My annual resume… and the things I learned from it

Holy blog-posts-I wish-I-had-posted-at-the-end-of-last-school-year-but-here-we-are-on-the-eve-of-my-new-school-year Batman! I guess its never too late to share some reflections on last school year as I look towards this one. I mention this just to caution you to read it as if I was posting it a month ago.

I am wishing my teacher friends (whether you have been back at school for days now, or are just starting) a wonderful new year!

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read):

It’s summer. I am reflecting on the school year. I had a very successful year professionally. It took a toll on me but I learned a lot. I will be saying no to some things this coming year. I also learned how to accomplish more in less time using tools like BusyCal and OmniFocus. Meal planning for the week was time efficient and healthier. Sneaking exercise into my day doubled as a teaching tool.

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Prologue

I am nearing the end of a summer vacation that has included everything from cruising the coastline of Kauai with the top down, strolling through the city streets of San Jose with dear friends, to listening to incredible live music in the mountains of Telluride, Colorado. Summer is almost over. As I sit on the couch in Massanutten, VA with nothing in my schedule for the day other than maybe sitting here a little longer, I thought it would be worth finishing this blog post that has been sitting in my inbox for months.

It is time to take inventory of what was, by my measure, a professionally successful year. I have kept busy musically, while learning my limits and what it means to push them. This busy schedule forced me to examine stress (all stress is stress, even good stress), and manage energy and attention. I experimented with tackling tasks in short bursts of free time as well as saying "no." Teacher burnout is a real thing, but it is possible to manage a thick workload when you really love what you do. Warning: this is an out of the ordinary post for me. The following section is a potentially braggy list of stuff I did with my time this year. The tone of this post is even more conversational than usual, but also very practical. If you want to get to the practical part and skip my self-congratulating list of accomplishments, scroll down to “Learnings.” 

Here was my year in “stuff”…

My Annual Resume

Teaching band: First and foremost, if all I did this year was teach music to middle schoolers, I would consider that a success. As a whole, my music department put on over 16 concerts this year. We directed 14 performing groups, which played entirely different music on every one of those concerts. 

Teaching private lessons: The second busiest domain of my life was my private percussion teaching studio, comprised of 25-30 students. Many of these students made local and state level GT and Honor bands, performed successfully at Solo and Ensemble Festivals, made their top ensembles, and demonstrated inspiring levels of musical growth. 

Conference presenting: This year I had the opportunity to present at seven state level music education conferences on subjects: managing time and tasks effectively, getting digitally organized, using an iPad to work with sheet music, and playing in tune with the support of tuning apps. I presented at the Ohio, Texas, Tennessee, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York Music Educators Associations, in addition to the NAfME Conference in Texas. I consider these trips to be a great way to promote my book and continue to make connections with music educators and technology specialists across the country.

Co Directing the Elementary School Honor Band: A first for me! I had the opportunity to co direct the Elementary School Honor Band in my district, the Howard County Public School System. This 85 piece ensemble rehearsed from January through May and then put on a concert in May. It represented students from every Elementary School in our very diverse school district. 

Taking the Symphony Orchestra to Perform at the MMEA Conference: My orchestra director colleague and I got to take our extra-curricular Symphony Orchestra to our state level music educators association conference to perform. It was nice to exercise my directing skills in a music conference, as they pertain to my career more directly than technology.

Church Music Directing: For the past three years, I directed a contemporary music ensemble at the church where I grew up. I ultimately had to step down from this back in January. More on that below. 

New Podcast: Launched a new podcast, The Class Nerd podcast, with Nashville based educator, Craig McClellan. Episodes 1-10 are already out. Listen here.

Podcasting and Blogging: I managed to update my blog and podcast with content that I feel passionate about, though not as regularly as I wished. I plan to be more regular here this coming school year.

Having Fun! Finally, I managed to have a life! My wife and I went on numerous trips, enjoyed drinks with friends, kept up with a few serial dramas, and more. And I managed to get seven hours of sleep most nights.

So here are some things I learned...

Learnings

Too much stuff!!!

Wouldn’t you be surprised to know that I learned this amount of commitment is not sustainable! This year was very busy, and while I said a moment ago that I managed to have a life, I still need to have a better family balance with work. Looking back on all of those conferences, that was seven weeks out of a 40 week school year that I could have been cooking dinner with my wife, listening to music in the dining room. I don’t regret any moment of those conferences, but I would like to achieve a better balance next year.

