Hannah Pitner — A Day In Her Life

This week, we're sitting down with Hannah Pitner, a professor of Spanish Linguistics in Memphis and co-founder of Lingua Viva, an online language collective she launched with her business partner while juggling a full-time teaching load and a one-and-a-half-year-old son. Hannah shares what it's like to get in movement in between pour over coffee pours at 6am, teach four to five college classes a semester, and build a language curriculum that started on a construction site.

In this conversation, Hannah opens up about the winding path from barely making it into college to earning a PhD in Applied Linguistics, leaving a teaching job during COVID to work as a barista, and the moment she realized she could turn years of freelance language trainings into a real business. We talk about journaling morning pages in silence before her son wakes up, navigating a sudden daycare closure with almost no notice, splitting household duties so she never touches a dish, and why logging her outfits on a private Instagram account for seven years has become her daily creative practice.

What We Cover:

Why she wakes up at 5:40am to squeeze yoga, journaling, and a pour over into one hour before her son gets up (and why even 10 minutes of quiet alone time changes her entire day)
The journey from interpreter to barista to PhD candidate—how COVID created the unexpected window to apply, and what it's like teaching four to five college classes while running a business on the side
How Lingua Viva started when a construction company building an addition to St. Jude needed Spanish safety training, and Hannah found herself in a hard hat creating curriculum for middle-aged men
Wednesday night at-home date nights where she and her husband JT read one chapter of a book together each week (currently: Hunt Gather Parent) to talk about something other than work and logistics
How their daycare suddenly closed, the scramble to find a new one, and why a trial week on spring break (and lots of balls) made her son’s transition seamless
The Curated Closet practice: logging her outfit on a private Instagram account every single day for seven years as a daily creative outlet that takes almost no time
Why she's finally learning to outsource (starting with marketing after four days of Meta ads nearly ended everything) and let herself ask for help instead of always being the one offering it

Connect with Hannah: