Cutting Down on Information Triage

I’m currently reading Alan Jacob’s Breaking Bread with the Dead, a book about how an understanding of the past can inform a wiser understanding of the present, which I discovered in putting together 4 Ideas to Understand the Present Through the Lens of the Past. In the early part of the book, Jacobs discusses how exhausted our minds have become through relentless sorting of daily information. On the use of the word triage in the first chapter:

Triage—it’s a French word meaning to separate and sort—is what nurses and doctors on the battlefield do: during and after a battle, as wounded soldiers flow in, the limited resources of a medical unit are sorely tested. the medial staff must learn to make instantaneous judgements: this person needs treatment now, that one can wait a little while, a third one will have to wait longer, preferably somewhere other than the medical tent. To the wounded soldiers, this system will often seem peremptory and harsh, in compassionate, and perhaps even cruel; but it’s absolutely necessary for the nurses and doctors to be ruthlessly risk. They cannot afford for one soldier to die while they’re comforting one whose injuries don’t threaten his life.

Sounds like my email every morning, not to mention social media. What to like, what to comment on, what to ignore. Who has become radicalized and needs to be snoozed from my feed for a month. It's not just email and social media that overload our decision-making apparatus, but so much of what gets thrown to us on a regular day.

Jacobs continues:

Navigating daily life in the internet age is a lot like doing battlefield triage. Given that what cultural critic Matthew Crawford calls the “attentional commons” is constantly noisy—there are days we can’t even put gas in our cars without being assaulted by advertisements blared at ear-rattling volume—we also learn to be ruthless in deciding how to deploy our attention. We only have so much of it, and often the decision of whether or not to “pay” it must be made in an instant. To avoid madness we must learn to reject appeals to our time, and reject them without hesitation or pity. 

Over the long term, this kind of information overload can create dependency and suffering at the same time that it is pleasurable. The emotional triggers of news and social media are reprogramming people at both ends of the political spectrum, and that kind of activity is highly profitable for news and media companies.

Jon Mitchell in Social Media: It’s Worse Than I Thought:

Channel surfing isn’t that different from doomscrolling. Smartphones and social media just provide a significant but incremental user experience upgrade to the same basic torture device. It’s still a calibrated mass hypnosis machine that entices a human being in repose to dissolve all will and intelligent response and just absorb a profit-driven facsimile of human society and one’s place in it from the minimal ironic distance necessary to reassure one that one is freely choosing to participate.

One way to counteract this constant barrage is to consume information with much greater intentionality so that we can regain our ability to focus. I really like the best practices mentioned in Anne-Laure Le Cunff's article on selective ignorance, which involve curating our information sources much more wisely, cutting back on our use of social media, as well as adding equal doses of reflection and fun:

Selective ignorance doesn’t lead to the illusion of knowledge; quite the opposite. By acknowledging that you can’t possibly know everything there is to know, you can decide where to spend your time and energy to cultivate intentional knowledge and stimulating conversations.

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of Breaking Bread with the Dead over the holidays.

(Image courtesy of Markus Spiske on Unsplash)

How I Use My Music Staff and Craft to Create Detailed Lesson Notes

Around 10 years ago, I started noticing a problem in my teaching studio. Several of my students were children of divorced parents navigating two households in their daily life. This was a challenge for keeping track of what they had to prepare during the week under the supervision of alternating parents, especially when lesson notebooks had a mysterious habit of disappearing. To make matters more challenging, many of these parents were too busy to help their kids with piano, leaving matters to nannies to bring students to lessons and help them with practicing through the week. I needed to find a way for parents and additional caregivers to understand what their kids’ practice objectives were from week to week.

The answer: regular emails sent to both parents as well as caregivers immediately after lessons. That way everyone would know exactly what the goals are for the week. And no excuses for forgotten scales and pieces at their next lesson! Weekly lesson notes establish what students accomplished the lesson, what they have to work towards in the coming weeks, as well links and resources that they might find useful.