Transition time is key

I also continue to realize how important transition time is. The colorful blocks in my calendar app had to be touching to fit all of my commitments into my schedule this past year. Having an extra 20 minutes here and there between stuff in my calendar helps me to stay on top of the logistic things that are the glue that hold the rest of the ship together. It also gives me a greater sense of calm and peace which allows my brain to better process what I have just done and approach what I am about to do with better clarity.

Just say no

I have been practicing saying no over the years. But sometimes saying no to prospective commitments is easier than those that you have been engaged with for years. In the thick of the school year, I had to let go of a job I have held for the past three years running a contemporary music ensemble at the church I grew up in. It was as an engaging task on multiple fronts, but I was ultimately not giving it the time it needed and so I had to make a choice. 

I will be making numerous other choices like this next school year. For example, I don’t think presenting at seven conferences is going to work out for me every school year, so next year I am aiming for one. And if my proposals are not accepted at any of them, I will present at none. But I will most likely pick one that has been an engaging source of professional community for me, and attend that one simply to learn.

Time and energy management

One of the challenges that increased the intensity of all of the above commitments was that my work day frequently only included one period of planning a day. This was a choice I made to see more of my students in instrument sectionals. It is hard to appreciate my own decision while in the weeds, but I think time will prove that this was a good choice.

This left me with some options… Wake up earlier and get some extra work done. This requires me to go to bed earlier. Which I never did. So the cycle would continue onward and I would wake up late. This means that I only have lunch and a planning to do any prep work for my day. Which also means I need to catch up after the school day which is actually when my mind is most focused on what I need to do. The problem is that two nights of the week I am running straight home to teach private lessons. The other three I am teaching an after school Jazz Band or Percussion Ensemble, then I am running straight home to teach lessons. Some nights I was not able to catch up until as late as 8 or 9. But then I am too tired to do anything other than watch Netflix. Not to mention I am too removed from my school day to meaningfully reflect. So I sit on the couch. And then maybe after an episode of Westworld, I take care of some email and tasks. Then I go to sleep late. Not too late to get a solid 6-7 hours, but too late to wake up early and get a head start the next morning. 

Of course, this includes little time for cooking or exercise. 

So how did I manage this? Barely… but I made some progress…

Cooking and Exercise

Exercise ended up getting the shaft towards the middle of the year. As I mentioned earlier, I am too tired at 9 pm, so I have to do it at 5 in the morning or most nights it wouldn’t happen. 

I was motivated to do this only if I was working towards something. So for the first half of the year, my wife and I registered for what felt like every 5K offered in the state of Maryland. This got me running whenever I could, even during small 30 minute cracks of transition time in my schedule.

I am also very competitive with my orchestra teaching colleague. We both have the Nike+ Apple Watch and during the months of fall would constantly compete over who could run more miles by comparing the Nike+ leaderboards every day in class. Finding a friend or coworker to work out with can be very motivating, especially when you talk about it constantly throughout the day.

We also learned to “cheat” by turning things into workouts that might otherwise not be considered exercise. We have to tear down the entire cafeteria table layout and set up 85 chairs and stands every Tuesday and Thursday morning for our before-school Symphony Orchestra rehearsals. If you do this really fast and run an Apple Watch “Other” workout, you’d be surprised how many calories you can burn. We got that routine down to seven minutes by the middle of the year. And I can do it in 16 by myself. #proud

When it got cold outside, we decided to change it up. Our principal had a pull up bar sitting in his basement. We asked for it and decided that we would start doing pull-ups at the turn of every class period. Educators as we are, we decided that we would use this as a teaching tool. Much like playing an instrument, if you do something in small increments consistently, you get better. Who knew? Not our students... they continued to think our leaderboard of pull-ups was a competition until the last day of school. But some of them caught on. We were modeling how to develop skills with consistent work ethic. It is a good message to put on display. And my upper body got way stronger.

