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Amy talks with Jill Gilbert, a piano teacher from Washington State, about how she utilizes Notion – a productivity and note-taking app – to manage her piano studio.
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Items Mentioned and Other Related Content
Organize Your Life With Notion (Workshop)
Digital Organization Coaching with Amy
Podcast Episode 105 – Evernote vs. Notion
Podcast Episode 109 – Amy & Joy: Ways We Used Notion This Week
Access Bonus Notion Tour Videos
Transcript
Welcome to episode 134 of The Piano Pantry Podcast. I’m Amy Chaplin, your host—a piano teacher who also loves talking about digital tools and productivity. I am especially excited to bring you a series of three conversations over the next few weeks with teachers on how they are utilizing Notion to manage their music studios.
Today, you’ll hear from Jill Gilbert, a teacher from Washington State. Next week, you’ll hear from Stephanie Thompson, a teacher from Michigan, and finally, from Valerie Merrell, a teacher from Indiana.
Notion is an awesome productivity and note-taking app that my friend Joy Morin and I have become pretty passionate about using over the past few years. We’ve developed methods and systems for managing teacher life using Notion and are now working to help our independent teacher community discover this wonderful tool.
Each of the three teachers you will hear from in the coming weeks participated in our live workshop held this past March – a workshop that we will be running again on September 20-21.
In this live two-day workshop, we share our methods and systems for managing teacher life using Notion. We’ll not just teach you HOW to use Notion; we’ll also teach you how WE use Notion. Registration opens on Monday, August 26.
And now, let’s hear how Jill Gilbert is using Notion.
Well, Jill, thank you so much for being on today and being willing to share with our listeners on a little bit of what notion looks like for you in your studio. Would you please start out by just introducing yourself, though, and let us know what your current studio looks like.
Jill: Yeah, sure. Yeah, thanks for letting me be a part of it, Amy. So yeah, my name’s Jill, and I have a studio in my home. I’ve been teaching for a couple of years. And I am in central Washington. And Notion has helped me get a a system in place so that I can have all my thoughts. Out of my head that don’t need to be taking up the space in my head because I have a really busy life at my house just apart from my studio. So Notion helps just keep things kind of under control.
Amy: And you’ve only been teaching for a couple of years, right?
Jill: I’m about to start my third year, yeah.
Amy: You’re kind of lucky in a way that you’ve been able to utilize Notion, not completely from the start, but in your early days.
Jill: I’ve heard that, yeah, I came in because I lodged an earlier bullet that could have otherwise been a mess to clean up.
Amy: Right, exactly. So when did you discover Notion? Had you been using it prior to the workshop that we did? How long have you been using it?
Jill: I think it’s because I originally heard it when I did the digital organization workshop with you. And that was just an option that we had talked about for ways to organize online stuff and I think it was just one of the options.
Evernote was another option. And at that point, Notion looked Kind of complicated to me. So I just stuck with Evernote cause I knew it and it was working just fine. But then I got into it because of the price increase with Evernote. And I realized after getting to spend some time with Notion, that it was a lot crisper anyway.
And so it just, it just took a little bit of pulling the trigger to give, give it a try before realizing it was a lot better than, a lot better of a system than Evernote.
Amy: Definitely. And I really like that word that you just said, that it’s crisper. Because I agree. There’s just such an almost minimalist feel about it. It’s just clean. It’s crisp is a great way of describing it.
Jill: Definitely.
Amy: In the digital organization workshop that you talked about, in the early days when I did it, one of the sessions I did was called “Daily Capture and Save,” and that’s where we talked about things like Notion and Evernote. I actually don’t do that particular session anymore just because there are so many other things to cover.
Jill: Oh, okay. Yeah, for sure.
Amy: So, that’s why we used to have a session about that, those kinds of things. All right, now let’s dig in just a little bit. I would love to hear how you’re actually using Notion in your music studio.
Jill: Well I use it to kind of just have everything in one place that applies to different things that I pull from online or that I need to deposit online. It used to just be everything I would just kind of save into my, into a folder on my desktop. And I would have all kinds of tiers and stuff of where things were saved. But I could never actually see everything all at once without having to kind of thumb through all the different folders on my desktop.