Since then, I’ve evolved a system of sending lesson notes to students and parents that has proved to be invaluable for both their progress and my own teaching prep. In 2020 with the rise of online and distanced teaching, communication has become critical, and I’ve found the need to add short videos of things that students are working on. 

I’ve previously written about systems for sending out lesson notes - check out my original post from 2013 as well as an updated post from 2019. With the current system I’m using, I think I’ve hit a sweet spot in terms of providing content to students, maintaining a clear flow in lessons and using a solution that’s scalable to my current studio of over 50 students.

Below is the current system that I’m using in my teaching.

Using My Music Staff for lesson notes

My Music Staff is a software product for private music teachers and schools that allows you to build a website, manage and schedule students, send invoices, as well as upload sharable files. What is especially useful are MMS’s learning resources, including file uploads, a lending library, practice logs, and a building a repertoire database for each student.

The feature of MMS that I use the most is the creation and sending of lesson notes from the student’s attendance page each week. This is the part of the MMS interface that has undergone the most improvement in terms of usability over the last few months. I also keep a repertoire database for every student who is at RCM Level 1 or above. Here’s what it looks like:

You can also add all repertoire selections marked “In Progress” to your lesson notes template. Simply go to Settings > Studio Settings > Email & SMS > Lesson Notes and add the following text below %Notes% in the template:

Active Repertoire:

%Repertoire%

You can also customize the lesson notes template to add even more information and evergreen content that students and parents could use regularly. I’ve included my two free ebooks that parents and students can refer to at any time:

However, the problem remains of how to send short specific video content to students every week. These videos have taken the form of recordings of new repertoire, technical elements, and short instructional videos. In the early months of the pandemic, I would record videos separately, then send them either through Apple Mail’s Mail Drop, Facebook Messenger, or WeChat. This was time-consuming and exhausting when scaled for my entire studio. Large amounts of data take time to transfer, and neither email nor instant messaging apps are ideal for this. 

A few weeks ago I discovered a new solution that was quick and easy to implement.

Using Craft for short videos and other content

Craft is a native note-taking app for MacOS and iOS that allows easy linking and sharing, especially with multimedia content. For a more detailed description of Craft, check out Ryan Cristoffel’s review on MacStories.

Note that Craft is actually a note-taking app rather than a video-sharing service, and its bi-directional linking is ideal for writing or building a Zettelkasten system. However, Craft’s ease of sharing content is the reason that I’m using it for sending out videos. A process that takes several minutes with email or instant messaging apps now takes a few seconds and can easily be incorporated into the lesson process with a bit of multi-tasking.

Here’s how I do it:

Create a new doc in Craft with either the student’s first name or initials (the document will be shared as a web page so I’m extra careful about privacy):

Share immediately via the secret link button and grab the share url (“Copy Link” in yellow). This creates a unique private web page that houses the content you share:

Paste the url at the bottom of the lesson notes in MMS:

Record a video during the lesson on a separate device (ideally iPhone), then upload to the doc you’ve created:

The video will then show up both in the app and in its shared private web page, which will be already linked from the student’s lesson notes that are sent via email:

That’s it! I find it best create, share, and add the link before the lesson in order to save time. You can add as many videos as you need, both in the lesson and afterwards. Sharing is controlled from the Craft app, so you can either delete the file or revoke sharing once a week or two have elapsed. You can also re-use the same links from week to week and add or delete content as needed.

Here’s an example of a shared document I used last week. One of my students was having some trouble with pacing and fingering in Nancy Telfer’s Fantasy so I made a quick recording of the piece in the lesson and a photo of a fingering to help them with a challenging passage. All this was done in the lesson without disturbing the flow of teaching.

A few words on my tech setup

Because I teach both in-person and online and need to switch between the two modes during the day, I favour a minimal setup that can be set up or taken down in around a minute. I use three devices: a MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and iPhone. I use the MacBook for typing notes during the lesson, the iPad for video and sound, and iPhone for recording extra video as needed. The iPad lives either on the rack of my upright for a straight-on view or on a stand to the left of the piano for a side view. I also flip the iPad camera for top-down views as needed. This system works for teaching on Zoom, FaceTime, or WeChat (I use all three for various students). Here’s what it looks like:

Music education is changing swiftly during the pandemic, and will continue to evolve as vaccines are rolled out in the coming months and we return to more in-person activities. What will continue to change is our relationship with technology, and how we can use these tools to create a better learning experience for our students.

