Working more hours is not the answer. In this episode I talk through how I protect my evenings and weekends, and the admin and planning systems that stop work creeping into every spare hour. Honest, specific, and practical.
In this episode:
Why most time management advice doesn't account for the reality of a teaching week
The difference between being busy and being productive as a self-employed teacher
How to design your teaching schedule around your energy, not just your availability
Admin tasks that expand to fill available time, and how to contain them
The systems that have given me back real hours in the week
Four objections that keep teachers stuck, and honest reframes for each one
Links mentioned:
One to One Focus Session (60 min, £67)
If you find this episode useful, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts: it goes a long way in helping other music teachers find my podcast!
-
Part 1: Where the time goes
A Sunday afternoon film
It was a Sunday afternoon, and we'd all decided as a family to watch an afternoon film: my kids, my husband and me. It was great, but all the while I was watching, I was feeling really anxious, knowing there were so many things I had to finish by the end of Sunday evening. I had a really long list of invoices to create. I had a WhatsApp from a parent asking to reschedule that needed a reply. And I had two students I'd promised new books to, but hadn't ordered yet. So I sat there with this horrible feeling in my stomach through the whole film, trying to be present and enjoy it with my family, and just being distracted by this enormous to-do list that couldn't be ignored. It wasn't a great feeling.
This is definitely not what I imagined life would be like as a full-time piano teacher. I thought working for myself meant I'd have the flexibility to teach during the week and get all the other admin done in between. I thought I'd have far more control than I did, and here I was, giving my Sunday evening away again, and it wasn't a one-off.
If you've ever looked at your week and wondered how it got so full, how you ended up teaching six evenings out of seven, and how the admin keeps spilling into time that was supposed to be yours, this is the episode you need to hear. I'm going to talk honestly about what time management truly means when you're a self-employed music teacher, what works, based on my own experience and the teachers I've spoken to, and what I wish someone had told me when I started teaching.
Don't worry: this episode isn't a collection of generic productivity tips. It's a reframe of what time management means for a self-employed music teacher, grounded in what makes sustainable changes, not what looks good on a productivity blog.
I'm Victoria. I started teaching piano part-time 18 years ago, alongside a career in pharmaceutical market research, and I made pretty much every mistake you can make when it comes to running a teaching business. But today I run a thriving studio from my home on the south coast of England, with students I love and a waiting list I'm proud of. I started this podcast because I want that for you too.
If you've ever said yes to a reschedule you really didn't want to do, felt your heart sink when your phone buzzed with another last minute cancellation, or found yourself putting off increasing your fees for another year because the timing never feels quite right, this is the podcast for you. I've been there and come out the other side with a teaching business that lights me up every single day, and I'm here to help you do the same.
The cost: resentment
Most teachers are working more hours than they realise, and fewer of those hours are income-generating. Think about it like this: we have an irregular structure to our teaching weeks. Our lessons are mostly in the afternoons and evenings, and we fit admin into the gaps. With a structure like that, it's really hard to see where your time is going, and when you can't see where it's going, you can't change it.
One of the biggest costs of not being able to manage your time effectively, beyond the obvious tiredness, is resentment. That might feel like a bit of a strong word, but I mean it in the most honest sense: resentment about what you do for a living. I've never met a music teacher who didn't absolutely love their job. We do it because we love music, our instrument and teaching, and we love teaching our students to play our instrument. It's a job we go into with a lot of passion. But when you can't fit in everything that being a music teacher entails, it can let resentment creep in, which none of us want, of course. And it's totally avoidable, which is what this episode is all about.
I should point out now that teachers who manage their time well aren't superhuman. They've just made decisions about what they will and won't do. They haven't promised to be everything to everyone; that's a recipe for disaster. They decide when they will and won't work, and they've built systems that protect those decisions.
So this episode is about those decisions, and how you can actively make decisions that let you manage your time in a way that allows you to love your job again, without living in fear of not keeping up with everything. Time management for music teachers is an absolutely enormous topic, so I'm not going to cover everything in this one episode, but I'll cover the main points we can do something about. So this is a very practical episode.
The lesson notes that took over
One of the things I want to talk about is the experiences that showed me there was a problem I needed to fix. One of them started way back in 2020, the infamous COVID year. Up until we went online, all my students had a little A5 notebook that I'd write their practice notes in. When we went online, I promised to send each student practice notes by email after their lesson.
I got really carried away with these lesson notes, because typing is fairly quick, and you can say a lot more than you would in a lesson, and certainly more than you could write in a lesson notebook during the lesson. At the end of each day, I'd sit down at my computer, and I think I ended up spending about half an hour per student writing lesson notes emails.
I'd structure it all out like I would in the notebook, with headings and subheadings for what we'd covered: scales and arpeggios, pieces, technique if it was relevant, theory if we were working on it, sight reading and so on. Then I'd write the practice notes, but I'd explain so much more in sub-bullet points about whatever technique or concept was relevant to the practice instruction. Then I'd go and find links to really great websites that I use and recommend, so they could read further if they were interested.
When I look back, I think, "Well, of course it took you half an hour per student. It was massive overkill." I thought I was doing the best job I could as their piano teacher and providing tons and tons of value. The reality was I was wasting a lot of my time, because although it felt good to share all this information, very few of them used it. That's not a criticism of them. They just didn't have time to go down the rabbit hole I'd disappeared down through my enthusiasm about music theory and all sorts of things.