Alright, to my final work out hack. Fact: Young wind instrumentalists don’t know how to breathe properly. To make a good sound, you have to take a deep and relaxed breath in. Kids don’t know how to do this. But the body knows how to do it naturally… when it is out of breath. So for a sectional lesson or two a year, I try to put my students into this state by making them work out as a warm up. It started with jumping jacks, but I found that didn’t wear their energetic little bodies out enough so I took this 7 Minute Workout App (this is another great way to sneak workouts in to your work day, by the way), and projected it onto the big screen in my room. I did this for an entire rotation of sectionals this year (which is seven school days long). And I teach three sectionals a day. That is three high intensity workouts a day for a week and a half. Those kids have never made a fuller, fatter tone (that lacks any sense of control whatsoever... you kind of have to tell them that, and then express the need to breathe deeply but then have a consistent airflow out).

The 7 Minute Workout app.

The 7 Minute Workout app.

On to food. My wife is super generous about cooking dinners and picks up a huge weight there. But we don’t have any time to cook the other meals of the day. So what do we do?

Our grocery list starts with the following...eggs, onion, green pepper, salmon, chicken, sweet potatoes, avocados, and asparagus. Some weeks we stock up on yogurt and nuts. I am a creature of habit and can eat the same thing every day for a while before needing to change it up.

So every Sunday, we buy all of this stuff I just mentioned. Then 1-2 dozen eggs, an onion, and a green pepper go into a bowl with salt and pepper. Next, we pour this mixture into these silicon muffin tins and cook for 20-30 minutes at 425 degrees. I eat two of these with a half avocado every morning. I can make close to the best cup of coffee imaginable in under seven minutes with Blue Bottle coffee, an Aeropress, a Baratsa Virtuoso grinder, and this kettle

This is a slightly fancier recipe for the eggy things. By the way, Paprika is a killer app for recipe planning.

This is a slightly fancier recipe for the eggy things. By the way, Paprika is a killer app for recipe planning.

Next is lunch. Easy. All of those other vegetables get roasted with coconut oil, salt, and pepper, until lightly browned. Then the chicken and or salmon goes in the oven until it is just barely safe from poisoning me. I pre-pack these into my Prepd lunch box modular containers and all of it fits in my backpack. No need to bring a lunch box. I supplement with nuts and RX Bars.

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Tech Tools

Now on to time and energy management. Tools that help me manage the many events in my day and the tasks I squeeze in the cracks. BusyCal is my go to on the Mac. It looks and feels like the macOS Calendar app in nearly every way with a ton of great power features on top. It has weather integration, the ability to tag events with people, and more. My favorite is a persistently open “Info” panel on the right side of the screen. Instead of double clicking events to see the notes and location I have assigned them, I click once. And instead of a floating modal box, I can always see the contents of my events. This feature alone is worth the 50 dollars for me. Especially because I use the notes field to track what my private students are working on and I hate clicking so many times in the standard Calendar app to get this info to show up in those modular pop-over windows.

Each lesson, I type student’s assignment into the “notes” field of their block. My “Lessons” calendar is in Google Calendar, and I have published it to a password protected part of my website for private students only. This way, they can log in to see when their next lesson is, and also what I assigned them recently. Now there is no excuse for them to say they forgot what I assigned. And it cuts down tremendously on unneeded parent communication. 

Check out the right side of the user interface of BusyCal. Reminders and an edit window can be persistently visible on the screen.

Check out the right side of the user interface of BusyCal. Reminders and an edit window can be persistently visible on the screen.

OmniFocus has been my “todo” app for years. OmniFocus has a great feature called Review where you set your task lists to be reviewed every “x” days, weeks, or months. Every day, it rolls up projects that need to be reviewed. If I wake up up early, this is what I do the moment I sit down at my desk. But it is also possible to do in little spurts throughout the day. This ensures that things don’t slip through the cracks. 

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OmniFocus just released their version 3.0 for iOS. This introduces some killer new features. First of all, the Forecast view now shows your tasks inline with your calendar so that you have better context for when you should be working on them.

Next, OmniFocus 3 supports a tag that will show something in the Forecast even if it is not due. While Reviewing, for example, I simply swipe left on the tasks that I want to be thinking about for the day, and it adds them to the list. 

Forecast view shows me my todos in context with my calendar events.

Forecast view shows me my todos in context with my calendar events.

