What time management skills help busy teachers escape burnout?

Is it just me, or does it feel like there’s never enough time in a day? It would be best if you had more time to manage your workload and find everything to do on your list. I can almost hear you thinking… what time management skills can help me escape the teacher burnout I’m experiencing right now?

Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to help you use the right time management skills to escape burnout. From purging your list to planning your week, these three teacher-approved time management strategies will help you escape burnout! So what are you waiting for? Grab my free guide to the 5 Teacher Time Management Secrets to leave work at work!

Why is time management so important?

Let’s settle the age-old debate. Teacher time management should have always been a part of teacher training. But it’s not and has never been included in our training. When you enter the classroom, you’re on your own when completing everything on your to-do list in the given time. No matter if there are interruptions during your prep, changes to the schedule or an admin adds seemingly non-essential tasks to the list.

I’m sure you’re with me on this because you’re burnt out from the neverending to-do list and looking for ways to check the tasks off your list more efficiently so you can enjoy your evening with your family.

With a long to-do list it's important to manage your time so that you can get through all your tasks during your day and feel prepared for the next day.

How Can Time Management Help You in the Classroom

That’s where time management comes in. Time management is quite the buzzword in teaching, with teachers having more on their plate than ever and still wanting to work within contract hours. It seems impossible some days, and you’re left bringing work home even if you don’t want to. This leads to feelings of lack of support, being overwhelmed, causing stress and tension at home, and frustration about the uncompensated time.

With a framework to help you manage your time, you can complete teaching tasks quickly and lift your head above water to breathe!

3 Time Management Skills

As a preschool teacher with a 4-year-old, I, too, have little time to bring work home. So, instead of giving you a list of time management skills, you could try and see if they work, which may take you more time.

I will share the exact process I use daily to help you keep it all organized. With this simple system, you can quickly identify the items on your to-do list that need to get done each day and find time to complete them. So you can leave work knowing you accomplished what you set out to do and go home knowing you’re ready for the next day!

Using the purge, prioritize, plan method to help complete tasks teachers are able to spend less time working and more time enjoying their life after 4pm.

Step 1: Purge

Have you ever missed a meeting? A call? Only to realize you should have remembered to write it on your list or calendar. When we don’t write things down, our brains try to remember by creating loops. When we do this, our brain tries to remember the task repeatedly. It’s like a skipping record that keeps skipping.

But when the record keeps skipping, it may or may not kick out and continue to play until the song’s end. That means tasks stuck in your head may or may not get done.

Brain loops are repeating patterns where thoughts get stuck and can lead to anxiety. They take up a lot of our energy and get in the way of progress.

To be more efficient with completing all of your to-dos, you must purge all of your thoughts out of your head into one singular task list. There are many ways to make task lists, from the good old paper and pencil list to apps like Google Tasks (which you can add as an extension to your Google Desktop). Whatever you decide, find a place to write down your thoughts that works for you. If you don’t have a place to purge that works for you, you will not use it.

Pro Tip: Purge work and personal tasks in one place. That will ensure nothing overlaps and that everything gets done.

Teachers, what do you say we get everything out of our head so we can relieve stress and work through our list with ease?

Step 2: Prioritize

Once you’ve purged, you can move on to the next step: Prioritize. Prioritizing is precisely like it sounds. Go back over your list and ask yourself these questions:

Is it important?
Is it urgent?

If it is important and urgent, you’re going to do it! You can decide when to complete the task if it’s important but not urgent. If it’s not important to you but urgent to your work, you can find someone to delegate the task to. And if it’s neither, delete the task off your list.

A quick way to prioritize tasks helps us know what to do each day. Once you have prioritized your list, you can choose 1-3 things you will do daily to help you complete your to-do list.

Step 3: Plan

To ensure you complete the tasks you prioritized, you will need to do a bit of planning. So grab your flair pens and planner, or open up your favorite calendar app (mine is Google Calendar)! And start putting those tasks on the calendar.

Parkinson’s law states that the work will expand to fill the time allotted for completion. For example, if I’m looking for supplemental ideas on Pinterest for my lesson plans but don’t set a time limit, I often get lost and spend more time than I need searching. But if I set a timer or put it in my schedule, I can complete the task faster and move on to the next.

Planning is the most critical time management skill. When you know how much time each task takes you and where in your day or week it makes the most sense to complete each task (work and personal), you can schedule your time effectively.

You no longer have to feel like there’s never enough time. You will control your time with the Three Ps of Time Management for Teachers.

What time management skills help busy teachers escape burnout?

Why is time management so important?

How Can Time Management Help You in the Classroom