So it was a really good example of how blinkered I got about what they really needed in their practice notes email to practise effectively on the things we'd discussed in the lesson. I'd gone so far down this path, thinking I was providing a ton of benefit, when I was definitely wasting my time. I wasn't staying in the reality of what was feasible for me to send, and certainly not what they could make use of in the one week between lessons.
Dreading invoice time
Another time it became clear that something needed to change about my time management was before the start of each new term. I really started to dread invoice time, because it involved quite a lot of heavy brain work. I had to go back through all my notes and reconcile the number of lessons to be carried over to the new term against the total lessons available that term, minus any student holidays that had been booked, and double check my calendar for any lessons that had been missed.
It was mentally exhausting, and demoralising to see the invoice totals plummet each term. It was a horrible task, because I didn't want to make a mistake. I had to be really careful to check everywhere I'd noted down who had missed a lesson here or there, or whether I'd had to cancel any that I'd carry over to the next term, and so on. You'd think I'd write it all down in the same place, but no. Thankfully I'm much more organised now, so that's not such a problem. But invoice time took a long time, it wasn't satisfying, and I needed to find a better way of managing my invoicing.
Trying to be everything to everyone
The thing is, as a self-employed music teacher, you're making all the decisions about everything. You're choosing repertoire and method books for your students. You're deciding (hopefully) who to take on. You're judging each student's reaction to all the material you give them, to decide the best path for them in learning the instrument. You're also deciding how much feedback to give, in lessons, in lesson notes and to parents, and how hands-on to be when prompting practice improvements.
You have to make every single decision, and that means you're at risk of falling into the very large hole of wanting to be everything to everyone. It's not possible. It's certainly not possible for 99% of us. I'm sure there's 1% out there with boundless energy, but we're all human. And I think a lot of us are perfectionists, because we want to provide value and be inspiring for our students.
For me personally, I've had unrealistic expectations of myself for a long time. In the beginning, I thought the more feedback I gave, the better. I used to keep a separate notebook where, after a day of lessons (right at the beginning, when it was part-time, so it was my evening lessons after working during the day, not a whole day), I'd write notes about the students: what I'd noticed about how they'd taken on a particular concept or instruction. It was like a journal of my thoughts about how the lessons had gone, where I could improve and what I could do next time.
That's great. It all sounds really wholesome and good for a teacher's development, and it is. But when you have more than about 15 students, it's not practical to devote that level of detailed thought to every single student after every single lesson. That doesn't mean that as your student numbers increase, you're reducing the quality of your teaching. It's a function of the fact that we adapt as we teach. We learn on the job; that's the phrase, isn't it? The more you teach, the more you learn, and the more you discuss with other teachers, the more you learn. If you have 25 students a week, for example, you'll naturally learn a lot more about teaching from those 25 students than you would teaching five.
So not reflecting on every single one doesn't mean you're dropping the ball. I found this really hard to get my head around, because I thought, "No, if I'm dedicating this amount of time to each student, I've got to keep it up for all the rest of them, however long it takes." That's quite a dangerous way to think, because you're holding yourself to unreasonable expectations that you're bound to fail at, and then you feel terrible and think, "Well, I must be a terrible teacher." It's a recipe for disaster. But it's so easy to fall into, because there are so many ways we can overthink things, or overestimate how much we need to do to be a good teacher for our students.
One of the drawbacks of being so focused on the detail is that you risk not recognising the bigger wins and long-term successes. As music teachers, we know there are lots of tiny wins along the way, and then some really big milestones our students reach. We don't want to miss those because we're so focused on the fact that we haven't sent the last lesson notes by email with links to six different theory websites.
Part 2: Boundaries, not productivity tips
Standard advice misses the point
Standard time management advice often misses the point for self-employed music teachers. It's really written for people in conventional employment, who work nine to five, have a fixed lunch break and go home at the same time every day, with all the time in between theirs to divvy up depending on their meetings. It's not designed for music teachers like us, who set our own hours, take our own bookings, do our own admin and teach from home.
Generic advice like "batch your tasks" or "do the hardest thing first" isn't necessarily wrong, but it doesn't account for the reality of a teaching week where your day is broken up by lessons at different intervals, with irregular gaps, and everything else we need to get done.
What I mean is that, more often than not, it's not a lack of productivity tools that we have as music teachers. It's a lack of boundaries around our time. Our time is our own to decide how to use, whether it's personal practice, preparing student repertoire, lesson planning, admin or professional development; you name it, we choose how to divide our time between all of it. And let's not forget downtime. We always need to plan for downtime. It's the fact that there are very rarely any boundaries around that time. If you don't have clear limits on when you work and what you take on, everything expands to fill every available gap.
That's true in every situation. Whenever I've set myself a task, if I put it on a particular day, it takes me the whole day. Whereas if I'd scheduled one or two hours, depending on the task, my mind would be that much more focused and efficient. Maybe I wouldn't get it done in two hours, but I'd more likely get it done in three, rather than an entire day, split up by lunch and distractions at home, like, "I can just get some laundry on and hang it out, because it's sunny now and it's going to rain tomorrow."