OmniFocus now allows you to assign multiple tags to the same task, so I have began including tags for energy level. “Low,” “Medium,” and “High” help me to filter items based on my current state. If I have five minutes, and haven’t eaten in a while, I can look at all the “Low” energy tags and get one or two done. 

Conclusion

I don’t have a grand way to conclude these 3000 words other than to say that I am very proud of my year. I am hoping that next year looks different. I’d like to be less busy, but more importantly, I want to be more focused. Chopping off “domains” of life should afford the opportunity to do fewer things better and with more peace of mind. For now, I think I am going to go for a run and try to enjoy this last week of summer. Please reach out to me if this post was helpful to you in any way shape or form. It took a lot of time to write. I thought about keeping it in a journal for only me, but was encouraged that it could benefit other teachers who are at similar risk for burnout or simply want to increase their productivity.

Expect more blogging next year! Until then, enjoy these final days of summer and have a wonderful school year!

 

Skepticism about Evernote’s new announcement

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As you probably know, I have been a huge advocate for Evernote in my book, clinics, and numerous podcasts. If you know that, you might also know that I have been looking for a replacement for it for years now. 

Evernote’s future has been unclear to me for a number of years now. While they have managed to keep their apps up to date with the latest iOS features, no major new features have been added to the platform in recent memory. Yet the company has raised prices, removed features from the free tier, and had some other small missteps. 

Yesterday, Evernote unveiled this post on their site. Its a followup to this post from earlier in the year. I thought the post from earlier in the year was a load of meaningless corporate and marketing speak, but today’s really takes the cake. And don’t even get me started on the post within today’s post that goes on and on for paragraphs about redesigning the app’s Elephant mascot, amongst other things. Dropbox tried this exact kind of thing earlier in the year where they make a huge rebrand announcement that is all graphic design and marketing fluff without any meat about how it will impact the user experience. And it hasn’t changed anything about how Dropbox is actually used other than making the user interface more difficult to understand in some places.

Like, really, Dropbox. In this limited space, could you seriously not think of any more information I might want to see while playing back an audio file other than this dude dancing next to a disco ball? This particular page is even worse on the sma…

Like, really, Dropbox. In this limited space, could you seriously not think of any more information I might want to see while playing back an audio file other than this dude dancing next to a disco ball? This particular page is even worse on the small screen of an iPhone.

To me, yesterday’s blog posts are further proof that Evernote does not have a clear vision for how to make their products better for users. The community has been very clear about what they want from the company. A better redesigned Mac app, markdown support, and code blocks, to name a few. But rather than disclose a roadmap of user facing product improvements, Evernote seems only committed to blowing steam through the use of fancy graphic design, photography, and web design. If only they put all of that time and money into actual features that would make users lives better. 

So I think this is the final straw. I am going to let my Evernote subscription lapse this fall when it comes to a close. The real challenge about this situation for me, and other Evernote users, is that it is the most fully featured note app on the market. Of all the things one might want from a note app, Evernote covers more of them than any of the competition. But unfortunately for Evernote, stock software like Apple Notes is good enough to do most of the things people need. And for those who want more, there is an emerging bunch of independent developers making note apps who show way more hustle, adding major features to their apps, annually (Bear, for example).

Apple Notes does such a nice job with simple text scraps, web clippings, and check lists, that the only primary use of Evernote I need to replace once my subscription lapses is the “everything bucket” use case. “Everything bucket” is the phrase I use to describe the dumping of PDFs, images, emails, and websites into a digital “drawer” so to speak, where I can later search these documents by the text within them. 

This summer I have been giving DEVONthink a try. It is a Mac and iOS app that is a one time paid purchase on each device. It is a document management app that has all of the “everything bucket" features of Evernote and more. I hope to write more on it soon. For now, I am pretty happy that I have an easy way to clip receipts, websites for later review, and emails, and have them made automatically text searchable. The DEVONthink app on Mac is hideous, and setting up iCloud sync took me a minute, but the utility of the app is worth it so far. I prefer something like this rather than to continue to support companies who string their customers along while they spend time and money on making their elephant mascot look more 2018. 

I may be wrong. Evernote could come out with a killer set of new features in the next 12 months, convincing me and the rest of the world to return to it. I’ll believe it when I see it. 

 

🎬 Featuring Percussionist, Ben Giroux!