——

This article was written as part of the Ness Labs Collector to Creator course.

4 Ideas to Understand the Present Through the Lens of the Past

Destruction from Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire, via r/BrandNewSentence

We’re inundated by news and social media. Competing narratives, fake news, and crowded voices on social media all contribute to the confusion about understanding the present and can impact mental health when taken to the extreme. But we still have an insatiable desire to understand what is going on in the world. How can we achieve this?

By looking to the past. 

The Lindy Effect is a mechanism used to estimate the life cycle of things. Nassim Taleb’s explanation:

If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “aging” like persons, but “aging” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!

• from Antifragile by Nassim Taleb, page 318

Looking for works of art and literature that have withstood the test of time is a built-in quality control mechanism. You don’t need to wade through junk when selecting well-known 19th-century novels, poems, or symphonies to spend your time on. 

Looking through lens of history is also useful in the artistic creation process itself. Brendan Pelsue in his TED talk on why you should read War and Peace:

By the time War and Peace ends, Tolstoy has brought his characters to the year 1820, 36 years before the events he had originally intended to write about. In trying to understand his own times, he had become immersed in the years piled up behind him. The result is a grand interrogation into history, culture, psychology, and the human response to war. 

The starting point for Tolstoy’s project eventually became a sprawling epic of the early 19th century, acting as fiction, war documentary, and philosophical meditation. Fictional characters freely intertwine with historical figures in order to zoom in and out of the intimate and large-scale historical currents which informed Tolstoy’s present moment (and ours). 

Alan Jacobs likens the act of uncovering insight from past works to stochastic resonance: 

When you approach the text from the past on its own terms and for its own sake, it becomes a kind of white noise in relation to present concerns. Your attention to the long ago and far away makes the tumult and the shouting die, the captains and the kings depart. (Allusion alert!) It’s when the current environment lies outside the scope of your attention, when you neither seek nor expect any connection to it, that you make room for random resonances to form.

And when they do form, you begin to discern the really key features of your moment more clearly. An image begins to appear where there had been formlessness. Useless and pernicious statements start to recede into the background as you perceive them for what they are. The salient and the helpful points move to the forefront of your attention.

Whenever you read a time-honored book, it introduces resonances from the past which can help you to understand the present moment. This happens largely by chance, and can give you a viewpoint into the present moment frequently unavailable to those who read current news or social media. 

The concept of finding meaning in the past in order to understand the present is nothing new. Marcus Aurelius’ quote from Book 10 of his Meditations is strikingly similar to Eccliastes 1:9 as well as a well-known quote from Battlestar Galactica:

To bear in mind constantly that all of this has happened before. And will happen again—the same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging. Produce them in your mind, as you know them from experience or from history: the court of Hadrian, of Antoninus. The courts of Philip, Aleander, Croesus. All just the same. Only the people different. 

from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Gregory Hays, Book 10 p. 139

One of my favorite reading experiences was inexplicably finding a first edition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude in the stacks at the Bowdoin College library one summer. After checking it out, I handled it extremely carefully for two weeks while immersed in the world of Wordsworth’s text in the way that it was originally intended. When I finally returned the copy to the circulation desk (along with a suggestion that they might wish to place that lovely first edition in rare books rather than general circulation), I had discovered a unique reading experience, a fresh understanding of art, nature, and life.

Tiny Delights Collection is Available for the Holidays

Spending more time working and playing in your own space but haven’t got the space or budget for a full-size painting? Do you want to give the timeless gift of original Canadian art that is affordable but still makes a great impression?

