## Introduction
We’re approaching the middle of October as this podcast episode drops, and as a studio music teacher, you’re probably starting to feel it. You’re well into the school year with your students, and you may even be starting to turn the corner from whatever you’ve been working on since the beginning of the semester and looking ahead to Christmas music.
By the way, be sure to listen to episode 192 for some thoughts on planning Christmas music.
You might also be gearing up for a local fall festival or achievement festival, or maybe you’re finalizing submissions for performance or composition competitions. The point is, you’re in the middle of managing a LOT of information, and there’s no time we feel it more than when we’re trying to keep all of those details organized.
In today’s episode, we’re going to look at some of the different options we have as studio music teachers for managing information, from simple note-taking apps to more sophisticated systems that bring everything together in one place.
And don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a deep dive into any one particular app. My goal is simply to help you understand what’s out there and, more importantly, consider what type of system might work best for YOU.
By the way, I’m Amy Chaplin and you’re listening to episode 193 of the Piano Pantry Podcast – a place where you’ll find practical and sustainable rhythms for your teacher life.
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## How We Traditionally Manage Information
Let’s start by looking at some of the ways we might traditionally use digital tools to manage information in our studios. And I say *we* because I’ve done many of these things myself over the years.
### Scenario 1: Quick Notes and Ideas
You get an idea for a fun recital theme, so you open Apple Notes or Google Keep and quickly jot it down. A studio family mentions in passing, when you run into them at the grocery store, that they’re planning to attend your fall piano party next week. You don’t want to forget, so you pull out your phone and make a quick note.
Or maybe you’re attending a local association meeting, and something in the conversation sparks an idea for a change you’d like to make in your studio. You didn’t bring your computer with you, so you open your notes app and drop in a few quick thoughts.
Sound familiar? These apps are incredibly handy for capturing information in the moment. But here’s what I want you to consider about basic notes apps.
How often do you actually go BACK into that app and look at those notes? When you do, can you easily find what you’re looking for? Or do you find yourself scrolling through dozens, maybe even hundreds, of notes filled with random thoughts and ideas? And what happens to that recital theme idea? Does it ever make its way into your actual recital planning?
There’s nothing wrong with using a basic notes app. The question is whether you have a reliable way of finding and using the information you’ve captured.
### Scenario 2: Lesson Planning with Documents
The next scenario involves using Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or maybe even Excel for lesson planning. In fact, I have a blog post on the Piano Pantry website about how I developed my own system for lesson planning using Excel and I’ll link to that in the show notes.
Maybe you keep a digital folder for each student, and inside that folder are documents named by the date of each lesson. For a student who’s been taking lessons for several years, you might have a hundred different documents!
You love that you can go back and see the history of assignments and repertoire, but you also have to open those documents individually to find the information you’re looking for. And darn it! You KNOW you assigned that piece to that student, but you can’t seem to remember when it was.
Maybe you also keep a separate document for each student with a running list of repertoire you’ve assigned them. But you find yourself typing the same book titles over and over because so many of your students use the same book series.
So here’s another question to consider: What do you wish were different about your lesson planning system? Maybe you feel like you have something that’s ALMOST working, but there’s just one thing missing that would make it so much easier. What is that thing?
### Scenario 3: Repertoire Planning with Spreadsheets
Next, let’s talk about repertoire planning. Maybe you do all your repertoire planning in Excel or Google Sheets.
You keep a workbook for each school year, and along the bottom are tabs for all your different repertoire lists. There’s one for your fall festival, one for Christmas music assignments, another for your Christmas recital, one for your keyboard ensemble concert, and another for your spring recital. You might even have a separate spreadsheet where you keep a master list of repertoire your students have played over the years.
Spreadsheets can be wonderful tools for organizing this type of information. You can sort, filter, and arrange things in ways that aren’t always possible in a regular document – as long as you know how to use Excel properly, that is. But you may also find yourself entering the same information in several different places.
Again, I want you to consider what’s working and what isn’t. Would it be more useful to you if you could enter a piece of repertoire once and then use that information in several different ways without having to type it all over again?
### Scenario 4: Studio Management Software
Lastly, maybe you’re using a studio management program for handling tuition, scheduling, and student information. You love having your billing automated, but you don’t particularly care for the program’s lesson assignment features. So you’re still using Google Docs for that.
Or maybe you’re still accepting checks for tuition and tracking invoices and book charges in QuickBooks. And that’s perfectly fine if it’s working for you! But what if it’s not?
But maybe you’ve found that you’re entering student information in one program, lesson assignments in another, and repertoire lists in a third and it’s just starting to feel heavy?
These scenarios may not match exactly what you’re doing, but I think most of us have dabbled in at least some of these approaches over the years. Whether it’s a basic notes app for quick ideas, Word documents for lesson plans and studio policies, spreadsheets for financial management and repertoire lists, or a studio management program for scheduling and billing, we have a LOT of information to keep track of.