This time last year my private student, Ben Giroux, was off to start his first year at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, MD. Today, his fantastic playing can be seen on the “Lessons” section of my website.

When I redesigned my website four years ago, my original intent was to feature all of the audition tapes I have recorded and produced for my college bound private students. For those entire four years only one of these videos has been posted while numerous others sit in untouched Final Cut Pro projects.

Well, no more! I am slowly working through these projects, and today you can check out Ben’s college audition tape on my Lessons page. Or just play the video below.

🎙 Recent Podcast Episodes - "Noteflight Marketplace" and "Going Paperless"

In case you do not subscribe to either of my podcasts, each had a new episode published this past week. They are good ones...

 

Going Paperless (Semester 1, Episode 8) | The Class Nerd - 

This week, The Class Nerd breaks down their paperless process. In this one, we cover scanning apps, file organization, PDF annotation apps, and handwritten note apps.

 

Noteflight Marketplace, with Friend John Mlynczak (Season 3, Episode 6) | Robby Burns + Friends -

This week Robby catches up with John Mlynczak, Managing Director of Noteflight, about their new Marketplace platform and the state of digital music publishing.

App of the Week: AirTable

I am becoming increasingly delighted by this web based spreadsheet app, AirTable. At first sight, AirTable was a little overwhelming to me and I could not quite see its use case in my life. Then I started playing with some of the prebuilt templates and things become clear.

AirTable allows users to create Worspaces which are little repositories of databases, which AirTable refers to as bases. A base is kind of like an Excel spreadsheet, only with very colorful, engaging, and customizable fields. Inside a base, you can have multiple databases (which kind of appear at first like sheets within an Excel doc). You can interact with the fields in your databases in a variety of methods beyond just simply typing text into them. You can create a place for an image, a place to add tags, check boxes, and more. One of the things I have been using AirTable to track is coffee that I like. Notice in the image below how colorful and interactive these documents are. 

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When I first started playing with this, I was floored when I noticed that one of the customizable fields can be set to mirror a record from another database. For example, in my coffee base I can have one database of roasters and another database of coffee. I can create a field in the coffee database called "roasters" that associates the coffee records with the roaster records that they correspond to. Upon this discovery, I realized- this is a relational database 1 for normal people! Cool stuff. 

Cross referencing coffee databases.

Cross referencing coffee databases.

AirTable has unlimited possible use cases. Most of my bases right now are great for tracking information when I need just a little bit more data and organizational power than a note app can handle. Another example of how I am using it is to plan my familie’s travel. Check out my family travel base below. I have one database of cities to visit, another of places to see, and a field to associate the two together. The date, cost, photo, and tagging fields make this a far more interactive and media rich process than writing it down in a note. Not to mention I can keep way more data visible at a time, without being overwhelmed by the clinical style of an Excel style spreadsheet. Did I mention that AirTable is collaborative!? Notice that I share this travel planning base with my wife, who can also add records, edit fields, and more.

Sharing the load of family trip planning is easy with AirTable’s collaborative features.

Sharing the load of family trip planning is easy with AirTable’s collaborative features.

My podcast host Craig McClellan has a fantastic overview of AirTable which features a far better description of how it functions conceptually than I am doing justice here. Craig is using this app to track certain elements of his students progress in the classroom, which you will get to hear all about on a coming episode of The Class Nerd podcast. It is really innovative and worth reading about if you want to get a better handle on the app or learn how to automate it.

Check out AirTable here for iOS and here for Android.

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    1    For those of you unfamiliar, a relational database (like FileMaker) is software that allows you to create multiple Excel like spreadsheets that you can link data between. Once you have created meaningful relationships between these different records, you can use tools to build user interface tools overtop this data so that you can interact with it more like an app (with buttons and text fields) rather than like a spreadsheet. Filemaker used to make a simple version of this software for the Mac called Bento which for me struck the perfect balance of this idea. Obviously, not that many felt this way. It was discontinued in 2013.

🗒 Drummin Dragons Technology Presentation

I am thrilled to be presenting at Howard Community College's Drummin Draggons music camp today. I will be sharing a number of apps that I use to practice effectively. Friend and colleague, Tim McKay, puts on this awesome camp every year. I am glad to be joining as a clinician.

