Recently on the Happier podcast, I heard of the distinction between working in your business and working on your business.
To me, that’s the big difference between summers and the rest of the year for church musicians. In fact, I think this distinction helps us conceptualize the work we do for other church programs that run during the “program year” (usually from around Labor Day to Memorial Day in the U.S.).
When I’m working “in” my position, I’m learning new organ and choral repertoire, and I’m leading rehearsals.
But when I’m working “on” my program, I’m planning strategically, I’m organizing, I’m taking stock. And that’s a lot of what I do during the summers.
For example, this week I’ve been “working on” my program by:
- Assessing the database of choral music at my new job
- Deep-cleaning a white board
- Assessing my program’s budget
- Working on a complete list of all the organ repertoire I know
- Scheduling meetups with other local music directors
- Filing (and filing, and then some more filing!)
Some of these tasks are things I won’t do as much of during the program year, but they’re important to the long-term health of the program. It isn’t just “working in” that’s important—”working on” the music program is important too.
