137 – Survival Tips for the Busy Musician with Kyunghoon Kim and Elizabeth Yao

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Staying active, busy, and productive as a professional musician is not easy. Pianists Elizabeth Yao and Kyunghoon Kim share some of the practical tips and mindset shifts that have helped them with time management, mental health, and making space for personal priorities.

Pianist Kyunghoon Kim, D.M., NCTM, is Adjunct Lecturer in Music (Piano) at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He is also a Signature Artist on Musicnotes.com, composing under the name Piano Sandbox.

Elizabeth Yao, D.M., NCTM, is Lecturer in Music (Piano) at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where she coordinates the secondary piano program, teaches piano pedagogy, and directs the Young Pianists Program.

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Items Mentioned

Outline

  1. MINDSET SHIFT #1 – It always takes more time than you think.
    1. STRATEGY – Budget your time
      1. “Buffer” time
      2. Conduct a time “audit” – jar of rocks metaphor.
      3. Time-blocking on your calendar
      4. Catch-up day
  2. MINDSET SHIFT #2 – You cannot do everything and that’s OK
    1. Say no and practice saying no – it’s a muscle that requires practice flexing
      1. Understand you cannot do everything.
      2. 3 PPP’s (heard from Artina McCain)
        1. Pay
        2. Prestige
        3. People
  3. MINDSET SHIFT #3 – You are only human
    1. STRATEGY – Manage your emotions – it’s not always about time management but about bad mood management
      1. Acknowledge the normalcy of burnout or depression – Seek support

Transcript

One of the things I love most about attending live teaching events is the opportunity to network. Last year, I was lucky to attend two excellent sessions on productivity. Both were given by the same presenter—Elizabeth Yao—a fellow Indiana Colleague—who is a lecturer in music for piano at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Elizabeth also coordinates the secondary piano program, teaches piano pedagogy, and directs the young pianists program.

Her talk at our Indiana state conference piqued my interest, of course! A follower of this podcast, she was not surprised to find me thrilled with her session.

Six months later, I attended a she presented at the MTNA Conference alongside Kyunghoon Kim who is also an adjunct lecturer in music for piano at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Kyunghoon is also a signature artist on musicnotes.com, composing under the name Piano Sandbox.

After these two excellent sessions, I was quick to ask if they would share their presentation from the MTNA conference on the podcast.

As we’re getting into the swing of the school year, this seemed like the perfect time to glean insight on time management, mental health, and making space for personal priorities.

Before we hear from our guest hosts today, I just wanted to let you know that this podcast is ad free thanks to the support of friends on Patreon. For $7 a month you’ll not only be supporting the expenses related to the production of this podcast but you’ll get some extra like weekly power hours, email processing support and more. One of the newest releases is a session called Taming the Jungle: Digital Management Strategies for the Independent Music Teacher.

You don’t even have to stick around, take in what you need and cancel at any time.

By the way, I’m Amy Chaplin, host of this podcast, but today, I’m happy to turn it over to Elizabeth and Kyunghoon.

[00:02:10] Kyunghoon: Hello, my name is Kyunghoon Kim.

[00:02:12] Elizabeth: And my name is Elizabeth Yao.

[00:02:14] Kyunghoon: We are a pianist duo.

[00:02:15] Elizabeth: We’re husband and wife.

[00:02:17] Kyunghoon: And we are very excited to share some of our thoughts in the Piano Pantry podcast.

[00:02:24] Elizabeth: I’ve been a fan of the podcast for quite some time now, so we’re really excited that Amy invited us to share with her audience.

[00:02:31] Kyunghoon: So the topic that we want to share today is Survival Tips for the Busy Professionals. And this is actually the presentation that we gave at the MTNA National Conference this year in 2024. And then we were invited to share part of the presentation.

[00:02:50] Elizabeth: Yes. We were really surprised by how many people came to that presentation, but I think it’s just a testament to how many of us musicians are busy or feeling overworked or stressed. Which is definitely a familiar feeling to both of us. So I really hope that these strategies that we’ve come up with will help you in some way.

[00:03:13] Kyunghoon: So we boiled down our strategies, the survival tips, to three items.

[00:03:20] Elizabeth: But most importantly, we wanted to link these strategies to mindset shifts. I think, I always felt that if I just found that one magical productivity hack, or if I just created that one perfect system that I would be able to get everything done that I wanted to get done, or maybe I just had to wake up earlier, or maybe I just had to be just a little bit more disciplined.

But what has been really helpful for us and what we’ve been trying to practice is to just really change our mindsets about certain things so that we can develop. An approach to productivity that is more sustainable and more realistic and more compassionate to ourselves.

[00:04:01] Kyunghoon: And our first mindset shift is it always takes more time than you think.

[00:04:09] Elizabeth: And the strategy that we associate with it is to budget your time.

[00:04:13] Kyunghoon: So imagine that you are teaching four students one one-hour lesson per each, and you schedule from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. back to back, and can you finish that lesson for that last lesson at 5 p.m. on time? Probably not. It’ll be more or less like 5:30 or after 5:0 when you are really done with four teachings.

And why does this happen? Because we are not really considering The buffer time and this buffer either jargon comes from those, internet computer Vocabulary where you load a video YouTube videos and sometimes it takes some time to load the video because the video is buffering So in order to budget our time, we have to be very realistic about our time for example, if you are teaching one hour lesson, we usually need a little bit of the introduction time at the beginning and also wrap up time at the end.

We might need, let’s say, five minutes buffer time before and after the lessons. Realistically, if you want to really follow our, schedule, we have to probably schedule our teachings, 1 p. m. to 2 p. m., and the next one will start at, let’s say, 2:05 or 2:10 and then, in that way. Then, of course, our last lesson will end around 5. 30, which is our realistic time plan.

[00:05:37] Elizabeth: Or, set a timer and start wrapping up at 1. 55 p. m., so that you can make that transition time.

[00:05:44] Kyunghoon: Either we consider those buffer time and add those buffer time in our calendar, Or when we schedule those one hour chunk, we have the buffer time inside so that five minutes before 2 p. m You will start wrap up wrapping up

[00:05:58] Elizabeth: One way to figure out whether or how much buffer time you need is to do something called a time audit which is if you think of a financial audit you’re thinking about Where the money is going, how it’s actually being spent, how you’re saving it, how it’s being used.

A time audit is the same thing where you maybe take a day and you just keep track of, maybe in your phone, in the notes app, keep track of how exactly you’re using your time. And when I did this, what I would do is just, every so often when I had a little break, I would think back on how I had used the past few hours and then just record that time..

And then looking back on it was really enlightening because I realized that These little interruptions add up to quite a lot more time than I thought or, I also realized, oh, my morning is as busy as I think it is. And then unfortunately, I realized that my social media breaks in the afternoon got a lot longer than I thought they did.

And another thing to consider is the jar of rocks metaphor when thinking about your priorities. The jar of rocks visual is, imagine you have a jar that you want to fill with sand and gravel and rocks. So if you pour in all the sand and then pour in all the gravel and then pour in the rocks, you’re probably not going to fit very many rocks in there.

Instead, you should start with the rocks. So the rocks in this metaphor are those big, important, meaningful things that you absolutely need in your life in order to feel satisfied and balanced. So maybe these rocks would be sleep, family time, and working on your book. If you put your rocks in first, and then pour in your gravel, and then pour in the sand, there is still going to be some sand or maybe gravel overflowing, and that’s okay.

We have to accept that there is never going to be enough time for everything in our lives. But the most important thing is that you’ve already put those rocks, those non negotiables, in there. And so how I like to apply that is to do what’s called time blocking or calendar blocking. This is a system where you literally put everything on your calendar.

If you see examples of time blocked calendars, it’ll probably include things like morning routine, breakfast meal prep, all, everything that is part of your life so that you know realistically how much time you have in a day to do other things or how much time you need to do seemingly mundane things like, traveling or like meal prep.

For example, I might put, practice in the morning, emails right after that, lunch, Lessons cleaning up my studio after, all of these are things that I might put into a time blocked calendar so that I have a really just realistic idea of what I’m doing with my day. And then if something if something needs to happen, so for example, someone needs to meet with me, I can look at what’s going on in my day and decide where I can slot that without moving a rock, like practicing or working on your presentation or whatever it is.

[00:09:09] Kyunghoon: And another thing that we really like to do was having a catch up day. So this is where I block out a day. For us, we chose Saturday. So we block out Saturday, and we make it empty. As much as possible and we don’t schedule any other items where that involves other. That means we don’t have to meet somebody or have to be somewhere. So we don’t have any fixed schedule on that day.

During this day this catch up day we catch up with the things that we couldn’t do it that much throughout the week. For example, if you are behind in practicing, then you can practice a little bit more in that free day. If you are behind in resting, you then you can catch up with your rest. For us especially recently we started going on a morning hiking and having a brunch afterwards and then that gave us a tremendous amount of joy and the sense of freedom. That’s really something that you don’t usually do in a usual weekdays so you can really refresh ourselves by having that. More importantly I think in doing it together it helps us a lot because when one of us has a work in that day and the other one is free, it’s hard for that other one to just enjoy their life when your partner is working hard. It’s hard to create that atmosphere or it’s hard to get into that mood. That’s why we decided to make it make our free day together, at the same time so that we can spend our family time and we can protect that time in a week

[00:10:48] Elizabeth: Right. So our second mindset shift is you cannot do everything, and that’s okay. The strategy related to that is to say no and to practice saying no.

[00:11:02] Kyunghoon: I think the most important thing here is to understand that we cannot do everything; that understanding is the key point. Even though everyone knows it, it’s hard to really understand and embrace it.

And this can be a psychological antidote for fear of missing out, FOMO. Because if you say no to certain things, then you feel like you’re missing out some chances. This is true; you’re missing out on some chances, but you’re missing this so that you can take the other chances. Because, again, we cannot split our body into four different things and then take everything. So we have to understand and accept that we cannot do everything and then be able to say no and let that go.

[00:11:49] Elizabeth: So when you’re making decisions about how you want to spend your time or what commitments to say yes to, I really like this, these three P’s that I heard from pianist Artina McCain when she came to give a talk to some students here at Indiana University.

She and her husband are also a musician duo. And she said that she uses these three P’s to make decisions. It’s pay, prestige, or people. For example, if an opportunity is not that prestigious, doesn’t pay well, but would put you in touch with people that you are really interested in developing a further connection with or adding to your network. Maybe that’s something that you want to really pursue.

Or maybe it doesn’t really put you in touch with people that you’re interested in collaborating with, or the prestige is not that great, but it just pays really well. And in that case, that would also be a factor to consider about whether or not to add this to your schedule to say yes to this. And then, say no to something else.

[00:12:51] Kyunghoon: So it’s all again, all about. Your priorities and then what you value more like if you value the pay more than you say yes to those opportunities that pay you well, and if you want more connection and Expand your network, then you will say yes to the opportunities that provide more connections.

[00:13:09] Elizabeth: and then also, I think it’s important to not feel bad when saying no or to prepare yourself for the reactions of other people when you do say no.

I think naturally, when we say no to things, people will get disappointed or they’ll get frustrated. But we just have to prepare ourselves for that, because that’s their responsibility to manage those reactions that come up in them. And it’s also our responsibility to be realistic with ourselves and understand that, yes, this person might be disappointed. Still, if I say yes to this, I’m going to start to feel resentment and frustration.

And I’m going to ask myself, why did I sign up for this? And in the long run, that will not be healthy for anyone in the situation. So I think we have to understand how people are going to react. And I heard that saying no is like a muscle, like you have to; it’s not easy to flex it at first, but you have to just keep doing it and practice doing it.

[00:14:13] Kyunghoon: I tend to say yes to the opportunities that provide new experiences to me. For example, let’s say I’m invited to judge a local piano competition then I want to try it because I have never done it before. And, like in restaurants, you never know if you would like this menu or not until you really try and eat it. So sometimes you have to do it, but after you do it, then you will know whether you would like to take this kind of project or opportunities in the future or not.

[00:14:42] Elizabeth: And our third mindset shift is to just understand that we are only human.

[00:14:49] Kyunghoon: And our strategy that is associated with that mindset shift is to manage your emotions.

[00:14:56] Elizabeth: So it helped me to understand the nature of procrastination. A lot of researchers have done studies on procrastinating and why we do it, even though we logically know that it’s hurting us in the long run, right? A lot of these studies have shown that it’s not so much about bad time management a lot of the time.

It’s more about bad mood management or bad emotional regulation. This is why sometimes, when we procrastinate, we might go and think that we need to deep clean our room before we’re ready to start working, or suddenly, we think of other tasks that seem urgent but are not that urgent. And that’s because there might be some underlying emotions, negative ones, attached to the task at hand.

Let’s say you’re procrastinating working on your presentation proposal. There might be some emotions there of, “I don’t think I have anything interesting to say,” or “I don’t think my ideas are going to be new or unique to anyone,” or “What are the other teachers going to think of me at this conference,” or “what if I do a bad job with this presentation,” or “what if my proposal gets rejected and this was all a waste of time.” There could be many emotions that are obstacles to you completing this task.

[00:16:18] Kyunghoon: And another way to manage our emotions is to acknowledge the normalcy of burnout or depression. Whenever we think about these words, burnout and depression, we usually think about a, like a big burnout after six months of intense work, and now you are burned out or you’re in a depression for one or two, several years.

But I think they are smaller scale. Burnout and depression in our daily life in our weekly lives, for example, Think about times when you practice so hard and very passionately on one day. For me, the day after, I really don’t want to practice because I put my everything in the day before, and now I’m burned out.

