Welcome to Episode 176. I’m Amy Chaplin, a piano teacher with a proclivity for organization, here to share practical and sustainable rhythms for your teacher life.
The Piano Pantry blog now includes not only inspiration for teaching, but as of October 2025, I’m also sharing recipes I hope will spark your joy for cooking and support your teaching life. Just this past week, I shared my very first slow-cooker recipe. It has only three ingredients and is my go-to for those days when I don’t have time to cook. Visit pianopantry.com/blog to catch the latest.
This blog and podcast are very happily ad-free thanks to the support of listeners. I’m a big recipe browser online, and I have to say, I’m getting increasingly frustrated by the amount of advertising that weighs down my scroll on some sites.
On a mobile phone, it often makes the reading and scrolling experience so disjointed. I hate it. I refuse to weigh down my site and this podcast with ads like that, so I’m turning to you to help keep it that way.
A special thanks to longtime supporters and good friends Becky Barber, Laurie Bender, and Florence Philips, who have been supporters from day one.
I would love to say thanks to you too. Visit pianopantry.com/patreon to join today for as little as $4 a month.
Today’s episode is especially about life rhythms — my current life rhythms, that is. I am a total sucker for hearing about the routines of others. I mean, don’t you ever look at your colleagues and wonder what they do all day?
We all know some of the basics of running a studio, but our days still look very different. Hearing how other people plan, prioritize, and execute their days always seems to inspire me, even if it doesn’t lead to any specific changes in my own.
So today, I’m here to share mine — along with a little beef I have with our community, and a question I hope we can start to reframe, or maybe stop asking each other altogether.
If you’ve been around here long enough, you know I’m more a creature of change than a creature of habit — at least in the big picture. Some of my daily rhythms last, but I’m grateful to be in a profession where my schedule shifts a couple of times a year. It feels like a breath of fresh air.
I’m in my 15th year of full-time piano teaching, my 11th year of blogging, my 10th year in a part-time church position, and my 5th year of this podcast.
About six years ago, I slowly began cutting back from what I would consider a full-time studio of 25 to 35 students to what I now consider a part-time studio of 15 to 20.
That’s fluctuated over time, but I’ve continued to scale back as I’ve realized how hard it is to run a full-time studio while also doing the work I love on this side — the blog, the podcast, digital coaching, and resource creation.
When you only have one to three hours a day outside of teaching, big projects move very slowly. One project can easily take two or three months. You can only do so much with small pockets of time.
This is the first year I feel like I finally have those larger pockets of time. I’m down to 13 students — and here is where I’ll insert my little beef with the teaching community.
Why do we always feel the need to ask other teachers how many students they have?
Or to offer up our number of students like it’s a badge of honor, or like that number means something important?
It means nothing. And it tells us nothing.
An incredible teacher could have five students, and a not-so-great teacher could just as easily have forty. Along the same means, one teacher could have 50 students that are 30 minutes but another could have 25 that are all 50-60 minutes. It’s all relative to context.
I find it so hard to get away from this unspoken feeling that when I tell people I have 13 students, I have to say “only” 13 students, or I have to explain:
“Well, it’s only 13, but two-thirds of them are 50- or 60-minute lessons, and the rest are 40 minutes, not 30 — so my teaching hours are the same as if I had 20 to 25 regular 30-minute students.”
Why do I feel the need to explain myself?
When we talk to other service-based professionals, do we ask them how many clients they have? No. We ask what they do. Sometimes we ask if they work full-time or part-time. That’s it.
Why do we have this weird thing with numbers?
I’m sure you’ll still catch me asking this question or offering these numbers, because it’s so ingrained in us. But can we at least make an effort to ask better questions, like:
Do you run your own studio or a multi-teacher studio?
Are you happy with the hours you work, or would you like to expand?
Did you start your career teaching piano or in another field?
There’s just other things we can ask to get to know other teachers rather than “how many students do you have?”
Let’s make an effort to stop playing the numbers game, and to stop viewing each other in a weird hierarchical way.
Okay?
Okay.
Now that I’ve reminded myself why I don’t need to defend how many hours I teach, here’s a sneak peek at what my weeks look like.
Of course, every week isn’t exactly the same, but I’ll give you the closest example of what this looks like in the 2025–2026 school year.
This year, I’ve leaned into working about 30 to 36 hours Monday through Wednesday, taking Thursdays off as much as possible, and sometimes working a few hours here and there on Fridays or Saturdays depending on what I’m doing and what life looks like that week. And this is working really well for me right now.
Mondays are the day I cut back on students the most. I intentionally didn’t schedule any students until late afternoon so I could have up to six hours to produce this podcast every other week.
Sometimes I can do it in three or four hours. Four to five is more typical.
Most days I get up and one of the first things I do is put a load of laundry in if there’s any. Then, I usually write from 8 to 10 a.m., then work out from 10 to 11, get ready for the day, prep lunch, and then grab 30-45 minutes work. I break for lunch sometime between 12:15 and 1:30 for 45-minutes to an hour so somewhere in that time frame. (And I say “we” because my husband works from home).
I need a little longer lunch for several reasons: my husband is home, and I do all the cooking, plus, after lunch I will put away the load of laundry I started and prep supper – setting out anything I can so it’s ready to go. Plus, this hour is a nice brain break from work, especially on days I work 10-12 hours.
Then I finish publishing the podcast or doing other work from 1:30-3:30 or 4:00, allowing for 30 minutes of studio prep and 15 to 20 minutes to play piano before my first student arrives at 4:50.
I teach three students from 4:50 to 7:10, then make dinner.
