When it comes to getting stuff done in a DAW, it pays to take time to Train Your Mind. By this, I mean, practise things until they're second nature.
- Pick a small handful of synths,
memorise a few presets (maybe not perfectly, but enough to get close enough).
- Like reciting a mantra or text, you refresh and reinforce all the memories connected to what you recite. If the memories you recite are those of making a synth patch, you refresh and reinforce the memories of where various settings are and what they do. Once you have things like that memorised, you can subconsciously explore the possible sounds you can get from a synth without having to actually try everything out. You can guess how to make certain types of sounds (e.g. how to make a basic pluck or pad).
- Over time, you can form a set of memorised examples that cover the space you are interested in: a set of synth patches that do most of the things you want when producing. Then, when faced with a need for a sound, you likely know what synth settings will do the trick. This means you don't have to spend minutes or even hours auditioning hundreds or thousands of presets, none of which you understand, in the hope that one will sound the way you like. The more presets you have, the larger the haystack you have to search for a needle that might not even be there.
- Pick a small handful of tunes. All you need really are the chords and melody.
Quite possibly you can find a recording online, and stem-separate to get yourself
a vocal take to experiment with. (Take care with copyright when actually
distributing the results of doing this.)
- Again, you are trying to cover the various bases of what sort of sounds and tracks you want to make. If you like a particular chord progression, learn a few songs using that chord progression, sufficiently that you can recreate them at least in basic form, from memory, and can practise the various production skills as you go.
- If all you need are simple melodies and harmonies to play with, these can be found anywhere.
- Cover skills with a few examples, not a single one. Couple is an issue: if you only learn one example, then you learn all the peculiarities of that example. If you learn a few examples, such that the core concepts are common to most (or all), but everything else is not (or less) common, then your brain will pick out the common features and rearrange your learned patterns so that it sees them as multiple applications of common generic techniques.
- What you learn by doing this, you learn. What you have drilled into your mind is drilled into your mind. What is drilled into your mind can be recalled effortlessly. What you can do effortlessly doesn't diminish the find time and mental resources you have available.
The idea is that you are training the mental processes involved in production, so that when you want to actually make something, the skills to do so are available on tap. Mental effort is a finite resource: Every ounce of mental effort you expend is an ounce you can't spend elsewhere. Time is a finite resource: Every extra minute you spend doing something, compared to how much time you need, is a minute you can't spend doing something else. So treat time and mental effort as limited finite resources and spend them wisely.