The fix for our time management woes isn't necessarily about doing things more efficiently. It's about doing fewer things, not promising the world to everybody, and being really intentional about what those things are.
How time slips away
One of the most annoying ways my time slips away is when I sit down to do something that should be a five-minute job, like replying to an email. I'm on my computer, so I see the email, but I also see the other tabs open on my screen, and I get pulled towards other small tasks: "Oh, I can just get that done while I'm here." Very quickly an hour has gone by. I might have got a few things done, but maybe I didn't even finish the thing I sat down to do, which was replying to an email that really needed a reply last week.
Or it could be researching repertoire books I need or want to find out about for prospective or current students, or a new series of books I'm not familiar with yet, reading teacher reviews before maybe buying them and having a go through the material to see who they'd suit. That's such an open-ended task. You could spend hours down a search engine rabbit hole, reading every teacher review of a particular series and trying to reach a conclusion without seeing the books yourself. It can completely destroy an afternoon.
The way I experience this isn't, "Oh my goodness, look at the time." I get a rising panic inside, knowing I've spent longer than I intended on this task. I don't know how long, but it's far too long already. And the awareness doesn't snap me out of it ("Right, let's just focus on what you were going to do in the first place"). The awareness just goes, "Yep," and I keep doing it, because I find it very hard to switch tasks, especially when I'm on a roll. If I've read a few reviews about a series of books and I think I'm close to a decision, I find it very hard to abandon it and come back later.
You've probably experienced something similar with whatever task you were doing. If you don't put a boundary around the time, the task spreads to fill the time available. That's not a criticism of the way we work; it's just human nature. We need boundaries to keep our minds focused.
The invisible hours
As self-employed music teachers, we often measure our workload in lesson hours, or maybe number of students. But that's only part of the picture. We all know we do many other things: preparing for lessons, admin, communicating with students and families, and professional development. Those hours are often invisible, definitely unscheduled for most of us, and underestimated.
I naively used to think that when I taught five half-hour lessons a week, I was only doing two and a half hours on top of my full-time job in London. But that really wasn't the case. It's quite hard to measure, because when you have regular students, your mind pops to different students frequently, if not every day; certainly now I'm full-time, it does all the time. Your brain is a great problem solver. If you have a student struggling with a particular concept or technique, your brain offers you solutions: "Maybe they could try this piece, or this resource." So you're always thinking about them, which makes it impossible to measure, but it's definitely time well beyond your lesson hours.
Busy is not the same as productive
Being busy is not the same as being productive. Take my lesson notes example. That was really busy work: getting on my computer after a day of teaching, searching theory websites and music websites for examples, and finding YouTube videos of pieces students were learning or could learn. I was very busy, but it wasn't productive, because the benefit of those lesson notes to the student was minimal. They didn't help the student any more than a quick five-minute email would have, giving them what they needed: a reminder of what to practise that week and what to focus on in each part.
It's very possible to spend a whole day on studio-related tasks, say on an unexpected day "off" (I say "off" in inverted commas), and finish it with nothing meaningful to show for it. The time was probably fragmented. You probably reacted to things that popped into your inbox, or suddenly remembered, "Oh, I wanted to try that new book I ordered last month," and we can all get carried away playing our instruments, can't we? I know I can lose a lot of time doing that. Often, that time goes on low priority work that our brains said yes to: "We've got some time off today, so I've got time to do that now." So being busy really isn't the same as being productive.
Ticking over versus moving forward
There are tasks that keep your studio ticking over, which are essential. But there are also tasks that move your studio forward: increasing your visibility in your community, improving your website so your ideal students can find you more easily, posting on your social media pages, and joining a conversation in a community group of music teachers. All of these can move your studio forward, by building your visibility as a music teacher and making connections with your community. They're all really important, but they need to be managed very differently.
Put a boundary around admin
As I said, admin tasks in particular expand to fill the time available unless you put a boundary around them. Someone who does their invoicing whenever they get round to it will usually find it takes far longer than a teacher who schedules a fixed 30 minutes on the same day each week, month or term.
I've already mentioned that I used to dread invoicing when I billed termly, because of the headache it involved and all the complicated things to remember. This is an area where I made an enormous improvement in my life, and it's a great example of how putting a boundary around the time stopped me frittering it away on little bits of invoicing as I went along.
I switched to monthly billing four years ago, and ever since then I've allocated one hour per month to log the payments I've received and send any reminder emails to students and parents. Allocating that specific time once a month, with recurring invoices sent out automatically, lets my mind stay on task during that hour, and not worry about invoicing or payments at any other time of the month.
Before, distracting thoughts could pop into my head at any time: "Oh, so-and-so's here. I wonder if they've paid yet. I haven't seen their payment come in. Should I try and catch the parent before the student leaves, or send an email or a text?" All those thoughts just clutter your mind. Having experienced both sides, my mind is so much calmer now about invoicing and payments, because it all happens on autopilot. Then, when it's time to pay attention to it, I've got that one hour scheduled. I normally do it on the second or third of the month, because all my payments are due on the first.