So I do still have that system on my desktop because I want to have things that are not connected to the internet that I want to have saved kind of long term, but what I do for Notion is for my studio. I have just all the different departments where my brain, where I have things to organize and where I have things to plan and execute.
That’s particularly useful for getting resources online or getting things put online. It just communicates better that way, and has it all in one place so I can see everything, and then I can be more efficient with my planning and my executions.
Amy: I would love to hear a few specifics. Maybe give us a few details.
Jill: My goal is to get lesson planning up there. I haven’t done it yet. It’s still in my summer bucket list. Find a system for summer, for lesson planning on there. Yeah, but yeah, totally. Student documents things that all the registration things that come in from, from my tally forms. I’ll go, I’ll get dumped into Notion.
So then that’s all in one place. All of my, even just the curriculum of each student and what they’ve done and what they’ve performed and where we’re headed and, you know, just my notes of what, what each student is working on or ideas of what I want them to be able to try. Or, you know, short-term slash and long-term goals, both, I guess, for each student.
I keep things on there like communicating with parents, just really quick. Phrases that I need to use or templates for emails I can tweak and also just kind of, you know, drag things in and out from my inbox really easily. I guess the other one is just another place where I start, where I dump just ideas of like things that I need to change in my studio or things that I want to implement in theory time, or when my students are doing lab time, stuff like that.
Amy: So you’re using an online form, so Tally and Tally connects to databases in Notion. So when your students register, do they fill out the form, then it sends it into a database, so you keep all their student details there, correct?
And then you have pages, maybe for each individual student, where you track their details, their repertoire. Ideas for the future, things for that student. Little notes, things like that. Yes. Yeah. And then I love the idea of having a place where you can save ideas for the future. Maybe things you want to remember to do for your studio or that you’re looking forward to, or little notes like that as well.
So, it’s so easy to sometimes have ideas about things but not have a place designated to drop those ideas and those thoughts, and then they kind of get lost, or they’re scattered all over the place.
Jill: Oh, or multiple places where those ideas end up going. So then it’s a lot of chasing my own brain of where, where was I, where was I thinking? And where was I going to make myself run into that idea again later on?
Amy: You were talking about emails with parents as well. I recently just got some emails. I had it in my Evernote account. I’ve been slowly moving things over. But I recently transferred some email templates that I do like as a series to families.
Like, “have you had your piano tuned recently”? Or, you know, here’s one little practice tip, “how you can build habits within your daily life,” and things like that. So kind of the same thing. I think it’s great to have little templates like that, that we, things that we do over and over again, that. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single time.
Jill: So yeah, exactly.
Amy: So what did you do prior to Notion? I know you mentioned Evernote. Were you utilizing other things as well? Or pretty well just Evernote?
Jill: I was kind of using multiple things. So Evernote was where I kept a lot of my student curriculum and student info. But all those other things I was mentioning were in 20 other places. So the email was a big one, and then my notes app on my phone was a big one. And then I’m also just still very much a pen-and-paper kind of girl. So I also just have truly like Scrap paper everywhere. Tons of, you know, notes to self. So that was a lot of what I did before getting, getting things kind of all streamlined onto Notion.
Amy: I know things like the Notes app were great in the early days of having devices, but unfortunately, the problem is, is with some of the basic Notes apps. Apps like Google Keep, and the Apple Notes are it’s hard to really organize in any way. I mean, you just have all these notes kind of just in there and sometimes you get multiple ones.
If you dump one idea on one note, you know, it’s just it’s not really a good way to organize those notes. So they were good in the early days, but now we have a lot of systems that have more capabilities to keep those kinds of things organized.
Jill: You’re gonna have to do a digital coaching session, on how to clean up your Notes app just in and of itself. One by itself. It’s become a huge boulder, just like email.
Amy: Yes! So you did mention earlier, you know, one of the things, reasons you transferred was because Evernote was getting pricey. So, just so that people are aware, Notion is free. Right now, I think it only goes to a paid tier when you need to share with, like, more than eight people even, so it’s very generous for what most of us are ever going to need.
