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Break large projects into baby steps to stay productive and avoid overwhelm. Discover practical examples for managing time, balancing creative work, and tackling daunting tasks efficiently.
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Items Mentioned and Other Related Content
Germ Alert: A Teachers Guide to Staying Healthy
Digital Organization Coaching (Online)
Transcript
Welcome to year number 4 and episode 151 of The Piano Pantry Podcast! I’m Amy Chaplin, a piano teacher, and your host. If you’re new around here, in this podcast, we talk about all things studio teacher life-related, from organizing our studios to getting dinner on the table and all that comes between. You’ll receive loads of easily actionable tips on managing your studio, life, and home.
Today, we’re looking at what it looks like to approach large projects with baby steps.
I’ve been creating content for teachers since 2016, and if there’s one thing I can say for sure, it’s that it is very hard to find large blocks of time to let yourself loose or lose yourself in creative projects. Depending on your teaching schedule, even if you only have 4-5 hours of students a day, that can mean an additional 1-2 hours of outside-the-lesson studio business-related work, leaving only an hour or two of extra time to tackle either projects you’re working on for your students or for other teachers.
I have played around with my own schedule sooo many times, trying to find the perfect blend of work dedicated to my main income stream and work dedicated to my own creativity and other income streams, whether it be for this podcast, the blog, coaching, or teaching resources for my own students and eventually – for you.
There are two big lessons I feel like I’ve learned that are almost contradictory to each other.
Have you ever heard of the maker vs. the manager’s schedule? In a nutshell, it comes down to two ways of thinking about your time. A manager’s schedule is focused on small segments of time—like 15, 30, or 60-minute meeting blocks—whereas a maker’s schedule is where we creatives often need to live.
Creative work requires large chunks of focused heads down time. Sometimes, you need to get in the zone and can’t do that in a 30-minute block between students. Big pockets of time – 2-4 or 8 hours – allow our minds to hone in, get in the zone, and knock out progress.
So, my first lesson was realizing that I needed to create large pockets of time in my week where this kind of work could live.
The second big lesson I learned, though, was that even head-down focused time on creative activities can have its limits. I’ve tried dedicating one entire day to projects, but 80% of the time, I still found myself having had enough for that day by around 3:30-4:00 p.m. anyway.
While having a maker’s schedule seemed ideal in the long term, the best balance was achieved with a mindset open to a blend of both.
Even large pockets of time weren’t enough if I ONLY worked on big projects when I had several hours in a row. To keep moving forward, I had to be willing to take advantage of the smaller windows in the manager’s schedule as well.
The best life balance for completing projects was a combination of both worlds: finding chunks of time and being willing to do even small snippets of work when time lent itself.
I remember hearing a podcast episode several years ago. I can’t remember whose podcast it was, but I remember they were interviewing Katherine Fisher, co-author of the Piano Safari method. The interviewer asked how she managed to get so much work done while homeschooling her children.
Her answer was that she just had to be willing to do the work that needed to be done, even in those small windows of time when she didn’t feel like it. She couldn’t just wait until inspiration struck or she had two full hours to work on a project. That has stuck with me. It’s really hard doing that kind of work in little bits of time, but if we don’t, there will never be enough large chunks to satisfy.
This mindset is applicable not only to work we enjoy but to work that we don’t as well. Do you have projects – whether it be ones in your business or your home that seem so momentous that you can’t even imagine where to get started? Rather than thinking about the end goal – what if you told yourself to only think about the ONE little thing that you could do next toward that task?
Let me share some examples from my own life that this mindset has helped me tackle over the past year.
The first example is transcripts for this podcast. When I first started this podcast, I just had to get it going and wanted to keep things simple. There were no show notes pages, and there were no transcripts. The longer I went on, though, I realized the accommodation of transcripts was greatly desired, so I slowly started adding show notes pages to my website. Even then, I only had transcripts of solo episodes, not conversations. It’s been baby steps, but I am now slowly getting transcripts of past conversations. I have added almost 10 more transcripts in the past few weeks for conversations from last year. Have I written on my task list to turn all the conversation episodes into transcripts? Nope. My only task listed is to turn the next one into a transcript.
