If the studio admin side of teaching is your favourite part, this blog isn’t for you.

But if you’re like most other music teachers, you prefer the lessons.

You want to put all your time and energy into helping your students grow into confident musicians…rather than fretting about scheduling and payments.

If we’ve hit the nail on the head with that, there are a few other predictions about you we’d like to make…

You’d rather listen to Jingle Bells 30 times a day for a whole month than work on your studio policies

A bold statement.

But the studio admin task of writing studio policies is not at the top of any music teacher’s list of Things That Bring Me Joy.

After you’ve written them, you then have the laborious task of getting your students and families to read them and respect them.

Have some policy-writing assistance, in the form of:

• A podcast interview with Nicola Cantan, covering what to consider when making policies
  
• Studio Policy Tune Up Powerpack – save yourself time and headaches with this studio admin powerpack. Yes, it’s $27. But it’ll save you so much time and effort.
  
• There’s also a great article by Jaclyn Mrozek (The Scrappy Piano Teacher) in the TopMusicMag: Streamlining Your Studio (more about that in a moment)

Your download folder is an absolute mess, and you’ve lost track of all the digital sheet music and games you’ve ever bought

You remember downloading an activity to help Maisie with time signatures, but then you can’t find it anywhere.

You check your download folder, but don’t have time to decipher all the files that you hurriedly (and stupidly) named “Lkjaskd” or “download232” or “print this later”.

You need a better organisation system. (Or at this point, just any organisation system)

Here are some organising ideas, in the form of:

• An interview with Amy Chaplin and Joy Morin about using Notion to Organise your Studio and Life
• A blog by Rosemarie Penner about organising your iPad
• There’s also a great article by Amy Chaplin (from Piano Pantry) in the TopMusicMag: Streamlining Your Studio (keep scrolling to find out more about that)

You’ve chased down payments so many times you could do it in your sleep (and sometimes have nightmares where payments are chasing you down)

“Hi Sam, just a reminder that fees were due on 1st of the month and it’s now the 27th…”

Even typing that to a fictional student gave me that nervous, icky pit-in-my-stomach feeling.

Bleh.

I don’t miss that feeling.

Because what I (very luckily) discovered was automated payment systems.

There are many ways you can automate payments, including:

• Charge a flat monthly rate and set up automated billing through your bank
• PayPal recurring payments (also known as subscriptions)

There are also many software solutions, including:

• My Music Staff
• Fons
• Opus1

These three platforms answered three big questions in the TopMusicMag: Streamlining Your Studio

You want to feel validated in your studio admin frustrations and problems, while getting some helpful advice

The internet is full of teachers who present themselves as having all the answers and leading a perfect teacher life.

Two truths:

1. They’re lying. No one has it all figured out. There’ll be some aspect of their teacher life where they don’t feel confident (they just don’t show us that)
2. No matter how organised and together someone is, they’ve had to trial and error to get to that point.

If you’re feeling like your scheduling system, or the way you communicate with parents, isn’t as professional or streamlined as it could be, don’t stress.

The first step is acknowledging that you need to make a change.

The second step is figuring out how to make that change.

TopMusicMag: Streamlining Your Studio won’t fix all your problems (but it’ll help)

We’ve got interviews and articles from a bunch of teachers who have found ways to streamline their studio admin.

We’re talking

• Habits that bring more flow and focus to your teaching life
• Quick and easy ways to communicate with studio families
• Ensuring you’re spending time wisely
• ChatGPT prompts that give you usable responses
• Automated payments, scheduling, and communication
• Nurturing new students on autopilot

So if you’re spending too much time on admin tasks, download the free mag.