It means I don't let things slide, and I can zip through all the payments, log them in my spreadsheet and in Zoho Books, and then click a button in Zoho Books to send a reminder email to anyone who hasn't paid yet. It's that simple; there's no complicated process. That's been one of the biggest positive changes I've made, and it's productive time. It's one hour very well spent, and it means I don't spend a second thinking about invoices or payments for the rest of the month.
Part 3: Designing your week on purpose
The dartboard approach
The default approach for most teachers is to be available whenever students want to come. We generally view our time as open and slot students in whenever they're available, so we're easygoing and convenient, because that makes us a good teacher. But as I've mentioned in previous episodes, structuring your teaching week this way isn't really structuring it. It's letting it happen, like throwing darts at a dartboard, certainly if you have my aim. They end up all over the place, and you have a really sporadic teaching week with no real structure. You might have a few lessons one day, loads on another, inconvenient gaps or not enough gaps, and it makes for a very stressful working week.
The result of this approach is a teaching week built around everyone else's convenience but not your own, and it doesn't reflect the way your energy changes through the week.
How I structure my week
I'm going to talk through how I've intentionally structured my teaching week. This is obviously based on my own decisions and what I can reliably commit to week in, week out, so it won't suit everybody. It's just to give you an idea of what I mean, and why I structure my week this way.
As I was building my student numbers, I decided to focus on the earlier days of the week, because people are fresher, myself included. For after school and evening lessons, I'd group them back to back, maybe two or three, sometimes four in a row without a gap (four is the maximum), and then have maybe a 15-minute gap. So when a student enquired, had their trial lesson and wanted to sign up, even if they said, "Can I come at this time on this day?", I'd say, "I have this available on this day," rather than, "Yes, fine, anything you want." Otherwise your weekly teaching ends up looking like a scattergraph.
So I've ended up intentionally teaching Monday to Thursday, finishing early afternoon on Thursdays, at about half past two. I talked about this in a previous episode: I used to teach Monday to Thursday, finishing on Thursday evenings, but to be able to collect my son from an after-school club, I moved my Thursday afternoon and evening students to other slots in the week. It has worked out brilliantly, because I no longer feel like a completely absent parent. I've kept all my students, and finishing after lunch on a Thursday gives me a bit more breathing room, even though my Monday is quite packed.
I'm definitely not someone who can work through the night, like when studying for exams. I very much need my sleep, and without it I'm useless. Same goes for food. Some people can work through without eating; they forget about eating and they're fine. I'm very much like a robot that's run out of fuel if I don't stop to eat. So I need to eat and I need to sleep, and I have to protect those things, otherwise I'm not very efficient as a human.
My Mondays
So I definitely don't overdo it, but as I said, Monday is my busiest day. I have 14 half-hour lessons on a Monday. They start at 10 in the morning, and they're grouped in blocks of no more than four, so I'm not teaching for more than two hours without a break. On Mondays I have an hour's break between each of the first three groups, and a 15-minute break between the last two, which works out fine for me. It means I have enough time to eat between groups of lessons, or get another drink.
I'm recording this just after the biggest heatwave we've ever had. I think we reached 35 or 36 degrees Celsius on the coast here, which was unbelievably hot, and we had to keep drinking no matter what, so I was filling up my bottle the whole time.
Anyway, my Monday is completely packed, and knowing I have 14 students to see on a Monday means I don't try to cram anything else in. I know that's seven hours of teaching, plus the thinking time before, after and in between, in the breaks. It's a very full day, so I purposely tell myself, "No, you can't fit anything else in," if I'm tempted to answer emails on my lunch break. When I used to try that, I'd be in a flap all the time. It's unproductive, and the downtime is necessary to make sure I'm at my best when I'm teaching.
One of the reasons it feels really good to have Mondays scheduled with 14 students in one day is that it's the first day of the week, when we're all at our freshest after the weekend, generally speaking. And because of the frequent migraines I get, the more lessons I can have earlier in the week, the better. My migraines vary in frequency, but more often than not they come later in the week. So if I can be available, rested after the weekend, for the majority of my students, it's fewer lessons for me to cancel and fewer students let down by not having a lesson that week.
A midweek break
On Wednesdays, I don't start teaching until four o'clock in the afternoon. I did that intentionally, because I wanted a midweek break, so I'm not starting first thing in the morning four days a week. It also lets me book appointments I don't want to do at the weekend, like the dentist, the doctor, the hairdresser, eye tests and all the rest of it. I can get them done on a Wednesday when things are less busy, because I struggle quite a lot with crowds and busyness. Going somewhere busy at the weekend, certainly a highly populated area, isn't my idea of fun, especially not to get an appointment done.
So I'm able to structure my week in a way that lets me balance the activities in my life, which is positive for my wellbeing and my family's wellbeing. I do have a few students on my waiting list who specifically want Wednesday daytime lessons, and ordinarily that would be fine, but I'm protecting that Wednesday, because it's very valuable time for me not to be teaching, given my full Monday. Then on Tuesday I teach from lunchtime through to the evening, and on Thursday from the morning through to just after lunch.
No Friday lessons
I chose very early on not to teach on Fridays, because in the past, when I've taught children on Friday afternoons, they've not been interested in their piano lesson. They're tired after a full week of school. They might be hot and bothered, especially in the summer. They want to go to the park with their friends after school, not to their piano lesson. So it never made much sense to me to open up Fridays, even when the occasional keen parent has said, "No, Fridays are great for us. We can always do Fridays," or when there have been adults who are only available on Fridays.
