Month: July 2019

By Miranda Wilson

This post is the third in a multi-part series on time management for music professionals.

How do you want people to remember you after you die?

I hope my family and friends will talk about the music I made, the lessons I taught, the words I wrote, and the way I made them feel.

Sometimes, when day-to-day stresses distract me from my purpose, I remind myself that no one is going to stand up at my funeral and proclaim “Her house was perfectly clean, and she was perfectly thin.”

And yet, we high-achieving women of a certain age (think grown-up Hermione Grainger) put a lot of pressure on ourselves to be perfect. It’s not enough to be at the top of our professions, we also have to be perfect mothers, run marathons, and live in houses that look like something out of Better Homes and Gardens. It’s a lot of pressure.

Continue reading “Time Management for Musicians Part 3: The 15-Minute Rule” →

By Miranda Wilson

This post is the second in a multi-part series on time management for music professionals.

Do you ever find yourself getting sucked into a necessary but boring task that takes all the time you wanted to spend doing something that means a lot to you? Did 56 new emails appear in the last five minutes, threatening to eat up your precious creative time? Does your music practice get pushed into last priority by all the other things you have to do? Are you angry and resentful about it?

So was I. Until…

Continue reading “Time Management for Musicians Part 2: Optimal Brain Time” →

By Miranda Wilson

This post is the first in a multi-part series on time management for music professionals.

Becoming a music professor was my goal from the first magical minute I stepped on campus as an undergraduate more then 20 years ago. What could be more blissful, I thought, than living the life of the mind and making great music while you’re at it? I imagined myself delivering passionate lectures, fixing bow-holds, writing essays, and travelling all over the world for recitals and festivals.

What I pictured myself doing, in other words, was the fun part of being a music professor.

Continue reading “Time Management for Musicians Part 1: the Priority To-Do List” →