a sales funnel on the landing page, or a jogger aspiring to run a half marathon, be sure to look at the right metrics.

I am a perfectionist. Someone might say it’s a good trait, but I would disagree.

As a perfectionist, I tend to overthink, overwork, and struggle to start new things. The desire to have everything done flawlessly stopped me from doing so many things in the past that I didn’t even bother counting.

What is on the other end of the perfectionism scale? Sloppiness, indolence, carelessness? I don’t know, I haven’t been there, and I can presume these aren’t great traits either. However, there is plenty of space on the spectrum between these two extremes.

This post is a reminder to myself that done is better than perfect. Sometimes ‘good enough’ is enough. ‘Perfect time’ may never come. And time is the most valuable resource, so use it wisely while you can.

Over the past years, I’ve been posting all sorts of things on my blog: from new podcast episodes to life events and random personal updates. That partly was intentional, as I like to keep everything around rather than having it scattered across different platforms and social media. I thought posting here everything was a good idea. But when I recently scrolled through the blog, I felt it had become almost like a newsfeed, and I didn’t like it.

I want to have a blog with more meaningful posts. A blog that would invite people to read, and encourage me to write. Fewer ‘check it out’ posts, less noise. More thoughts, more meaning. This is the type of blog I would like to have.

With that in mind, I’ve hidden a substantial amount of posts. I’ve been pretty ruthless in clearing it up, so don’t be surprised if you miss a post or two (or a few hundred).

At the same time, I’ve done my best to find more appropriate places for some types of content that I’m posting regularly. For example, the Ask Me Anything series now has a dedicated page for each episode on the website, so I no longer need to post it here. The same goes for almost everything music-related, like Rave Podcast, which now can be found on the website of my music alias. Some work is still in progress in that regard, so you might see occasional ‘not found’ pages for the time being, which I’ll fix eventually.

I want to encourage you to grab the RSS feed to subscribe to new blog posts, which I hope you’ll enjoy reading. If you want to keep up with all my news and updates, my Telegram channel is the best place. For anything else, don’t hesitate to hit me up via email.

Back in 2019, I published an article ‘How I prepare my DJ playlists’ (which now has over 21K views), providing behind-the-scenes into the structure of my DJ collection. Since then, my collection has evolved, as it’s an ever-changing process that reflects my DJ needs.

And today, I’m sharing my entire DJ collection with my Patreon subscribers. This is something that sane DJs probably would never do!

So, here’s the thing. I have my DJ collection with over 7000 tracks on iTunes (‘Music’ app on macOS), which I use as the main hub for all my music. To keep all of the music sorted and to find tracks during my DJ sets easily, I keep all those tracks in over 80 playlists, neatly organised by energy levels and mood. This collection and the playlists are mirrored in Rekordbox, which is the main DJ software that I use to export music to USB sticks which I then plug into the DJ decks on my gigs.

I also have that music collection and playlists mirrored on Spotify, and this is what I am sharing with my Patreon subscribers. While I can’t share the physical audio files from my music library for copyright reasons, even Spotify playlists are a pretty big deal.

First of all, that’s a lot of great music. A lot. Secondly and most importantly, this is my real DJ collection that I am actively using and keeping up to date – so it’s a great material for learning and inspiration to see how I organise my playlists, a real behind-the-scenes peek into the mind of a DJ. I’ve also recorded a video walkthrough to provide more explanation of my playlists.

If it sounds interesting to you and want to get access to it, consider joining me on Patreon (and have many more goodies besides this DJ collection): patreon.com/daniellesden