Or, as I think now, Evernote is around the $10/a-month range or something like that in order to be able to use it on more than just one device. I’m in the same place. I finally stopped paying for Evernote this year. I kept it for quite a few years while I was still using Notion just to try to make the transfer.
And I’m like, okay, I’m just, right now I’m just transferring stuff out of it. I’m not saving anything there anymore. So it was time to pull the plug. Sure. For sure. All right, so what has been the most surprising for you about using Notion?
Jill: It surprised me that I could make it work honestly, because some of the ideas I loved at first, but I didn’t think that I could actually make it streamlined. For example, doing those databases when I took the workshop with you and Joy, the databases was just like, I loved that idea, but I did not understand or didn’t, I didn’t consider that it would actually line up and then be beneficial to, you know, to offload my time, things off my plate.
But all it took was Just a little bit of heads down, head-down time, and that’s kind of it. I’m just a little bit of front-up front work. And then it’s in, then it’s, then it’s a, you know, a well oiled machine now. So that surprised me because I thought it was going to be more high maintenance, but it was really only just a couple of tough, tough hours of, you know, getting things to work the way I wanted them to work and figuring out what those things just took a little time, but then after that, it’s just been really smooth.
Amy: And it’s worth it then. And I know, I like hearing you say that because I know I’ve heard other teachers mention that sometimes it’s scary trying a new program.
You think, you know, oh, is it going to be too complicated? Do I have to learn another thing? And, you know, the truth is, like you said, yeah, I mean, there are some learning curves. But, if you’re willing to put the time in, then you really reap the benefits in the end, upfront, by just learning and, you know, really trying to hone in those skills, so.
Jill: I was just going to say, I think that it’s also they transfer, those skills transfer to other programs out there right now, and so that’s really helpful too. I don’t remember where I was just recently working on something, but it seemed like the blocks of that program functioned exactly the same as Notion. I wish I could remember what it was. It wasn’t tally.
Amy: That’s a great point, definitely. And I think even things like shortcuts and stuff that you learn to use shortcuts, a lot of times that transfers to different programs as well within Notion and outside of and so forth. Has there been anything that you found challenging about using Notion?
Jill: There was I guess just that, that initial idea of like figuring out how to make databases work because I wanted to make everything Be exactly like Excel spreadsheets, and they’re similar, but you can’t manipulate things exactly the same way. And so that just was a little bit of a frustrating thing to get used to.
And I still don’t know that I have everything quite dialed in about how to, you know, manipulate. You know, different, different cells and stuff like that. But yeah, I guess that was, that would probably be the only thing. Everything else hasn’t been frustrating at all. It’s really easy to make things from scratch and it’s really easy to just make it as complicated or as simple as you want.
Amy: Well, Jill, this has been so fun chatting with you. We’re going to continue our chat and do some screenshots and, well, not screenshots, but screen sharing and get a little tour. If you are interested in seeing that, you will be able to find that bonus content in my Patreon, and it will also be a part of our future Notion Workshops, but thank you so much for being with us today, Jill.
Jill: Yeah, my pleasure, Amy. Thanks for helping me out with everything.
Yes, you heard it right. Each episode of this Notion series will include a video tour where Jill, Stephanie, and Valerie will give you a look into their Notion account so you can see firsthand how it looks and feels.
You can access this bonus content by joining my Patreon Community. For just $7 a month, you’ll also get access to quarterly presentations, regular tiny tips from me, weekly power hours, and email processing support. Join at the Insider level today at PianoPantry.com/patreon that’s PianoPantry.com/patreon.
It’s a pretty sweet bonus, if you ask me, especially since your monthly support also helps cheer on the continued creation of this podcast.
These video tours will also be included in the resource hub Joy and I created for our Notion workshop attendees.
Register for this Organize Your Life with Notion workshop by September 6 to receive $30 off. Visit PianoPantry.com/notion for more details. Registration opens on Monday, August 26.
