I love the change of seasons. I love when the cool weather comes, when the cold weather comes, when the flowers start peeking out again and it gets warmer, and when school is out. Every season has its good points.

Oh, and Happy Birthday to April!

It’s been busy, of course. As much as I talk the whole “ooh I want my weekends free” talk, I also enjoy making music and having more money! So I’ve taken some gigs of course, and then this weekend I ended up helping out a contractor by playing a last minute wedding as well, plus we attended another symphony concert. (We ended up going three weekends in a row due to wanting to see various concerts, but we don’t have anymore this month.)

I played on a real concert, real actual music with live performers and a masked/vaccinated audience. It was wonderful, and I had forgotten how performing feels so it was great to be back to that.

And now I’m into my week again, so much teaching, so many students, lots to do! I’m getting used to the schedule and making things work. I do a lot of planning: I use google calendar (which I sync with My Music Staff for private teaching) and have a few different calendars to plan personal things, time to work on various projects, catch up on business paperwork and things, exercising, appointments, etc. I enjoy seeing the various colors of my day (I also use different colors to keep track of which students are in person and which are online) and it helps me stay organized and make sure that things I need to get done each week get done. In addition to google calendar, I keep a few running to do lists on my phone (I just use the reminders app on my iphone) and anytime I have anything to do, I try to add it to the list (I will do this in the middle of a lesson, for instance) and then I check those lists often.

My running lists are: general to do list, which is pretty much anything I can do at home, Grocery list, food planning, gardening list (this one is being ignored as I just can’t do it all), and a curriculum to do list where I’ve been gradually solidifying my personal teaching philosophy and curriculum to really know exactly what it is I’m teaching my students and how to get them from beginning to advanced through all the steps they need. (That’s one of the projects I list above). I find the general to do list super useful for me because I don’t have strict boundaries between personal and business responsibilities, so when I have time at home, I will just work on that list, regardless. (The question of whether I should have strict boundaries is a different thought for a different day.)

I also keep various documents for studio billing, financial planning and bill paying, travel planning, meal planning, etc, and work through those as needed. I use an app for keeping track of my expenses and mileage for tax purposes (Self-Employed through Intuit) which is a little more expensive than I prefer but I also find the app incredibly useful and I don’t use an accountant, so it probably works out in my benefit.

Anyway, this may be a boring blog post, I know, but I was just thinking about how I get things done. I’m not a paper planner person, though I do keep handwritten checking registers because I’m old fashioned in that way–I track my deposits, withdrawals, all payments for my checking accounts through my handwritten registers, but pretty much everything else is online. I’d been using handwritten teaching attendance books as well, but since I switched to My Music Staff this fall I may phase that out for next year as it’s redundant at this point. Some redundancy is good for record keeping, but too much is time consuming for no point.

Planning wise, I’m looking forward to doing some travel over the holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas) and I’m planning to make homemade fruitcake this year, as well as a variety of cookies as usual. I will likely not go quite as over the top as last year, but there are still some things I really enjoy making as well as always trying a few new recipes. It’s October, which means it’s not too early to plan holiday baking, as well as the fact that making fruitcake is something you evidently do early so the fruitcake can “age.”

Anybody have any great ways they plan or get things done? For those who are self employed/work from home: how do you delineate time spent on work and time spent on personal things, or do you do like I do and blur the boundaries?