That reminds me. Very early on, when I first started teaching part-time from home in London, I took on a few adult students. I had one student who, I didn't quite realise at the time ("Oh, why is she not remembering anything we talked about last lesson?"), but I'm fairly certain she was drunk when she came to her lesson. I think she was about my age, in her early twenties; I was only 22 at the time. She worked in a corporate job and, just like me, had travelled back from work, and maybe she'd had some drinks at work or straight after. It was quite an embarrassing situation, because I thought, "I would never turn up to a piano lesson drunk." Admittedly, I've only had piano lessons as a child, and the odd one as an adult. But that's just an aside. I doubt you'll have that problem very often.
Weekends
Now, teaching at weekends. I used to teach one student on a Saturday morning. She was my next door neighbour's daughter. She was lovely, she practised all the time, and she was one of those really good students. Because I'd dropped down to just a few students, I think she was one of only a few, so the Saturday lesson was fine. It was just one half-hour lesson with my neighbour, and everything was fine.
But I've never entertained the idea of teaching at weekends on a regular basis as a full-time teacher, certainly not since having children, because weekends are so precious. I'm not saying your weekends aren't precious if you don't have children, of course. But when both parents are working, it's the one time in the whole week when you can all be together. So I avoided that at all costs.
It still surprises me when I come across music teachers who teach six days a week, meaning one of those days is a weekend day. Often the reasons are, "That's when my students are available," or "I need enough students to make ends meet." Often what comes out in conversation is that they're refunding lots of lessons, giving away their time for free by rescheduling, charging far too little, and only charging for the lessons students attend, not when they disappear on holiday. All the sorts of things I talk about that let you maintain your income based on when you're available to teach.
So it's quite a tricky issue to unpick, but it's definitely worth considering if you teach at the weekend and really wish you didn't have to, but feel you can't make enough money otherwise. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with teaching at weekends. If you want to, go for it; it's not a problem. But most of the time when I hear about it, teachers admit it with reluctance or regret.
It isn't luck
Sometimes, when I say, "Oh no, I only teach Monday to Thursday," the response has been, "Oh, you're so lucky." But it has nothing to do with luck. I haven't stumbled upon lots of students who were magically available Monday to Thursday at these precise times. I made myself visible enough, with my website, my social media presence and being searchable on my Google Business Profile, that I attracted my ideal students, and I suggested the lesson slots rather than asking, "When can you come?" One of the easiest ways to lose your time is letting the student pick a lesson slot, rather than suggesting one for them. So my teaching schedule isn't luck, and it isn't a luxury. It's the way I've intentionally planned it.
The mindset shift
If you want to make practical changes to your timetable, there's a mindset shift required. If you're still operating from the belief that your availability is owed to every student who wants it, that has to shift. You won't be able to redesign your schedule thinking that way. Your time is not infinitely elastic. It's fixed, and you can control when you give it to your students, and how much. That's not being bossy or pushy. It's taking control of your own time, because no one else should take control of your time. It's yours. You work for yourself, so you can choose how to control it, and you can do it in a professional way that creates a weekly schedule that suits your life and your energy, not one you have to endure every week.
Daytime students are real students
Attracting daytime students is quite a hot topic sometimes, because the default expectation is that every student who wants music lessons needs either an after-school slot, if they're a child, or an evening slot, if they're an adult working during the day. That's not an unreasonable expectation, but it isn't everybody.
On Mondays, as I described, I teach 10 till 12, 1 till 3, 4 till 6 and then 6.15 till 7.15. The students who come in the morning include working adults with flexible hours, home educated children and retired adults. It's a mix that works and lets me teach throughout the day, rather than being restricted to afternoons and evenings.
So your daytime slots are real and fillable, particularly for adult learners with flexible working arrangements. They could come for a lunchtime lesson if they live nearby and can work from home. And there's quite a large community of home educated students these days; I think it blossomed a bit during COVID. You can provide music lessons for these students, who are seeking a different way of life but still want to access everything they would on a normal school schedule.
I've heard music teachers describe their daytime slots as a bonus: if they get any students during the day, that's a nice extra, and it doesn't really count as real income. It really surprised me to hear that, because I see them just like any other student. I give them a fixed weekly lesson, and I guarantee I'll be there to teach them at the same time on the same day every week, just like my after school and evening students.
Yes, after school and evening slots are more in demand, so whenever someone is added to my waiting list, I mention, "If you can be available during the day on a weekday, you've got a better chance of getting a lesson slot sooner." But I've never seen daytime students as a nice-to-have. They're students who fit my ideal student profile, and they're great students for me. So if you've ever seen your daytime slots that way, I'd encourage you to reflect on it, and maybe turn around your view of the value of those slots. You can provide just as much value in a daytime slot to a student who needs, or is able, to come during the day. Some of them prefer it because, like me, they'd rather not go out at busy times. You can provide that for them. They're out there; they just need to find you.
Protect your non-teaching time
Protecting your non-teaching time is really important to me. I mention downtime almost every time I talk about anything: scheduling downtime, protecting your downtime, not rescheduling lessons at all, and certainly not into downtime or free time. We're all human, and we all need time to rest and recuperate, and to switch off and do something that has nothing to do with music teaching. It's good for our brains and good for our nervous systems.
Not teaching on Fridays or at weekends is not laziness, not in the slightest. It's time to recuperate, just as nine to five, Monday to Friday workers need their weekends. We need our weekends too, so that we can come back on a Monday, like me, teach 14 students, and not be completely wiped out by it. Non-teaching time isn't optional. It's part of how a studio that lasts is built.
Part 4: The systems that give me my time back
My cancellation policy
I mentioned earlier that it's the decisions we make that determine the structure of our week and the sustainability of our studios, along with the systems we use to protect that time. Now I'm going to talk about some of the systems that have given me back my time in practice, the ones that have made a real difference.
I want to start with, surprise, surprise, my cancellation policy. This is where I've been able to protect my time most successfully. If you're not familiar with it, I have a very strict policy: any lessons missed by the student are charged for, and not refunded or rescheduled. Full stop. The exception is bereavement. If the absence is due to a bereavement, I'll refund the lesson. Otherwise, whether the student is ill, away on a school trip, or the grandparents are on holiday and can't bring them, I'm still there ready for the lesson, so the lesson is charged for.
The first time people hear this policy, if they're not familiar with everything I talk about, it can be a bit of a shock, so I apologise if it's shocked you. But it's a system I've operated diligently for the last few years, and I now have a studio where I no longer fear requests for reschedules or for lessons to be carried over, because all my students and families understand how my studio policies work. They opted to sign up for lessons with me knowing all of this, so they understand the process, and no one pushes the boundaries.
It has saved me so much time, as well as a lot of income. When I tally up at the end of an academic year (which we're coming up to now) how much income I've saved by not refunding lessons or losing out by rescheduling them, it's enormous. It really brings home how important it is to have a good cancellation policy, and to stand up for it. I make that point because I had a great cancellation policy in the beginning, but I didn't stand up for it. I'd sheepishly share it with students and families when we first met, and then we'd never speak of it again, and I'd offer refunds and reschedules when people missed lessons. Big mistake. I don't do that any more.
So when a cancellation text comes in, I reply straight away: "Thanks for letting me know. I'm sorry they can't make their lesson this week. I look forward to seeing them next week." Then in my Google Calendar, I add "(cancelled)" to the end of their scheduled lesson and change the colour from lavender to blueberry. That's my colour coding, so I can see at a glance who's cancelled.
I don't waste any time on it. I don't need to spend time thinking about how to respond because I feel uncomfortable holding my boundaries. I don't waste mental energy or stress wondering how they'll react when I say, "Thank you, but I'm not refunding the lesson." I don't have to worry about any of that. I'm also not wasting time by rescheduling into, in inverted commas, "free time", because it isn't free time. When you reschedule a lesson, you're giving away a lesson for free, taking time from something else.
And there's no knock-on effect. I'm not spending time updating invoices, sending refunds, generating credit notes or jotting down a reminder to carry that lesson over to the next term. All of those things take precious time, and with this one system, a robust cancellation policy that you support, you save time in so many different areas. You also don't carry the mental load of disappointment about lost income, which is what it used to mean for me. Every cancelled lesson was, "Oh well, that's another lesson I won't get paid for, and I can't make up for it." All of that's gone with a good cancellation policy.
Monthly billing
Monthly billing is another system I can't stop talking about. I switched to monthly billing four years ago, and that single change has eliminated the most admin time and the biggest mental load I had. I'm not calculating bespoke termly invoices any more, and I'm not chasing payments. Yes, you heard me right: I'm not chasing payments, beyond sending a one-click reminder email to maybe one or two students each month if they've missed the deadline of the first of the month. All my income comes in on the first of every month, and that's it. And I have recurring automated invoices; I don't have to do anything, they just go out every month like clockwork. If you want to know more about monthly billing, I have a blog post about it, and I've done a podcast episode about monthly billing too, so you can hop over and listen to that after this one if you like.
Scheduled admin time
Another system is scheduling my admin time, which I've already mentioned. I schedule one hour on the second or third of each month to log monthly payments, rather than letting invoicing bleed into every single gap. I'm intentional about when I spend time on invoicing. I just log on, check all the payments, put them in my Excel spreadsheet and log them in Zoho Books, and that's it.
Lesson planning
Another system I use is for lesson planning. This is an area that can really eat up a lot of time for no extra benefit to you or the student. Given enough time, you could spend hours creating the most beautiful lesson plans for every single student every single week. But there's a limit to the benefit for each student and for you as a teacher.
For a long time, I used A4 lined Pukka Pads, one per term. I'd have a couple of pages per student, write down the dates, and under each date write down what we'd cover in the lesson. I did that for a number of years, and I have a new product in development. It's in beta testing at the moment; you might have heard of it. It's called the Teacher Piano Planner. I've been using my prototype for the last two terms, and a number of teachers are using the Teacher Piano Planner for the summer term. They're just about coming up to the point where they'll complete their feedback form and let me know how it's gone, with ideas for improvement.