Wendy is excited to introduce Tiny Delights, a collection of small-sized paintings for holidays, gifts, and special occasions! All smalls are 10x10 and are available for $80 + HST in our online store. If you would like to see one of Wendy’s regular-sized paintings in miniature, let us know. Requests for specific colours are also welcome.

Freedom and Space to Hear Things

Miles Davis once explained his approach to jazz improv as creating "freedom and space to hear things". The phrase is fascinating: not freedom and space to play things but to hear things - what the other instruments were doing, even the sound of your own playing, and to respond. Any of us can have that freedom and space if we're willing to listen. Whether we're giving a speech, waiting on tables, or sitting in a corporate call centre, the messier, improvised response is the one that takes in the entire context: the ambient noise, a customer's tone of voice, the reaction of an audience, even the weather. Sometimes it's only when a speaker delivers a line and sees the body language, hears the laughter, or senses the sharp intake of breath that she instinctively understands what she must do next.

• from Messy: How to be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World by Tim Harford

(Image courtesy of David Wheater on Unsplash)

Further Thoughts on Mental Models

A few weeks ago, I compiled a list of mental models and organizational systems that I use in work and daily life. Digging deeper into some of the writing behind mental model theory, I came across a contrarian view from Cedric Chin on the dangers of adopting systems from outside one’s field of practice if they aren’t grounded in genuine practice:

As it is for MMA fighters, so it is for business, software engineering, investing, decision making, and life.

The upshot of this argument is this: don’t read blogs written by non-practitioners, spouting insights that aren’t related to their field of practice. Don’t read Farnam Street. Don’t read self-help hacks on Medium who haven’t achieved much in life.  Hell, don’t read this blog — especially if your career goals diverge from mine. I have little to offer you that practice cannot.

Instead read from the source material of practitioners in fields you inhabit, copy their actions, climb their skill trees, and reflect through trial and error.

You can read more on Cedric’s thoughts on mental models here (shorter version) and here (longer version).

In a few months I aim to revisit my original mental models post from a few weeks ago to explore which of them have stood the test of time and which I may have been premature in citing.

I’m glad to have written about what I’ve been up to since the start of quarantine, since it demonstrates that I have skin in the game and am an actual practitioner. The vast majority of musicians are only trained in the art of performing and understanding music. The challenge of owning a small business in the arts is that you do have to learn skills outside your field, and university education doesn’t prepare you for this.

(Image by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash)

Introducing the Foley Music and Arts Online Store

A few years ago, my wife Wendy started realizing her dream of creating and selling beautiful art. In just a few short years, she had sold several dozen canvases and painted musical instruments.

Then the pandemic hit and all of her opera and TV work disappeared. She was still able to make a few sales during the early part of the year but needed a way to reach even more people in order to generate more.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve received assistance from Digital Main Street’s ShopHERE program to create an online store where Wendy can sell her paintings directly. The process was tricky at times, and required building a Shopify store on top of a Squarespace site.

But the dust has settled and we’re thrilled to announce the unveiling of the Foley Music and Arts online store! Here you can buy paintings directly, as well as gift cards that can be applied to either paintings or music lessons.

Right after launching the store, Wendy made a quick sale to a buyer in Utah who had had their eye on The Blossoming Cello for some time. You can browse through a full gallery of Wendy’s artwork here before proceeding to the Buy Now page.

On the Challenges of Regular Blogging

Writing during a pandemic sucks.

Things were going okay, and I was developing a steady blogging habit. Then overwhelm hits and I can’t think of anything to write about for weeks on weeks.

I’m very lucky and privileged to have been one of the people whose amount of work increased during the pandemic - there was a stretch between late February and early May where I didn’t have a day off in over 100 days.

But the fact that there was no chance to rest made the reflection needed for writing very difficult to summon at times.

One of the challenges of being a blogger is being able to write about things that inspire you, respond to things in the world, do it regularly over time, and not be a bore.

Writing is also non-linear; that is, it isn’t a steady path from A to B. It meanders, and the project that initially seemed easy turns out to be much more complex and branches out.

Many of the ideas in blogging are half-baked and are merely starting points for further exploration on the part of the writer and the reader. That’s the charm of it.