And often, it’s not that any one of these tools is bad – it’s that we’ve accumulated different tools for different purposes over time and sometimes we have to stop and consider if they’re still serving us well still in this season of life.
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## What Is Personal Knowledge Management?
Here’s something else I want you to consider as you think about these different scenarios as studio music teachers.
We spend a lot of time thinking about how to SAVE information, but how often do we stop to consider what we’re actually going to DO with that information later? Because saving information doesn’t do us much good if we can’t easily find it when we need it—or if we never actually use it again.
Think about all those notes you’ve jotted down over the years, the conference handouts you’ve saved, the repertoire lists you’ve created, or the teaching ideas you’ve collected. How much of that information have you actually gone back and used? And maybe an even better question is, how easy would it be to find that information if you needed it tomorrow?
There’s actually a term for this broader process of collecting, organizing, retrieving, and using information. It’s called **personal knowledge management**, or PKM for short. It sounds a little technical, but it’s really just the practice of managing the information and knowledge we accumulate so we can actually put it to use. And I think that’s an important distinction.
It’s not just about having a place to PUT information. It’s about having a reliable way to find it again and make it useful in the future. So as we look at some of the different types of apps available to us, I want you to keep that bigger picture in mind.
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## Three Types of Information Management Apps
I like to think about information management apps in roughly three categories:
1. Apps that help us **capture tibits of information**.
2. Apps that help us **organize information well.**
3. Apps that help us **connect and manage information**.
Now, these aren’t official categories, and there’s definitely some overlap. Many apps can do more than one of these things, but I think it’s a helpful way to understand the different approaches.
And regardless of which approach we use, the ultimate goal is the same: to make information easy to find and useful when we need it. Because a beautifully organized system full of information we never actually use isn’t necessarily serving us any better than a messy one.
### Category 1: Capturing Information
The first category includes apps designed to help us quickly capture things we don’t want to forget. Some familiar examples are Google Keep and Apple Notes.
Think of these as digital sticky notes. You have a thought, an idea, a reminder, or a quick list, and you need somewhere to put it. The beauty of these apps is their simplicity. They’re easy to open, easy to use, and generally accessible from your phone.
And to be fair, apps like Apple Notes have become much more sophisticated over the years. You can organize notes into folders, use tags, attach images, and do quite a bit more than simply jot down a thought. But for our purposes, I think of these apps primarily exist as quick-capture tools. They’re great for getting information OUT of your head and into a place where you can hopefully find it later.
### Category 2: Organizing Information
The second category includes apps that help us take that information a step further by organizing it into digital notebooks. Some familiar examples are Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, and Goodnotes.
Think of these apps as digital three-ring binders. Rather than having individual sticky notes scattered everywhere, you’re collecting information into notebooks, that have sections, and categories.
You might have a notebook for recital planning, another for professional development, and another for teaching resources. Inside those notebooks, you can store notes, documents, images, PDFs, and other reference materials.
Different apps approach this a little differently. For example, OneNote is organized much like a physical binder, with notebooks, sections, and pages. Evernote uses notebooks, notes, and tags to help you collect and retrieve information and it also includes features that go beyond traditional note-taking, such as tasks and calendar connections. Goodnotes is particularly popular with people who like handwriting notes on a tablet or annotating PDFs.
The main idea with this category is that you’re moving beyond simply capturing information and thinking more intentionally about how to organize and retrieve it.
### Category 3: Connecting and Managing Information
The third category is where things get particularly interesting. These are apps that go beyond simply storing and organizing information. They allow you to create more interconnected systems for managing it. You may have heard these referred to as *everything apps* or *all-in-one workspaces*.
The idea is that instead of using one app for notes, another for spreadsheets, another for project planning, and another for tracking information, you can bring many of those functions together into one customizable workspace.
Some of the better-known examples include Notion, Coda, and ClickUp. ClickUp’s strength is primarily in project and task management, although it also includes documents and other information management features. Coda focuses on combining documents, tables, and interactive workflows, allowing you to create tools and systems within a document. And Notion, which is the one I personally use, combines notes, documents, databases, tasks, and other tools into a workspace you can customize for your own needs.
Now, I want to emphasize something here. **You don’t have to use every feature of an everything app for it to be useful.** In fact, you could use Notion as a very basic note-taking app if that’s all you wanted. But what makes these apps particularly powerful is the ability to connect information and use it in different ways.
Let me give you an example.
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## Evernote vs. Notion: A Practical Example
Since Evernote and Notion are the two apps I’ve personally used for managing information, I think comparing them is a helpful way to understand the difference between a digital notebook and a more interconnected workspace.
Let’s say you want to create a collection of piano repertoire you love teaching.
In Evernote, you might create a notebook for repertoire. Inside that notebook, you’d create an individual note for each piece. You could include the title, composer, level, teaching notes, and maybe even an image of the score. You could also add tags for things like elementary, intermediate, or advanced repertoire. Then, when you want to find an intermediate-level piece, you could search or filter your notes using those tags. That’s a great system!
