Time Management Trips: Why Time Management Is Different For Teachers

#TimeManagement, #TeacherTimeAudit, #Teachers

Have you got time for that?

Everyone complains about not having enough time in the day, and for teachers, this is true. 

What makes this worse for teachers is that most of the popular time management systems aren’t particularly well calibrated for teaching.

I’m not saying time management systems like time blocking, kanban, or 1-3-4 aren’t helpful. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that when it comes to teaching they need a little bit of adjustment. 

The thing to keep in mind is that when it comes to teaching your time is already highly structured while still being inherently interruptible. 

When it comes to being interrupted the trick is to manage the frequency of when these interruptions can happen. One way to do this is to have a consistent structure for your class time. Consider adding 15 minutes for skill builders at the beginning of class. 

Skill builder times are a great way to sneak in a little extra time for emails, prep, and follow up with students. 

“If you’d like to learn more about skill builders check out the article linked here…”

Consider implementing the ‘Three Before Me’ rule Where you require your students to ask at least three others their question before coming to ask you. 

When it comes to implementing a time management system within a school day, that time is already strictly regulated, things can get tricky. 

There has been a lot of research citing the benefits of ‘flow.’ This cognitive state, originally studied by Miahly Csikszentmihalyi, facilitates our ability to engage in ‘Deep Work.’ Csikszentimihalyi’s ‘Flow States,’ and now Cal Newport’s concept of ‘Deep Work’ both require significant amounts of time to be devoted to them.

Ironically, the managerial aspects of the 45, 60, and 70 minute blocks the teaching day gets chunked into actively preventing teachers from getting into these highly productive states. To make matters worse, prep time is a scarce commodity. With devoted consistent ‘prep-blocks’ being scarcer still.  

So what is a teacher who wants to manage their time to make time to do? 

A good place to start is by figuring out what is going on with your time. 

This can take the form of a ‘Teacher Time Audit.’ 

A Teacher Time Audit (TTA) can take many forms. The key is to track the number of things you get up to in any given chunk of time. So you can figure out what you can do more and less of. 

Example:

Time Management Is A Skill That Requires Adjustment

The aim here is to count the number of tasks and the number of minutes you spend on each task as being separate from the total amount of minutes within the time slot you are treating as a chunk.

If you find the total amount of time devoted to each of these individually tracked activities takes more time than the total time of the time slot. Then maybe, its time to move some things around. 

If you’d like to learn more about my approach to Teacher Time Auditing then you might want to head on over to the resources page and check out the latest entry in the No User Manual Provided series. 

As you play around with your own teacher time management system remember to create strategies around reducing interruptions. Figure out how to  work within your pre-existing time blocks. And identify what sorts of activities may be taking up a little too much time. Remember to book in some down time as well! 

Teaching is a busy profession and the person most teachers forget to make time for –is themselves!