Stop trying to manage time!
A better way to approach it is task management
Focus on what needs to be done in order to reach your goals instead of how much time you can devote to them.
Do you find your days filled with tasks that you never seem to get to the end of? Things that feel important, or maybe urgent, but aren't really having an impact on actual student learning or your long term career development. Instead, you find so much of your timetable being filled with paperwork, meetings, putting resources away and tidying up the learning space, and it's draining. It's not just your time that's being hijacked, it's also your energy.
I used to warn my teaching students that if they were the kind of person who needs to be able to tick off all their tasks as 'done' in order to feel successful then teaching will drive them crazy. This is the kind of job where nothing is ever really finished and all your best planning can fall flat for no obvious reason. You need to be the kind of person who can ride waves of activity without attaching too firmly to the outcome. Picture of a surfer who will paddle out, watch for a wave and take a chance on it only to have it flatten out too quickly to get a decent ride. What do they do then? They paddle out and watch for the next wave.
One of my favourite thought leaders in the personal development space, Brendon Burchard, often says that our days become "filled with busy work instead of our life's work" when we focus on managing time. In the classroom we see "busy work" all the time and it happens because our days are conveniently chunked into blocks of time that we fill with activity - and so we do. We've even convinced ourselves that the worksheets and activities we've set are, at best, important skill practise but at worst they're simply a way of controlling the classroom. Outside of classroom time there are all the hui and assemblies to contend with.
Time management is about how you chunk up your time into workable slots and then fill those slots with the things you need to get done. A better way to approach it is task management. Focus on what needs to be done in order to reach your goals instead of how much time you can devote to them. You can apply this approach to your career goals as well as ākonga learning. Of course, to do so you need to have clearly stated goals to work toward so perhaps that will be the next blog post.
Task management begins with goals. Take some time to clarify your goals - career goals, ākonga learning goals, personal development goals, wellbeing goals and what ever else is important to you. Get clear on what will make you feel fulfilled in your work and home life. This is not the kind of thing that should be completed in a single sitting so don't try to rush it. Start with a brain dump of thoughts and ideas and then start sorting them into long term, mid term and short term goals.
Next start noticing the links between your goals, how they relate to one another and contribute to a bigger picture. This will help you to start working out priorities because some of your goals are tied to things that are beyond your control. These are usually things such as commitments or accountabilities controlled by someone else. Your job, for example. Presumably it's an aspect of your career goals. When some of the tasks and commitments of your job feel like they're getting in your way try to reframe them as mid or short-term aspects of your long term goals.
For example, Turua Pākau is my personal project, the long-term goal of which is to empower kaiako to be the best they can be. I can break down that long-term project into mid-term goals or steps. This blog is one of those mid-term steps and its purpose is twofold. Firstly it will develop me as a writer and establish my position as an expert in my field; and secondly its purpose is to gather a community of educators with a common goal of excellence who recognise that the current system is no longer serving our future and who are willing to put in the work to transform it. Each blog post I write, and the accompanying promotional material alongside it, is a short term goal. While I can treat each blog post as an individual task I know that it is contributing to the mid and long-term goals - it has a purpose.
I guess it's a little bit ironic that I'm writing this post a good month behind schedule. That kind of illustrates the point, though. While this blog is part of my personal project, I also have to juggle that with my other work commitments - projects that are not my own but that I am accountable to someone else for. Those projects are also made up of specific tasks that run on their own timeline and sometimes they have to take precedence. Well, they put food on the table and let's face it, that's pretty important!
So, while I can set myself a schedule for writing and publishing blog posts, I know that I can adjust that schedule without compromising the bigger goal. The challenge for me is to work out ways to manage the tasks relating to my other commitments in ways that create space for my personal goals.
Now, back to you. What are you going to do first to move away from trying to manage time?
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