How to better manage your time as an SBL

How can you talk about time management when you’re always in a rush? Helen Burge offers some handy tips for managing your schedule when you always seem to find yourself pressed for time

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Fund Ed

Free time is a luxury few can afford as a school leader. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t manage your time more effectively. Below are some tips to get you started.

Stop procrastinating

We all procrastinate. Some of us quite blatantly and others blissfully unaware in their fuzz of busyness that they’re putting off more important tasks by clearing the little things they get a buzz from.

Be honest with yourself. Will this procrastination effectively reduce your hourly rate as you have to stay later to do the actual work? Would you recommend this approach to others? Probably not. This might take practice to stop. Maybe stick a Post-it note on your screen that says something like: ‘Are you procrastinating… again?!’

Be aware of your weaknesses

On average, smartphone owners use their phone for three hours, 15 minutes a day. The top 20% of smartphone users have daily screen time in excess of four-and-a-half hours.

Take a look at your screen time usage. How bad is it? You can give yourself limits in your settings, which you can, of course, ignore if you really want to.

Burge used the same concept to reduce the amount of time she spends on email. She’s also been setting a timer during which time she doesn’t check emails at all but focuses on completing a particular task instead.

This means she’s not disturbed by the notifications or pings as her inbox fills up. It’s been a tricky thing to do as she hates having more than ten emails in her inbox.

Burge is aware this is an issue of her own making, which has added pressure onto her, but she just doesn’t understand how people can have hundreds of emails in their inbox.

So, when she’s doing emails, she either responds, delegates the task or allows it to sit in her inbox. But it can’t be there for longer than a week…

Colour

If you are privileged enough to see the former SBL and school leadership consultant Nickii Messer present on how to improve your work management, she may suggest a simple but effective technique to organise your paperwork into four different coloured files:

• PRIORITY ONE (red): Today
• PRIORITY TWO (blue): This week
• PRIORITY THREE (turquoise): This month
• PRIORITY FOUR (green): ‘Term 7’, where I put all my items for a quieter time during the holidays

This method has helped Burge clear her desk of clutter and prioritise tasks. Her Priority Two file tends to be a bit bigger than the rest, so she sticks Post-it notes on different tasks, with dates she’s going to work on them.

This helps her bring forward the work into the Priority One file. It also stops her sneaking ahead and doing a piece of work she likes the look of, rather than the work she’s putting off.

At the start of the day, she reviews her files, and on a Friday afternoon she reviews them again, ready for the following week.

Blocking

Her diary used to quickly fill up with meetings, but she was left with no time to do the work the meetings generated, so she ended up completing it in her own time. Now, she blocks out her diary in order to complete pieces of work as per the Priority filing system.

As Harvey Mackay said: “Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.”

This quote rings true. On occasion, Burge has regretted spending time on a task, or watching a bad film, or being with negative people. That is time you cannot get back.

Our time does have a value in terms of the hourly rate we’re paid to perform our roles. Have you even been at a meeting and worked out in your head the cost of all those people meeting for that hour? Did they convert the value of that meeting into achieving a goal or generating more income? It’s certainly a reflective exercise.

So, spend a bit of time reviewing your work practices. How can you use your time better? Do you need to improve how you run meetings? Reflect on your approach to work. If a colleague presented the same issues to you, how would you go about advising them to make adjustments?