We have to acknowledge that’s also a part of burnout, even though it’s on a very small scale. It is still a part of the emotions that we are going through. And then we have to acknowledge it. What I meant by that is we probably don’t want to push ourselves too harshly when we are feeling this like we cannot say to ourselves.

Hey, you just practice hard for one day. You know, just toughen up and just go – I mean you probably have to practice hard more than one days, but that’s I think very important in terms of managing our emotions. Otherwise, we’ll hold our emotions inside and then okay I shouldn’t be I shouldn’t say that I have a burnout right now. So I have to just keep going and then later eventually it’ll hurt you,

[00:17:48] Elizabeth: Right, it snowballs into something bigger

[00:17:50] Kyunghoon: Yeah, so before it gets bigger, you have to acknowledge this kind of a small burnout or depression and then trying to express these emotions or trying to manage it,

[00:18:00] Elizabeth: Right, and one really important way to manage it is to seek support and to really address those emotions head-on. I remember when I was feeling really busy, overwhelmed, and stressed. Seeking professional help was the thing was something that I felt like I just did not have any time for, but there was a point where I was I just realized I need to; I think it would really help me to talk to someone about all of these feelings that I’m dealing with in relation to my work.

I noticed that MTNA had a partnership with BetterHelp. I’m not sponsored by them or pushing them, just saying that how I got these sessions. Some free sessions were offered through this trial membership. I signed up, and I was able to talk, for just a few sessions, with a therapist who really helped me think through some of my anxieties when it came to work.

And I wanted to share one strategy she shared with me, which I found very helpful. She told me whenever I’m feeling anxious about a situation at work, to ask myself, what’s the worst case scenario and what’s the best case scenario? So for example, worst case scenario. student gets really offended at something I say, they talk to the dean and eventually that leads to me getting fired and losing my job and not having any source of income.

Best case scenario, someone is so impressed with how I dealt with the situation with the student and they tell the dean and somehow I get recognized and awarded in front of the whole school. That’s definitely not going to happen, right? Neither scenario is likely to happen. So by recognizing that and just accepting that. We’re likely going to have middle-of-the-road results that actually helped me to release some of my mental burden when it came to work things.

[00:19:52] Kyunghoon: And it’s also very helpful to actually share our emotions or how we feel about these things with your partners, if you have, or your friends. If you have some friends that you trust because just by speaking out, just telling how you feel can already release your emotions, and then you can Regain our, you know, those default statuses without negative emotions.

[00:20:14] Elizabeth: Yeah, we have to support each other, and we’re in this together, yeah.

[00:20:19] Kyunghoon: So, to recap our mindset shift and strategies, our first mindset shift was

[00:20:25] Elizabeth: “It always takes more time than you think.”

[00:20:28] Kyunghoon: …and the strategy for that is – you budget your time. And our second mindset shift is…

[00:20:37] Elizabeth: …”you cannot do everything, and that’s OK.”

[00:20:40] Kyunghoon: Say no or practice saying no.

[00:20:44] Elizabeth: And the third mindset shift is that “we are only human.”

[00:20:46] Kyunghoon: So we embrace those imperfections of our body and mind and manage our emotions.

[00:20:55] Elizabeth: We hope that some of these strategies can help you in your life and work. And we want to thank Amy again for inviting us to share.

[00:21:03] Kyunghoon: Yeah. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much to Elizabeth and Kyunghoon for taking the time to share with us today.

One thing I took away from their advice and have been doing for the last several months is time blocking on my calendar. While I had a rough idea of how long I was spending on things – like this podcast work – it was very revealing to actually show it on the calendar.

I start by scheduling blocks of time and then I adjust it to what actually occurred. So, for example, if I block 75 minutes on my calendar to write and publish a Friday Finds blog post but it actually took me 90 minutes, I adjust so when I go back and look at my week I can see the time that actually occurred and adjust in the future.

I’ve found it quite interesting that for a lot of items and projects, 75 minutes is a good average. Using the weekly view rather than the monthly view setting on my Google Calendar has made time blocking a lot easier to schedule and manage.

I also love their advice on the 3 P’s: Pay, Prestige, and People. The more I have professional opportunities coming at me, the more this question becomes a necessity for helping weed through that to pursue or accept and what to let go of.

A reminder that the show notes for this episode are available at PianoPantry.com/podcast/episode137

Registration is still open for the workshop Organize Your Life With Notion which will be held Friday and Saturday September 20-21 from 10am – 1pm Eastern Time. The $30 off early bird discount has passed but we’ve created a $20 extended discount coupon which will be good to use to register leading up to the start of the workshop. Hope to see you there!