Will Someone Clean This Up?!

It's piano recital time. So that means I spend hours pouring and playing through book after book of music, looking for just the right pieces for all my students. All 18 of my students. This is how my studio looked this afternoon after a morning of searching. I have my music organized neatly, but when it comes recital time, everything seems to kind of spill out. I make piles of I'll try these and piles of yes, but who, maybes and rejections. It's quite a process.
I think about recital music all the way back at the beginning of the year, when I'm searching for festival and contest music. I think about pieces when I'm away from the piano, like doing dishes, getting ready for the day, going on a walk with Luke. It sort of possesses me for a while. I jot down notes on lessons, post-its, my blackberry, anywhere there is a scrap of paper to remember it. I keep a running stack, sometimes ear-marking who I think fits the piece. (Music is almost never put away entirely in my studio.)
Then comes crunch time, in the spring, when I must get the music out to the students or the show will not go on the road! I make a list of each day's students, pull out all the files of music and start rifling through. If I find a perfect fit, I write down who and what and then label the front cover with a sticky note saying whom it should go to and what page. It is a good thing Bill works at 3M. I use sticky notes of all varieties a ton in my teaching.
I strive to have each student perform two pieces from memory and that is a lot of music. I have students ranging from just their first year of lessons to their 10 year. And I want to make each one of them sound their best! I'm a little over halfway there. I had asked the women in my Thursday morning Bible study to pray for me as I worked on this and their prayers have helped.
Now all I have to do is figure out where all the music I'm not using goes back to!