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Guest host Joy Morin talks with Stephanie Thompson, a piano teacher from Michigan, 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
Amy: Welcome to episode 135 of The Piano Pantry Podcast. I’m Amy Chaplin, your host—a piano teacher who also loves talking about digital tools and productivity. We are in the middle of a 3-part conversation series here on the podcast with teachers on how they are utilizing Notion to manage their music studios.
Last week, we heard from Jill Gilbert, a teacher from Washington State. Today, you’ll hear from Stephanie Thompson, a teacher from Michigan, and next week, you’ll hear 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 is open. Visit PianoPantry.com/notion for more details.
A special thanks to Joy for hosting today’s conversation with Stephanie.
Joy: Hello Stephanie, thanks for being with me. It’s great to have you. Would you take a moment and just introduce yourself to us and tell us a little bit about your studio teaching?
Stephanie: Yeah, so my name is Stephanie Thompson. I’ve been teaching for 20 years this summer. And I’ve had a studio of about 35 students for the past 10 years. So this is my first year. Full time gig. I teach mostly in person, but I do have a few online students and I have, I follow the traditional lesson format where it’s one on one private lessons anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes.
Joy: Awesome. That’s great. I’m excited to hear a little bit about how you’ve been using Notion. So we’ll get to that. First, I want to ask, so when did you discover Notion, and how long have you been using it now?
Stephanie: It was through you and Amy about less than a year ago, I would say. So I haven’t been using it for that long. Before that, I was an Evernote user since 2012. Oh. So it’s been. I finally got everything transferred in preparation for this. That was my impetus to get everything transferred over all of my notes and my Evernote is at zero right now. So that feels great.
Joy: Awesome. That’s great. Okay, cool. So, let’s dive into it. Would you tell us a bit about how you’re using Notion specifically for your piano studio?
Stephanie: Yes. So, my favorite thing right now is email templates. So, I do the same four recitals in my studio each year. We have a cider and doughnuts meet and greet recital in the fall. It’s the informal recital where we play outside and eat cider and doughnuts. I have my holiday recital in December. We have our awards recital in May, then a summer pop recital in August, and I keep that same format year to year.
It’s been pretty regular for about five years now, and I plan on keeping it that with the same regularity. I like it. My students like knowing what to prepare for the upcoming year. And we’ll do one-off things here and there, but that’s the main core. We do the same events throughout the year as well, like festival MTA student achievement testing and guild auditions, and they tend to happen at the same times of the year, too.
So, I have my email templates for each month. So I can see, okay, I need to send out the fall registration and the last invoice of the year info in June. I need to send out my high school diploma photo request for Guild Notes magazine for any students who earned their diplomas, and I need to send out the June studio class information.
I can see in November, I need to send out my festival and SAT registration info. And what I have is I have pages with it. The emails that I sent in previous years, so basically, all I need to do is go through and change dates, and if there are any small differences, I change those. It’s nice because I don’t have to think that much.
Sending emails would always take me a lot of time, and I would be nervous sending them. I had to make sure everything was just right and worded correctly. Do I give them too much information? Not enough information? And my emails have been very well crafted over the years, so it’s nice to reuse them over and over again.
And then at the top, I have my new lesson inquiry response. If I have a waitlist, I will have my new lesson inquiry response when I have an opening. I have a no-lessons reminder. I have an invoice reminder. So that’s my favorite part about using Notion. It’s all right there, and I can just copy and paste it.
A lot of what I use Notion for is very simple. It’s just text notes. I don’t use it as powerfully as you and Amy do, but I just need a place to keep track of all of my information in one place and have it be instantly accessible. Whether it’s on my phone or my laptop so I can pull up my studio class groups right away, Those are all in there I have my recital planning checklist, where I have my four recitals listed out, and I have my holiday recital packing list, so I know to bring the Christmas tree, the Christmas lights, the fake presents, everything that I need to get for that.
I have all of my recital welcome speeches from years past, so when it comes time for recital time, I don’t need to hem and haw over what am I going to say, I’ll look at what I said last year. I always have new things that I add to and change, but if I didn’t know what to say, I wouldn’t stress because I have years of recital speeches that I could just change a little bit. So that was helpful, too.
I’ve got my Piano Studio waitlist. I used your template for it, which was nice. I simplified it a little bit. I like things to be really simple, so I could use them very quickly. But I used your template, which was really handy. I’ve got my Annie’s music order, which is a local music store.
And anytime I have something that I need, I just add it in there. Then I copy and paste it into an email to her at the end of the week, and she gets that. I’ve got some fall scheduling notes. So that’s what I use it for in my piano studio in a nutshell.
Joy: Wow, that’s amazing. I’m so excited to hear about how you’re using Notion. You hit on so many different great ways to use it. I think Notion is just a great landing place to just put anything text wise that you might use again as a reference, or like you were saying, things like emails that you might send the next year recital speeches, like you said it’s just great not having this. Documents in your computer or old emails deep in your inbox, but having a go-to place where it’s neat and organized and you can reference things.
Stephanie: I have under my professional block here, and I guess this is piano studio-related. I have my teaching repertoire. Again, everything is all text. It’s all text, which is just perfect because if I am looking at one of the Facebook groups like Piano Teacher Central, and they’re doing this, Oh, what are all the great Halloween pieces that you know, or I need some flashy, late intermediate piece, I can just say, Oh, I’m going to type that in Facebook When I need that, I can just pull that out for later.
And then I have my reference notes section, which is just a bunch of pages within that page. And if I go to a conference, I have my NCKP notes. I have any conference notes. I actually just used it today with my last lesson. I was going through with my student the four stages of learning a piece of music, and I wanted to say exactly how it had been presented at the conference, so I just held up that note. It took me about five seconds, and I don’t even have the best organization. It’s just the pages chronologically, but they’re all in that one place. I was able to pull that up for the student as we talked about that concept.
Joy: That’s awesome. It’s a great example that you could just pull it up today. The search feature in Notion is really good, too. So that can be even if you’re still organizing or figuring out how to organize your sub-pages within your pages. That’s why I use the search feature all the time, too.
Stephanie: Oh, I use search for so many other things, so I will have to use that in Notion for sure.
Joy: Awesome. That’s great. Would you like to share maybe just one last like favorite thing about in general how you’re using Notion or maybe one specific favorite thing?
Stephanie: My favorite thing is the email templates. I led with that. That’s my favorite because I don’t like to spend time thinking about emails. I just like to send them. I don’t want my time inbox to be full. And I’m gonna use it for a lot of personal stuff, too. Like my exercise plan, I have a PDF with links to the YouTube videos I’m supposed to do for the week, and I just click on those, and I think my favorite part is just how accessible it is, though.
You can pull it up on your phone, and it’s there. jot down a quick note. It doesn’t take a lot of time. Other apps that I had used in the past would take a while to load, or they would say, they would always pop up with the window. Do you want to upgrade? No, I want to make my note before I forget it.
Joy: It’s been awesome hearing, just in a nutshell, how you’re using Notion for your studio. Stephanie, thank you so much. I’m thrilled to hear all the examples you shared with us. It’s very inspiring. So thank you.
Stephanie: Of course.
Amy: Guess what, friends?! Each episode of this Notion series includes 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.
