Muralists clean and prime the wall before the first color goes on. Most great work starts with boring prep.

Preparation is invisible in the result and decides most of it. Paint on an unprimed, dirty wall fails within a year no matter how good the painting is, which means the boring half of the job is the half that determines whether the interesting half survives. The part nobody photographs is the part that holds everything up.

Build the dull step into your plan rather than treating it as a delay. Clean the surface, tune the instrument, set up the files, charge the batteries. Give it its own slot in the schedule, because prep squeezed into the start of the fun part always gets skipped.