If you are a student at this camp (or not), you can find links to download all of the apps I discussed today here: Drummin Dragons Technology Presentation | July 26, 2018 | Robby Burns

🎙 The Class Nerd - Episode 4: Drafts

This week on The Class Nerd, Craig and I pick apart our favorite iOS productivity app, Drafts.

I always explain Drafts as the app that most diminishes the cognitive load of my music teaching job and beyond. Gone are the days of writing down notes, todos, and other reminders on whatever scrap piece of paper is nearest to me only to forget everything when its most important. Drafts is the fastest way I know to take down an idea. I don't even have to think about what kind of idea it is because Drafts offers a rich list of actions that can send the text to other apps.

This episode might be out most technical yet, but don't let that scare you off. Drafts is one of those apps that is as complicated as you want it to be. You can get a ton of productivity out of it with very little learning curve.

Listen to the episode here.

 

🔗 Sonos gets AirPlay 2 Support and Affinity Designer Comes to iPad

It’s an exciting day for users of Apple products today. Two announcements that caught my attention are highlighted below...

Affinity Designer Debuts on iPad as a Full-Featured Graphic Design Tool – MacStories:

Nearly one year ago, Serif released Affinity Photo for the iPad as a full-featured photo editing powerhouse. Unlike what companies such as Adobe do, where a Mac app like Photoshop is broken down into less powerful versions on iOS, Affinity Photo was brought to the iPad with no compromises whatsoever. Today, that same philosophy is bringing us Serif's second major iPad app: Affinity Designer.

Where Affinity Photo focuses on photo editing, Affinity Designer is a vector-based illustration tool. And with full support for the Apple Pencil, iOS 11's drag and drop, and system technologies like Metal, the app looks like the ultimate portable design studio.

For a limited time, Affinity Designer is available at a launch price of $13.99, 30% off the regular price of $19.99.

I have long been looking for something like Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. I have been very happy with OmniGraffle for designing seating charts, posters, flyers, and other graphics on iOS, especially because it syncs flawlessly to its Mac counterpart. For $13.99 I am going to be very tempted to give Affinity Designer a spin. Download it here.

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Next up, Sonos!

Sonos Adds AirPlay 2 Support to Certain Speaker Models – MacStories

Sonos announced today that it has added AirPlay 2 support to compatible speaker systems. The update allows users to stream audio to the company’s Sonos One, Beam, Playbase, and the second generation Play:5 speakers from iOS apps that support AirPlay 2 of and from iTunes on a Mac.

I recently purchased a HomePod and have been looking forward to pairing its audio with my existing Sonos Playbar in the living room and Sonos Play:1 in the bedroom. Jason Snell wrote a great post for Macworld that gets into the all the details about how all of these different smart speakers play together.

Sonos update adds AirPlay 2 support | Macworld:

Perhaps most impressively, all AirPlay 2 speakers can play music in perfect synchronization. If you’ve got a HomePod or two and a compatible Sonos device, you can now select all those devices and play music through them, entirely in sync. Even better, if you’ve got incompatible Sonos devices and place them in the same group as an AirPlay 2-compatible Sonos device via the Sonos app, those speakers will also play synchronously. I was able to get music to play in sync throughout my house this morning, via a paired set of HomePods, a Play:5, and the (incompatible) Play:1 in my bathroom.

My two Sonos speakers are incompatible. So I can’t get too excited unless I buy a new Sonos One or Play:5. I do need one of these for the basement but it is a steep price to pay. Furthermore, it is a bummer that the old speakers cannot be controlled individually through the Apple home app, only as a group with a compatible Sonos.

I can bypass this problem in the living room, where my TV (with Apple TV attached) is running its audio through a Sonos Playbar. AirPlay allows a phone to send audio to an Apple TV on the same network, so if I want to control the Playbar individually, I just send audio to the living room Apple TV its attached to. The bedroom will be a different story, through I cannot imagine that many scenarios where I will need separate music or volume control in the bedroom and basement.

 

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🎙 The Class Nerd Podcast - Episode 2: 3rd Party Email Apps

If you didn’t know, I launched a new podcast with Nashville teacher, Craig McClellan, last week. It’s called The Class Nerd Podcast, and it is focused on connecting teachers to apps, services, tools, and tips, that will help them better do their jobs. 

 

We just released episode two, and it is all about third party email apps. Check it out here