I’m resigning myself to the fact that on some weeks I’ll have clearly thought out articles. On other weeks I won’t.

Friday Links

A new friend we made on a walk last week.

A lot of perceptive writing is happening on blogs these days and we limit ourselves by spending too much time on news and social media. Here are some links to enliven the start of your weekend:

Art of Managing Yourself: Things I’ve Learned

How often have you experienced a situation where you start the day happy and sunny, coffee in hand but it quickly devolves into a day with helmet on, water hose attached, and you, face smeared and hair singed, putting out rapid fires in succession?

That, my friend, is the chaos that must be so actively managed. The takeaway here is the value in managing oneself, to maintain order.

Yina Huang’s observation that everything is always falling apart is totally on point and the way that the universe is built (2nd law of thermodynamics). What we need to do is create a scaffolding that takes that into account and allows us to build up our systems again. Continually.

In Defense of Reading Goals

But if you’re operating in an environment where pattern-matching is useful, it probably helps to expand the set of patterns you have in your head. And reading goals work well for that, because they push you to read when you might otherwise spend time on YouTube, or Twitter, or on the next autoplayed Netflix show.

Cedric Chin’s argument goes like this: the more information that you can take in from books, the more it will allow you to match patterns from what you read onto the nature of unfolding reality, especially in your professional field. This will allow you to answer questions and take advantage of that information in order to succeed.

ten recent thoughts

3. What we have now is what we used to want.

This list of ideas from Rebecca doesn’t initially seem connected. Sit with them for awhile and you might just feel clarity returning.

Structured distraction: how to make the most of your breaks at work

The problem is that today’s environment is actually full of stimuli which may grab our attention during those periods of scanning our immediate surroundings. Next time you blame yourself for letting your mind wander or clicking on a notification while trying to do focused work, remember that it’s just your brain doing what it is supposed to do: be on the lookout for potential danger.

It can be brutal trying to retain focus much of the time. Anne-Laure Le Cunff tells us that this is actually the way we’re wired, and taking these breaks can help our brains to do some much-needed housecleaning.

Further reading: 20 Blogs I Read in 2020: Quarantine Edition

Have a great weekend!

Six Months In

We’re smiling underneath these masks! Here I am with violinist Joseph Peleg and cellist Igor Gefter recording the Kol Nidrei service for Temple Sinai.

This morning I put together a list of all the professional activities I’ve been up to since the start of the pandemic in March:

• teaching my entire studio online from March through July.

• 12 weeks of examining students remotely for The Royal Conservatory (nearly 500 exams in total).

• a livestreamed recital with mezzo soprano Krisztina Szabó for Tapestry Opera.

• created a split-screen video of Poulenc’s Hôtel with mezzo-soprano Alia Amad as part of The Suleika Project. Alia and I were featured at an Aspen Music Festival webinar last month to talk about the creation and production process for split-screen videos.

• webinar appearances for the Frances Clark Center for Keyboard Pedagogy, CollabFest, the Millionaire Musician, and Tom Lee Music Canada.

• recording High Holy Days music in person for Temple Sinai in Toronto.

• recording High Holy Days music remotely for Temple B’nai Israel in Clearwater, Florida.

• co-writing with Natasha Fransblow an online teaching manual for an institutional client.

• finishing up my duties as Past President of ORMTA Hamilton Halton.

Since the start of quarantine, there have been moments of energy, exhaustion, hope, despair, and everything in between. I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the most inspiring people you could ever meet.

Some of the musical world’s most seasoned veterans have risen to the occasion to deal with the most difficult circumstances imaginable. Young professionals have moved quickly with vision and insight that bodes well for our ability to grow with an uncertain future.

But we also need to remember those whose livelihoods have been forever changed by the pandemic. Many people in the arts have lost all their work, with little hope of regaining it unless things revert back to the way they were, if that is even possible.

I want this blog to be part of the discussion on how to create genuine solutions and help people to find a way to earn a living in the arts despite continual change and uncertainty.