Dan (00:00):
Hey welcome. Thank you so much for coming and joining me here today. I am gonna be talking to you about four of the most grateful benefits or the biggest benefits to scheduling your time. But before I get into that, I wanna encourage you. If you do not have a copy of my book yet work less, teach more. The book's whole job is to help you to reduce the amount of work that you're doing to allow you to have more time, to be effective as a teacher, and to have more time to live a life you love outside of school. Now, I only ask you to cover post and handling, and if you want to copy head to teacherspd.net/freewltm for work, less, teach more. So teacherspd.net/freewltm, grab yourself a copy of that book. And I hope it really starts to improve your effectiveness, reducing your workload, and allow you to live a life that you love outside of school as well.
Dan (01:00):
Today, we're actually talking about an aspect that's in that book, and that is the benefits of scheduling your time. Now, I actually believe that scheduling your time is probably the biggest thing that you can do to reduce your workload as a teacher. And the main reason that this works is because the it's our first benefit too. Actually, it's the benefit number one, which is to become more purposeful with your time by creating a schedule of your time for a whole week, right? You sit down and plan out a whole week here by creating that kind of a schedule and planning out what you're doing hour by hour. It means you are being purposeful with your time. And so you start to say, well, you know, when I get to school in the morning, what should I do first? Right? And you're actually starting to think through that process.
Dan (01:47):
And so you put in there, you know, I'm gonna finish writing a unit of work, or I need to finish that lesson plan that I'm gonna deliver in period six. Hopefully that's not the case, but you, you putting in maybe some kind of deep work, some harder work, some work that really requires focus they're gonna do before school even gets started. And then as you go through, you might have a recess break, but what, what's the best use of my time during recess when everyone's in your staff room and there's kids knocking on your door. Yeah. That's not a time to be doing deep work, right? That's a time to do maybe some shallow work. You're gonna start doing work, like checking your emails or something like that at that point in the day, rather than right at the beginning of your day. And so you're just setting up a system here by scheduling your time so that you are more purposeful.
Dan (02:28):
And so when you then are scheduling your time at home, right? You say, well, when I first get home, I actually only have a three hour window where I'm at home at the same time as my children are. And so during that three hour window, I'm gonna prioritize my kids, right? I'm gonna make sure that I'm spending time with each of them, or maybe I'm gonna make sure I'm actually working on with one of them on developing their reading, or maybe I'm gonna work with one of them to help them with a particular skill set that they're working on in a hobby that they're into anything like that. Right. You're actually gonna schedule in some quality time
Dan (02:59):
With your kids because you're being purposeful with your time. You're not just gonna get home, track your bag down, kind of unwind, have your coffee and go, oh, what am I gonna do for the rest of the day? Your kids come home. They talk about staff, maybe involved in that. Maybe you're not, maybe you get cranky. Yeah. There's lots of things that can happen. That can influence what happens with that time. Whereas if you're being purposeful, you are waiting for when your children get home and go, right. As soon as they get home, this is what I want to be able to do with them. Or maybe it's just like, I'm gonna ask them what they wanna do. And I'm gonna do that. You know, I'm gonna say, what do, what would you like to do for the next hour? And they'll with me, right?
Dan (03:32):
And they might say, well, I really want to, you know, chat about this particular topic, or I want to go and do some shopping with you because I actually need new shoes and you go, great. Let's go shopping together. And you actually go and you spend that hour with them going, shopping, chatting about life getting shoes. It's just a byproduct of everything else that's going on with you developing that relationship. And so the number one benefit, and I think the most important benefit is being purposeful with your time. Cuz you, even your schedules have to be really rigid, right? You can have a flexible schedule that gets interrupted sometimes, but you then just reschedule your day when it gets interrupted because you're being purposeful. And when someone asks you, you can go, well, do I want to allow that to change the rest of my day?
Dan (04:15):
And that's an important question. So number two, number two is that by scheduling your time, you are balancing things out. You actually are choosing what takes up your time and what takes up, how much of your time. And so you might actually start to schedule in some exercise, time you go, right? I actually need to get some exercise done to stay healthy. So that means that three days a week, I'm gonna schedule maybe Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays in the, in the evenings. I'm going to go and get some exercise done, could be just going for a run, going for a walk, going to a gym, playing whatever sport that you play, anything like that. You're being purposeful in balancing out where you spend your time and that has benefits for your health. It has benefits for your relationships cuz you can go, right? I have got this whole week where I've scheduled stuff where I'm beginning to schedule stuff.