Sometimes, if I’m in the middle of a big project, I’ll work another hour or two in the evening. My husband often works late from home as well, so it’s not unusual for us to work from 8:30 to 10:30 a couple of nights a week and then wind down.
He’s a night owl, and while I’m naturally more of a morning person, I’ve shifted later so we can keep similar schedules. Bedtime is usually around 12:30 or 1:00.
Tuesdays follow a similar rhythm. I usually start a load of laundry then get to work right away from 8 to 10. I write emails to my subscribers on Tuesdays which can take anywhere from 1-4 hours depending on what week it is and what’s going on. Other than that the work hours prior to my 3:30 student are dedicated to whatever my current project focus is.
Lately, I’ve been prepping another round of Jam Band, which I ran in January with my older students. It’s taken a couple of hours each week on Tuesdays because I’m not just prepping it for my students, but also developing it into a future resource. Which, assuming it happens, won’t be available until next school year.
Another major project right now is the Notion workshop coming up February 27, March 6, and March 13, with a Pro follow-up session on April 10. So these are all Fridays from 12:30-2:30.
Joy Morin of ColorinMyPiano.com and I run that together. I would say we each put in 4-5 hours of prep time to get each workshop setup, not including blog posts or emails.
You can visit pianopantry.com/notion to join the waitlist — registration will open soon. We’re also going to be running a free webinar if you would like to get a little closer look before signing up so stay tuned.
So, again, Tuesday mornings two hours work, then getting ready for the day, lunch, laundry, dinner prep, a little more work in the afternoon, take a mental break and personal practice starting no later than 3:00 then students from 3:30-6:45. This month I also then ran a Jam Band from 6:45-7:30pm on Tuesdays.
After that, dinner and again another 1 or 2 more hours or work on Tuesday night.
Wednesdays are slower in the morning because I have my Patreon call at 11. I usually do laundry and home care from 8-9, exercise from 9 to 10, then start work around 10:30.
My Patreon call is from 11 to 12 then we do the lunch, laundry, dinner prep yada-yada, LOL. 1:00-3:00 is when I often have appointments and I’ll do my studio prep and practice. Then students from 3:00-5:20, a short 20 minute break, and then students from 5:40 to 7:40. So I do 3 students, 20 minute break, 3 students.
Yes, we eat dinner most nights between 7:45-8:30.
Sometimes I lay down for 15-20 minutes before I start teaching in the afternoons – I actually did that a lot last year but this year I just haven’t felt the need. I do like making sure I have a mental break between my project work and teaching hours. My husband says he always knows when a student is about to arrive because that’s when I play piano.
I once heard the late Marvin Blickenstaff — who we lost this past week — say what better time to play piano than at a time when at least your first student of the day will hear you making music.
If the students comes in early, I tell them to practice on one of the keyboards until I finish my practice – even if it’s just for 2 or 3 minutes.
Thursdays are my formal day off, and I love it.
It’s the day I do errands: make meal plans, go to the grocery, do a little food prep, clean up our household bulletin board, tidy up the refrigerator, and just manage life. I block off 90 minutes on my calendar every Thursday to sort through our stack of mail that has built up from the week, organize receipts, categories expenses, yadayada. I call it “financial management time” or “doing bills” although every bill we can is on autopay. It still takes 60-90 minutes each week. If I miss a week it feels just awful the next week so I try to not miss.
I also have several standing activities that rotate on Thursdays throughout the month. Once a month I have a book club meeting from 9:30-11:30 and every 3 weeks I record music for a church in town on a Clavinova that’s about 90 minutes of work. Once or twice a month, I will pick up my Big Brothers Big Sisters girl after school and spend the afternoon/early evening hours with her. Once or twice a month I have worship team practice on Thursday evening. So lots of rotating things and it’s just a good all-around life catchup day.
Because all my students are Monday through Wednesday, we love the flexibility of being able to take off on Thursday evenings or Fridays. It allows us to do things like travel to DC for my husbands Christmas party in December, it gave us the ability to travel for two funerals this past January on Friday without me having to take a flex day, or we can take off with our camper for a long weekend in the good weather months – often still working remotely on Friday.
It’s also nice to have Fridays as a day that if I want and need to, I can have 8 hours of heads down project time as I did these past two weeks working on an update to my Note Reading Progressions resource.
It’s a series of sequenced practice sets for the Note Rush. The update included 11 pages of QR code labels you can use to send home with students for specific assigned note practice, a CSV file and even more practice sets than the original. So no matter what not reading approach you take you will find something for you.
This update took me about 20 hours (almost twice as long as I expected. I was thinking 10-12 but, yea, 20 it was). But it’s good and it’s on sale RIGHT NOW for 25% off through February 4 using the code NOTE25 at checkout. So that’s what I did with some of my big chunks of time these past couple of weeks.
That’s the gist of it, friends.
Crazy work hours Monday to Wednesday – life breather on Thursday – Friday flex Saturday flex.
This schedule is working really well for me. It’s no badge of pride or anything, it’s just reality in this season. You might think I’m crazy, you might think I’m amazing, either way works for me, that’s fine LOL.
What I do know is this: sometimes we need big chunks of time to get something done, and sometimes the small pockets matter just as much.
That’s something I talk about in episode 151 “The Art of Progress: A Balanced Mindset for Any Project” if you want to dive into that more.
This is my life and I like it. LOL. It’s working well.
Next year it might look completely different and I’m Ok with that.
Phew, that episode ended up way longer than I expected it to, but that’s my life share for this episode here in January 2026.
Be sure and hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast app so new episodes will download automatically. Also, would you take 30 seconds please to rate and review this podcast for me? Pretty please?
Thank you!
Until next time!
