There are some golden rules to mixing that you should really follow, at least until you get really good and develop your own way of working. You can still do worse than to get into the habit of adopting the first few as your lifetime no bend rules.

1. Don't work for hours and hours non-stop. Your hearing gradually becomes numbed and will eventually become a casualty of Temporary Threshold Shift which makes your ears ring and affects your ability to hear high frequencies. The end result will be mixes that have far too much top end and a life of misery as you lay awake at night listening to your ears screaming.

2. Don't monitor at exceedingly high levels, especially when using headphones for long periods of time. TTS occurs a lot quicker at high volumes.

3. Before starting a new mix be sure to Zero your mixer. This is easily achived by making sure all the EQ is set at zero, pan controls are centered, faders are at rest and all mutes and solo buttons are off.

4. When EQing it's usually better to cut frequencies than boost them. This will also help to prevent you from trying to give the sound something it should really have had in the first place which will in turn assist you when recording and creating sounds.

5. Make sure that you are getting absolutely the most level into your recording device when recording, without clipping or going too far into the red.
If you work entirely in the digital domain, with optical cable Etc., this isn't too much of a problem but if you still use audio cable or even tape you owe it to yourself and your music to get as much signal as humanly possible down that wire.

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