Manage your time, ease your stress

Your time is your most precious resource. I am sure that with your range of commitments at work that it is limited and that you want to be as productive as you can be, but how successful are you? If you are a middle leader the chances are you are juggling your leadership responsibilities with a sizeable teaching load, if you are a senior leader it is likely that you have a broad range of diverse responsibilities and tasks that fill your days; whatever your level of leadership managing your time is crucial to increasing your productivity and maintaining your well-being.

Make lists: I have always made lists, ensuring that anything I had to do was written down so as to remind me to do it. However lists can be improved with additional information especially about when you are going to do the task. This is linked to prioritisation; make sure you know which tasks need doing first and when they need doing by. My own lists would contain deadlines and I would prioritise tasks with stars, a three-star task being the one that would take priority over all others. This prioritisation is important as tasks can be essentially grouped according when they need to be done (urgency) and how important they are. Though naïve, tasks can be grouped into four categories:

·         urgent and important,

·         urgent and less important,

·         not urgent but important, and

·         neither urgent nor important.

It is worth viewing your tasks through this lens and prioritising accordingly.

Set targets: decide what you are going to do and when you are going to do it. Plan the use of your time and make commitments to doing the work. It might be that you decide a job will require 3 hours of work but you know you’ll get fidgety and bored after 30 minutes on the task so you break it down into more manageable chunks, each of a defined length. This way you are more likely to give quality time to a task and get it done to a high standard. Make sure your targets are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-limited); targets that fail to meet these criteria are hard to achieve as they can be ill-defined, you may not be clear of the success criteria, they may not be realistic, and you won’t set aside the time they deserve.

Myth of multi-tasking: You will achieve more if you concentrate on one task at a time. Good leaders prioritise and you should aim to do the same. Multi-tasking results in having your attention in more than one place at any one time and I can attest to two facts, the first is that no single task gets the time it deserves and secondly the quality of the tasks is diminished. One task at a time with no distractions, that’s the recipe for success.

Time for emails: We all tend to have knee-jerk reactions to emails; they come in and we have to deal with them. Look back through your email dealings over the last few days and see how many actually required an immediate response, not many I would suggest. Best practice in business is that you should put aside a couple of slots each day to deal with emails, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, maybe the latter before heading home for the evening. We also tend to hit the emails first thing; this tends to be the time we have the most energy and we end up processing emails? Maybe think about putting emails to one side and leaving them until a little later so you can use your energy more productively.

Key tasks at key times: This follows on from the emails in the previous point and relates to the point on setting targets. Try to deal with certain types of task at the same time each day. Do your emails, return your phone calls, do your planning and so on, at specific times and for set amounts of time. If you give yourself a clearly defined 30 minutes a day to do your planning at 8 am each morning, you stand a better chance of achieving this target than if you do it as and when.

Working away from your computer and phone: These can be the biggest source of distraction in the workplace. If there is a task that can be done away from my desk then I will go elsewhere and do it. It helps me resist the temptation to answer or check my phone, and it prevents me from being distracted by the dreaded ping of the email!

Energy breaks: There is good evidence that we operate on energy cycles. Our energy and interest waxes and wanes every 80 -120 minutes. Given this it would be counter-productive to keep on working when we are drained of energy. I would ask you to reflect on instances when you have tried to work at something for much longer than 90 minutes and have found yourself becoming tired, irritable and distracted. Get up and do something you enjoy for 10 minutes. Let your mind wander and escape from the task. This will boost your energy and whilst you may end up spending less time on the task you will achieve more. Granted, it is not always possible to down tools after 90 minutes, after all many of you will have your hands tied by a timetable, but if gaps appear take advantage of these and give yourself an energy break. This will also help build resilience as you have the chance to destress every so often.

Don’t have an open-door policy: This may seem contrary to popular opinion but an open-door is extremely time-consuming and saps your energy as well. My advice would be to have certain times when your door is open and publicise this. I used to simply say if the door was physically open then it was open to all-comers, but even this has its limitations. Maybe put aside a half hour slot every day when you are open to anyone, but stick to it. Your colleagues will quickly get used to this and will not think any the less of you for it.

Reward yourself: You are special and don’t forget it. Make sure that you reward yourself for completing tasks. It may be a biscuit for a short task (when I’ve done my emails I’ll have a cup of tea) or it may be more significant after you’ve redesigned the whole-school tracking system.

There is another important leadership element that you should consider here. Given that you are a leader you are developing other staff. Positive time management techniques set good examples to others, it shows them how to work effectively and how to achieve goals. You are constantly acting as a mentor to your team and so your habits can have a significant impact on those around you.

Manage your time more effectively and you will improve your output whilst helping to manage your stress more effectively.