I Don't Work Late and I Don't Work Weekends: Here's How

If you feel like your teaching week runs you more than you run it, this episode is a realistic look at what really changes things. Not a productivity system or a colour-coded calendar, but an honest conversation about what time management means when you're self-employed, why so much of the generic advice misses the point, and what has truly made a difference in running a full studio.

I talk through why most time management advice is built for a different kind of work, the difference between being busy and being productive, and how I design my teaching week around my energy rather than simply my availability. I'm specific about what that looks like in practice: why I teach Monday to Thursday, why I finish on Thursday just after lunch, and what made that possible.

I also cover the systems and habits that have genuinely given me back time, and I work through the four objections that tend to stop teachers from making changes to how they work.

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

Resources mentioned:

Time-Saving Quiz

Teacher Piano Planner (launching summer 2026)

Focus Sessions (£67/hr)

Access the show notes here: Episode 8 Show Notes

Transcript

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