So today is Giving Tuesday. Which I think is a pretty silly name…just as ridiculous as Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday. First off, small businesses should have Black Friday too—it’s like saying Friendsgiving to mean Thanksgiving with friends…Thanksgiving should already be about friends! And Black Friday can be a shopping day for all kinds of stores…and then Cyber Monday? I think there were probably a few years when people had better internet connections at work than at home and that’s why they shopped on Monday? Or alternately (my pet theory) nobody actually works at work—they just pretend they do in order to cover all their internet time? But really. So that brings us, logically and clearly, to Giving Tuesday. I think giving to charities and nonprofits is great, and we should do that, throughout the year, at the end of the year, really whenever you have “extra” money. But that money you are wasting on buying gifts for friends and family members who don’t need anything…that could ALSO be given to nonprofits. People are constantly complaining about how much junk they have, how much simpler they want their lives to be…are these the same or different people who run out to the stores on Black Friday to get great deals on a bunch of junk nobody needs?
TL: DR version: Holidays are stupid. Give money to nonprofits.
So the week is going well. I put “write a blog post” in my calendar for this time so I thought I’d just sit down and do that. I told you guys in my last post that I was experimenting with scheduling tasks that I do, and this is day 2 of that. So I made a few different colors of calendars in Google Calendar (my organizer of choice) and added things like “Important Paperwork”, “Cleaning”, “Practice Violin”, “Run/Shower” and “Write a Blog Post.” I thought maybe I’ll be able to get a handle on where my time goes better this way too, and be more productive, and as a result (hopefully) have more meaningful downtime, where I’m not fretting over what I should be doing, because I either already did that, or it’s on the calendar. Between that and a very detailed “to-do list” on my phone, this is the time for organization. I could have waited until January, but there’s no time like the present, is there? I figure better to start right away and by the new year I’ll have more of an idea how much time I really need to schedule for things and I’ll just be a supreme organizational machine!
The more students I have the more work it takes to keep everything running, and while if you’d asked me 10 years ago if I’d want to be a full-time violin teacher I’d have said no, it looks more and more like that’s where I’m ending up. The money in teaching is better and more regular than freelancing, especially here in St Louis, and while I enjoy playing gigs and weddings and will always continue to do so, I am happy to have the bulk of my income from teaching. I also love performing, and will always do that as well. Of course, that makes it sound like I have several full-time jobs, but as I’m really considering myself a full-time violin teacher, it’s that job (small business!) with additonal work here and there, rather than more evenly divided.
That probably doesn’t even make any sense, but I never promised you that this blog post would. In any case, I have some emails to return before I teach, and while I’d love to put them off, I know not replying will stress me out, so I’m off to do that. You might be seeing more regular blog posts if I stick with this organization thing, though no guarantees on quality. Practice may or may not make perfect!