One of the main reasons for creating the Teacher Piano Planner is that I wanted to streamline the process of planning lesson to lesson for each student through each term. I've come to realise that the system that works best for me is limiting the amount of space I have to write a lesson plan. If it's open-ended, it can go on and on. When you look back at what you completed in the lesson, you can see just how much time and energy you spent thinking up wonderful things you never got on to. It's not totally wasted time, because thinking through different activities for your students will come back to you again and again. But doing it every week for every student is a bit of a waste of time, I'd argue, because it has to align with what's feasible in a half-hour or 45-minute lesson.
The Teacher Piano Planner is a larger version of my student piano planners, with more relevant things for us as music teachers. It's a structured planning tool for the term (the book lasts a term), with spaces for lesson notes for each student, up to 30 students in this first version. It has loads of other features, like scale and arpeggio trackers, a term calendar, and preparation pages for exams, festivals and recitals, and all sorts of good stuff.
But the main system I've built into the Teacher Piano Planner is a little table for each student, where I put the date at the top for each week's lesson, note that they've attended and what we covered, and tick things off if we completed them, or put them in brackets if we didn't. Then I can move them to the next lesson, or pivot in a different direction based on what happened in the lesson.
That system has let me focus my lesson planning week to week, so I'm not spending an hour or two going through lesson plans for 30 students on a Sunday evening, getting completely tangled up trying to remember how this student coped with that sight reading card last lesson, how that student is getting on with this Level 2 piece, or how prepared another student is for the next recital. It's a lot of brain power to think back through a whole week. With the Teacher Piano Planner, it's all in front of you.
What I tend to do is, at the end of a day of teaching, I quickly jot down the next week's lesson tasks for each student I've taught, on a Monday, for example. Then, the next Monday, I open the planner and it reminds me what we were working on, the thoughts I had at the end of the lesson, and where to focus next. I'm doing it while it's fresh in my head, so I don't have to recall it from distant memory, which makes it that much easier. I can wake up on a Monday knowing I've got the notes I need for all my lessons that day. The Teacher Piano Planner will be available this summer, 2026, so watch this space.
The Time-Saving Quiz
A couple of years ago, I created a time-saving quiz that looks at all the main areas where our time can go. It's quite a fun little exercise, and it gives you a score for each area and recommendations based on your scores. It's a free download, and the link will be in the show notes. It's a PDF you can fill in digitally, and if you do, all the scores are added up for you on the last page, giving you what you need to access your results, with a link to them on the back page.
So if you're not sure where to focus your attention to improve your time management as a music teacher, I'd encourage you to try the Time-Saving Quiz. It'll give you lots of helpful suggestions for the area you need the most help with. And if not, it'll give you a nice boost to know you've scored quite highly in those areas.
Limiting your availability while you grow
I really used to struggle with the idea of limiting my availability while I was growing my studio, because I didn't want to sabotage my business or put any barriers in the way of taking on new students. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn't it? When I look back, I took on every student who wanted to join my studio and wasn't intentional about scheduling, and I had a weekly schedule that was all chopped up, all over the place and unmanageable, with a lot of dead space I couldn't use.
When I decided to be intentional about scheduling, even while still growing my studio, I struggled to justify limiting my availability, knowing I had loads of spaces across the week that I could potentially offer. But they weren't really lesson spaces. It's very easy to fall into thinking any free space is space for a student, because that takes no account of your energy levels at that point in the day or week, or of whatever else is happening that day with your family or your children, if you have them.
Just because you don't have loads of students doesn't mean you don't deserve to limit your availability. Limiting your availability doesn't reduce your chances of filling your studio; it increases them, because you start attracting students who fit your schedule, rather than taking every student who comes your way, or indeed every student who can't fit into anyone else's schedule.
When you're clearer about your teaching slots, and you choose when you want to teach and when you don't, it becomes easier to fit students into those slots. Someone comes along saying, "Oh, I'd love to have lessons again," has their trial lesson and wants to sign up, and you're not left with an open-ended "Well, when are you available?" You know exactly what you can offer, so you offer the next available slot on the relevant day. It's much more structured, and you end up with the teaching schedule you intended: one that gives you breaks at the right times, and downtime at certain points in the week, like my Wednesdays not being completely full on.
One point I'd like to make is that it's really hard to change lessons once they're established. If you've taken on a whole bunch of students and placed them wherever they wanted in the week, it's harder to then shuffle them into a schedule that suits you, the teacher, than if you'd planned it in the first place. If you're in that situation right now, it's not impossible to change. It's absolutely possible; it just takes a bit more effort and work. I did it, in effect, when I moved all my Thursday afternoon and evening students to other slots in the week. So it is possible, but it's easier if you go in knowing you can schedule students where you want to teach them.
"All my students need evening slots"
Lots of music teachers go into this believing afternoon and evening lesson slots are the only feasible ones. Based on my own experience, I'd argue that's not true. I have just over 30 students at the moment, and half of them come during the working day, in the morning and before school finishes. I've managed that by attracting my ideal students, who are a mix of children and adults: retired adults, adults with flexible working arrangements and home educated children. That's how I've got the structure I have for my teaching week.