Now let’s consider how you might approach that same collection in Notion.
Instead of creating a traditional notebook, you might create what’s called a database. If the word *database* makes you nervous, don’t let it. Think of a database as a collection of information that’s organized into individual entries, much like a spreadsheet where every row represents one item. In our repertoire example, each row would represent a piece of music. You could have columns for the title, composer, level, style, method book, and any other details you want to track. But here’s where it gets interesting. Each of those rows can also open up into its own page, where you can store teaching notes, images, links, and anything else related to that piece. So you’re getting some of the functionality of a spreadsheet alongside the functionality of a digital notebook in one place. IT’s like putting the two together.
And you don’t have to look at that information in just one way. You could create a view that looks like a traditional spreadsheet. You could create another view that displays each piece as a card with a preview of the page. You could filter the collection to show only intermediate repertoire or sort it alphabetically by composer. And all of these views are pulling from the SAME collection of information. You’re not creating multiple copies of the same list.
But here’s the part I particularly love. Let’s say you also have a separate database in Notion that contains your students’ names. You can actually CONNECT those two databases. So when you assign a particular piece to a student, you can select that student’s name from your existing student database rather than typing it out again. And depending on how you’ve set up your system, you can view that connection from the student’s page as well.
So you have a way of seeing which pieces are connected to which students, without having to maintain completely separate lists. That’s what I mean when I talk about moving beyond simply organizing information to actually connecting it.
Of course, this is just one example, and Notion isn’t the only app that can do this. The important thing is understanding the possibilities.
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## Organize Your Life with Notion Workshop
And if this idea of connecting information rather than keeping everything in separate documents and lists sounds intriguing to you, I want to invite you to join my upcoming Organize Your Life with Notion workshop.
My friend Joy Morin and I are hosting this three-part online workshop on Thursdays, November 5, 12, and 19, from noon to 2 p.m. Eastern.
It’s designed specifically with studio music teachers in mind, and we’ll walk you through how to use Notion to organize information and build systems that work for your own teaching life. And you don’t need to have any previous experience with Notion to join us.
We’re currently offering an extended discount of $30 off registration through October 28.
Registration will remain open through Wednesday, November 4, but if you’re interested, you’ll want to take advantage of that discount before it expires. You can find the link to the workshop details in in the show notes at pianopantry.com/podcast/episode193 or visit pianopantry.com/notion directly for details.
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## Choosing the Right Approach for You
Now, after hearing all of this, you might be thinking, “Well, that sounds great! Maybe I need to move everything into Notion!” But not necessarily. So let’s keep a realistic perspective here.
While I love Notion and think it is incredibly valuable for studio music teachers, I am also realistic that there’s no one right app for everyone. How we manage information depends on what we’re trying to accomplish, what we actually need, and, if we’re being honest, how motivated we are to learn a different way of doing things.
Because there IS a learning curve when you move into more sophisticated information management systems. And sometimes the time and energy required to build and maintain a system isn’t worth it for what you’re trying to accomplish. If you have a system that’s working for you, GREAT! Keep doing it!
But maybe you have a system that’s *kind of* working. You can get by with it, but something about it just doesn’t feel right anymore. Maybe you’re constantly duplicating information. Maybe you have a hard time finding things. Maybe you wish you could see all the information related to a particular student in one place. Or maybe you’ve simply accumulated so many different documents, spreadsheets, and apps over the years that you don’t even know where to look anymore.
If that’s the case, I would encourage you not to immediately go looking for a new app. Instead, start by identifying WHY your current system isn’t working. What is it that you’re actually trying to accomplish? What information do you need to manage, and how would you ideally like to access and use that information?
Because sometimes the solution is as simple as creating a better folder structure, developing a consistent naming system, or taking advantage of features in an app you already use. Other times, you may discover that your needs have outgrown your current system, and you’re ready to explore something different. And that’s where a more interconnected information management app might be worth considering.
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## Closing: Is Your Information Actually Serving You?
I want to leave you with one final thought.
The goal isn’t to have all your information in one app. The goal is to have a system where the information you need is easy to capture, easy to organize, easy to find, and, most importantly, easy to USE. That’s really what personal knowledge management is all about. Because collecting information is only part of the equation.
It doesn’t matter how many wonderful teaching ideas we’ve saved, how many conference notes we’ve taken, or how many repertoire lists we’ve created if that information never makes its way back into our teaching or business.
So as you go about your week, I want to challenge you to pay attention not only to how you’re SAVING information, but also to how you’re RETRIEVING and USING it.
When you need to find that perfect piece for a student, can you easily pull up the repertoire ideas you’ve collected? When you’re planning your next recital, can you find those theme ideas you jotted down six months ago? When you’re facing a teaching challenge, can you revisit something you learned at a conference two years ago?
And if the answer is no, maybe that’s a sign that something in your system could use a little attention. After all, **the value isn’t in how much information we save. It’s in what we’re able to do with it.**
