Productivity for Music Teachers
As a music teacher, it always feels like there’s more to do than there are hours in a day. But, there’s no way around it; to build and create successful programs, you must be productive. But being productive isn’t about packing your schedule with tasks. That leads to stress, burnout, and health problems. Instead, developing your focus and working on the right things makes the difference between success and failure as a music teacher.
Becoming a Productive Music Teacher Comes Down to Three Essentials
Focus
We live in an age of procrastination and distraction. Develop your ability to maintain focus for a huge advantage.
Habits
You are what you do on a daily basis. Learn how to develop productive habits and follow through to become unstoppable.
Tools
Automate the tasks that steal your time but must be done. Then, you can focus the important things only you can do.
Develop Your Focus
Our world has made our attention spans shorter than ever. Even now, you’re probably itching to click over to another tab. When you struggle with attention, your work and personal lives suffer. But in an age of distraction, developing your ability to focus for long stretches will give you a huge advantage. These posts will help you with just that.
Apps That Will Save You Time
Sick of losing hours of time with something as simple as scheduling? This is just one of many repetitive tasks that can be automated with technology. Most are free, but even the paid ones are worth the time you save. These posts show you how to use some of the most effective ones so you can take more time back to do what’s most important.
In a Distracted World, Productivity is Your Unique Advantage
As creatives, we have three problems that cripple our productivity.
1. We have so many projects we want to do, we never get to any of them.
2. We have a tendency to be scatterbrained. Well, if you’re like me, anyway. On top of this, we’re constantly bombarded by information, communication, and advertisements engineered to steal our attention.
3. Society’s notion of productivity is a lie. Our culture worships the 80-hour work week. This is not only unproductive, but it’s ineffective and unhealthy.
Finding Your Top Priority
Productivity is not about getting the most done as quickly as possible. Even if you accomplish more in less time, you're just going to fill that extra time with more work.
True productivity is about getting the right things done that will move your project forward. Not just any project. But, your top priority. The thing that will bring you closer to the change you want to see in the world through your teaching.
An Environment Where Productivity is Impossible
You live in the most anti-productive world mankind has ever known.
Attention has become one of the rarest, most valuable resources on the planet. And the technology in our pocket has been engineered to take advantage of our human behaviors to steal our attention for its own purposes.
These pieces of technology take advantage of the same part of our brain that enjoys the slot machine at the casino. Every notification, app, or ding on your phone is created to set off the “variable reward” phenomenon in your mind. This literally renders you incapable of focusing on any one task.
If you want to be an effective music teacher and build programs that will change the world, you have to build habits that eliminate these distractions. You will need to alter your work environment so that you control your attention, not Facebook. Even when you’re working on your computer.
Without this deliberate attention to a productive environment, your work will always remain an uphill battle.
Getting More Done Doesn't Mean You're Being Productive
Anyone can fill their calendar with work. CEO’s do it all the time. But, are they really spending all that time getting important work that moves the needle? Not likely.
As a culture, we brag about our overloaded schedules like it’s a badge of honor. When really, we’re holding ourselves back from doing the work that matters.
In order to become a productivity machine, you must organize your time in two ways. First, you must protect the time you will use to move your most important projects forward. Second, you must block off the time you will use to accomplish the tasks that aren’t so exciting, but need to be done (paying bills, responding to emails, etc.). Everything else can wait or be outsourced.
It's Time to Break Free
The hardest part is getting started.
It starts with making the decision to break free from the human zoo of falling into the same counterproductive habits day in and day out.
As with anything, developing productivity habits is a practice. You weren't born with this information. Neither was I. We learn as we go. But, it all starts with the decision to get started.
So...ready to begin?
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