So I'd like to reframe the idea that "all my students need evening slots, and I can't change that". Some do. Some really do need after school or evening slots, but not all of them, and unless you ask, you'll never know. Once you realise who you want to teach, based on all these factors, you can start attracting your ideal students. I did an episode on this, Episode 7, so if you want to understand more, go and listen to that one as well. To attract your ideal students, you first have to work out who they are, and then speak to them in everything you put out online and on your website. But on this particular idea that students only come in the afternoon or evening: it's not necessarily true, and unless you challenge it, or look for students who are available during the day, you won't find them. So it's definitely worth testing the assumption before concluding your schedule can never change.
"Batching admin doesn't work for me"
I've heard teachers say they've tried batching their admin and it didn't work. But I'd argue that most of the time batching fails, it's not because it doesn't work. It's because that time slot wasn't protected. If you don't schedule it in your calendar or diary (wherever you decide how to spend your time) as an actual appointment, your brain will always see it as optional, and something else will push it out of the way, like rescheduling a student. Those are prime places where admin gets shoved to one side, because you can do it at another time, and that's how admin ends up creeping into your free time and your downtime. It gets into your Sunday evening, when you want to be relaxing and enjoying time with your family, not doing admin. So your admin needs to be treated as a commitment in your diary, not as a hope.
"I feel guilty taking days off"
I've also heard teachers say they feel guilty having days off when they know other teachers are available. I haven't felt this myself, but when other teachers are available isn't your benchmark for when you should be teaching. There could be a studio open seven days a week; that doesn't make it a better studio. It's probably a more exhausted one, if it's a single teacher teaching seven days a week. More often than not, it might be a music school with a number of teachers, and if it's open seven days a week, I can pretty much guarantee not every teacher works seven days a week. And if they do, they're unlikely to be as well rested as a teacher who has some downtime.
So if you feel guilty for not teaching on some prime teaching days, I'd encourage you to take ownership of your working week, because you're the only person who knows your own energy levels. You know when you work best. If teaching in the morning is better for you, go for it. Start attracting your ideal students who are available during the day, in the mornings or on weekdays, and try not to feel guilty about not teaching on days when you know other teachers are. It's a very personal choice, and you can be the best teacher you can be when you teach at times that work with your own energy.
One thing to try this week
To bring this episode to a close, I'd like you to try one thing this week. Take a piece of paper and write down your teaching week exactly as it is right now. Write the days of the week, Monday through to Sunday, and note down when your lessons are, where you have gaps, and whether you've allocated admin to certain places in your week. Then try to be objective, look at your teaching week, and decide: "Is this the teaching week I really want? Or has it just ended up this way?"
Or you can think about it like this: "If I could change anything about my teaching week, what would it be?" Don't worry about how likely it is that you can change it, because you can. You can change anything you want to. You work for yourself, so you can make these changes. Sometimes they feel impossible, but I promise you they're not. Think about how your teaching week would look if you could design it from scratch and still have the same number of students. I can pretty much guarantee most teachers will find there are some things they'd like to change. Some things work fine, but some don't.
It doesn't mean you're failing. We all end up here at some point, but we very rarely reflect on our teaching schedules this way, because once a student is scheduled, it feels set in stone. But it doesn't have to be. Think about it from the student's perspective: each year they might sign up for different school clubs. How many times have you been asked to move students around for a new academic year because they've taken up a different sport after school, another instrument or some other club? That doesn't mean you're not allowed to as well. You are allowed to restructure your week, and the start of a new academic year is an ideal time for a clean change, as long as you give your students enough notice.
Resources
I've mentioned a few things in this episode. The Teacher Piano Planner will be available this summer, summer 2026. The Time-Saving Quiz is free, and the link will be in the show notes. If you need any one-to-one support, I offer Focus Sessions, and I'll put the link for those in the show notes as well; you can book on the website. And of course, I have the free studio policy template, if the point I made about cancellation policies resonated with you. It's a free Canva template you can adapt for your own studio, and it's my most popular freebie to date, so go ahead and make use of it.
Control of my time
Just to finish off: having changed my teaching schedule to fit my life and my energy levels really does feel fantastic. I have control of my time, I know I'm not overstretching myself, and there isn't a single day in the week I have to gear myself up for. Even the Monday with all 14 students: because it's a Monday and I'll have rested at the weekend, and I go into it knowing that's all I'm doing that day (just these lessons, nothing else crammed in), I have enough energy every day for all my students.
And when I finish on a Thursday afternoon, I know I can collect my kids from school, relax and get other things done without being "on", because we have to be on when we're teaching, don't we? There's no half-hearted teaching, certainly not in my life, and I'm sure not for anyone listening to this podcast. Knowing my admin tasks are covered, my lesson notes are made through the week, and there's nothing hanging over into the weekend makes a huge difference to my wellbeing and my satisfaction as a music teacher. I know I'm providing the right level of support for my students, without overpromising and exhausting myself.
I'll finish with non-teaching time. We can allocate it exactly where we need it, including downtime. Downtime needs to be in your week, and not just once a week. You need downtime regularly, so you're not on high alert, so your nervous system can relax, and so you can refresh yourself and be the best teacher you can be for your students.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful, and I hope you enjoy the Time-Saving Quiz if you try it; it's fun, but also informative. If you know a music teacher who would benefit from this episode, please share the link with them. And if you're enjoying this podcast, I'd be very grateful if you could leave me a review, so more music teachers like you can find it. Until next time, bye bye.
