If you feel that a 30-minute lesson is just too short for your advanced students, well, you’re not alone—it is. But by implementing simple forward-thinking methods, incorporating new tools, and maybe reinventing some of your approaches and guidelines, you can better utilize lesson time that seems to be gone before it ever gets started.

For starters, you can save an incredible amount of time by writing and archiving your lesson material. Sounds logical enough, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought I should do that very thing as I wrote the same lesson or transcribed the same lick yet again. Want an easy start to your collection? Photocopy every thought, every chart, every tab sequence you so effortlessly jot down and give away, and you’ll be amazed at the amount of usable material you have at the end of the week. Then, more importantly, organize and archive your work. And not just your work: go through those guitar magazines you’ve been collecting since you were 12 and gather all the lessons and transcriptions you always thought would be so great to use in a lesson. Build your library and get a filing cabinet—you’ll need it! With an inventory of inspiring material at your disposal, you can map out a time-based curriculum, which opens the door to a more goal-driven program that you can prepare for in advance.

At some point you’ll want to make a small-to-medium investment in an essential tool—a laptop computer. If you’re not teaching with one already, you’re doing yourself and your students a disservice. In my Apple Mac Pro I carry all the documents I want to use in my teaching, and I have a collection of applications that helps immensely in every aspect of the lesson. For instance, I use the Amazing Slow Downer, Audacity, and SoundConverter for much more efficient transcribing and manipulating audio on the fly (see Teaching Tools, spring 2007); Finale for writing pristine notation; and FileMaker Pro for creating and managing a database for the library mentioned earlier. And with everything in digital form, I can email assignments or supplemental material, or transfer media through compact flash drives. What could be more powerful than having that to-die-for Pat Martino transcription or that Van Halen lesson at your fingertips? I tell you, put your CD collection in the palm of your hand—get an iPod.

Other organizing tips are not directly music related but are important nonetheless. Train your students to tune their guitars in advance, and to have their lesson material organized and ready to go. Even trivial items such as taking off their coat before setting foot in the lesson room make a difference. These incidentals add up and, before you know it, could eat up ten minutes—that’s one third of the lesson! Simple preparations not only make the lesson more efficient, but help teach students responsibility and work habits that will prove useful in many aspects of their lives both in and out of music.

Chris Buono is a professor at the Berklee College of Music, an industrious contributor to Guitar One magazine, and an active composer, bandleader, and sideman in myriad styles.