The next example is decorating our home for the seasons. I do this changeover three times a year. Early September is for Fall decorations (which are my favorite), the weekend after Thanksgiving is for Christmas decorations, and sometime around Spring Break, I return to everyday decor. It’s really hard to find a half day to tear down and put away all the current decorations and set up the next. I’ve found it feels much less like a “thing” if I spread it out. One evening I might gather everything and set it in a pile in the living room. I put all that away the next night and pull out the next season’s decor. On the third night, I get the new decor set up. Over the course of a week, it’s all done, and it didn’t feel like a momentous task.
The third example is cleaning windows. I could spend one entire Saturday and kill myself exhausted or spread it out over several days or weeks. In the Springtime, I go to one wall in the house at a time. Clean the windows on the inside and get screens put in. After a week, the whole inside is done, and then I move to the outside, again spreading over a few days. Pro-tip – you have to be careful what time of day you’re cleaning windows – especially in the summer. You don’t want to clean the windows when the sun shines directly on them, or they will be more prone to streaking.
hMy fourth example the new database I created for tracking my reading in Notion. For years I’ve just used a simple table. I like to track the year I read the book, the author, who recommended it, whether or not I would re-read it, and the rating. The more I’ve used Notion, I realized how beautiful a database would work for this. The beautiful part of getting it all into a database was I can easily see what books I’ve read from individual authors with one click, what books I would llike to read some day, how many times I’ve re-read a book and so forth. There are so many cool things you can do with a database. It was a big task designing my own custom reading page and database but I did it in baby steps.
One evening I combed through last years list and added the books I read last year into the database. One evening I designed my books dashboard where I can use the database to display a fun chart that shows how many books I read for the year, one evening I created my authors database that connects to the books database and so forth. All in all – this book reading database project likely took me 8-12 hours – becuase I added years worth of books read into it, but I did it over the course of 2 months in small snippets – only focusing on the 1 portion of the task that came next.
My fifth and final example is similar to the windows cleaning one. When it was time to winterize outside the house, I put all the summer stuff away from both the front and back porch one evening, the next morning I cleaned the porches, and the third day I pulled out the Fall decorations for the front porch. Taking small steps toward big projects helps make the thing that feels like such a big thing not feel like so much of a thing.
So I ask you, what are some projects you desire to accomplish but are struggling to find the time to tackle – either because you’re trying to find ONLY those large chunks of time or because you feel too overwhelmed to even know where to start?
Is it organizing your sheet music?
Turning a different room of your house into your studio?
Cleaning out the attic?
Writing a book?
Organizing your digital sheet music?
Clearing out Your email Inbox?
Well, good news friends, you don’t have to do these things alone. There are two ways I’m ready to help right now. First off, my Patreon community meets weekly for power-hours. It’s a great way to ensure you have dedicated work time.
Not only does Patreon help support this podcast, but you get bonuses from me as a thank-you. Most recently, I shared an in-depth video on understanding Google Drive sharing, and our last email-power hour focused on using email rules and filters to help manage your inbox.
A special shout-out to Patreon member Lisa Lawson for supporting the podcast – thanks, Lisa!
The second way I can help is through the upcoming Digital Organization Coaching series. The winter session of this online small group coaching program starts up Friday, January 31 and will run for six weeks from 1:00-2:30pm Eastern Time.
Over the course of 90 mintues every week, I will help you take baby steps to tackling tasks that can feel momentous like cleaning out that inbox, organizing your digital files, media and more. Replays are available if you can’t make it live, but I would encourage you to make the time to be there and be accountable in person.
Visit PianoPantry.com/digital for more details and to register. Get $20 through January 29 using the code DIGITAL20 at checkout.
It’s the dead of winter, and many states are getting arctic cold weather. Make sure you’re taking care of your instrument by keeping the humidity up in your studio. A small thermometer that displays humidity, like the Acurite thermometer, is a simple way to help draw your attention to humidity levels. While 35-40 percent is desirable, sometimes, in the winter, you might be struggling to keep it in the 20s. Keep those humidifiers going, and just like we water our bodies and house plants, we have to water the air! Otherwise, the dry air can cause your acoustic instruments to fall out of tune more quickly. It’s also good practice to keep your acoustic piano away from an outside wall, fireplace, or constant stream of air, such as next to an air vent where conditions can change with more extremes. For more where that came from, visit the Teachers Guide to Staying Healthy Post on PianoPantry.com linked in the show notes.