Dan (05:09):
When am I actually gonna spend time with my partner? When am I gonna spend time with my children? When am I gonna spend time in this hobby that I wanna actually get done? And when am I gonna spend time developing myself, developing myself as a teacher? Or when am I gonna spend time? You know, developing my relationship with these students that I have, where does that fit into my schedule as well? And so you're balancing out all your systems and processes and your workload, which is amazing because it is going to have a great impact on your stress levels. It's gonna have a great impact on your health, on your relationships. And this is yeah. If you don't schedule your time, I, I really dunno why you're not doing this. It is one of the most beneficial things you can do. I can list so many number three for this little episode that we're doing today. You become
Dan (05:57):
Not just more productive, but you become more effective because yeah, you do become more productive because when you get to that time, right, it gets to lunchtime. You're like, I know exactly what I'm doing at lunch. I'm gonna go and sit by myself in my actual classroom, gonna close that door, pull the curtains. And no one knows I'm in there and I'm gonna smash out a whole bunch of work where I'm not distracted, who I'm gonna get this done and that that's productivity, you're becoming more productive in that sense. But you're also becoming more effective because you're choosing when you're gonna do those harder tasks, those deep work tasks compared to those less deep work tasks. Like if you've got this beautiful time that you know, every day you are in your staff room or by yourself and you are spending it doing shallow tasks or just walking around slowly preparing, you know, coffee or whatever.
Dan (06:45):
You know, I know teachers used to walk around my staff room, grinding his coffee with his hands. Yeah. That's a waste of time. Right? Unless it's relieving your stress or anything like that, then maybe it's okay, but you can actually go, right? I've got this chunk of time. I've scheduled it. Therefore I'm gonna become more purposeful and more effective with my time. You're not allowing all these in between things to take away from your time. And you're choosing because you're being able to balance things out. You're actually choosing to become more effective. You're actually choosing to put things into your schedule that improve your health, that reduce your stress. Maybe it's a meditation. Maybe you're gonna read a book, right? Maybe you're gonna spend more time just doing some social things with friends because that's something that helps to relieve your stress and enables you to enjoy life more.
Dan (07:30):
And so by putting these things in, you actually become more effective when you're on, right? When you actually have the time that you've scheduled in to do your work, you are more effective, cuz you're more focused. You're more refreshed. You're not as stressed and you are gonna get more work done in that time. You're gonna become more effective. You're gonna be choosing the task that really matter most to your teaching, right? So, you know, be choosing well with this hour that I have. What is the most effective use of my time at that point? Is it going to be that I'm need to spend some time interviewing a student to get to know them better? Or am I gonna be writing my programs or am I gonna be writing my reports three weeks before they're actually due so that I don't have that stress that comes at the end with my reports.
Dan (08:13):
Lots of things that we can do here as we're scheduling our time and the fourth and final benefit I'm gonna talk to you about today is that it becomes easier to say no. And I think that is a huge benefit for any teacher to be able to say, actually I can't do that. I'm busy. And I think that is just so freeing to actually go, well, I don't have free time, right? Unless you've particularly scheduled it as free time. But even that you've scheduled it, it's not free time. You've probably scheduled something you're gonna do during that free time. You're gonna read your book, you're gonna relax and you're gonna get a massage. Okay.
Dan (08:48):
And you can say to anyone, even your principal, when they call you and they say, can you please come down for a meeting about Blah? You can actually say, I'm so sorry. I can't, I already have something in my schedule. Can we rebook for tomorrow at this time? Can we rebook for next week, at this time? And if it is not an important and urgent thing, you principal will probably say, yep, not a problem. Let's reschedule it. For, and then you'll find the time, okay. That is super impactful for you as a teacher because suddenly everything's not just getting thrown out all the time, right? You're not just going, well, I am free. I haven't planned anything. And so yes, of course I can do that. You actually know what you're meant to be doing and that you can't do that. And I think that can have such a huge impact on your life as a teacher, to be able to reduce your workload, to just be able to say no to things.
Dan (09:39):
When you're asked to do something, you go actually, no I'm busy at that time. You know, you've got a blocking there that you're gonna see now that says, you know, time spent with your son, right? That's in your calendar. And then someone's gonna ask you a school. Can you be involved in the musical? We meet at this time and you're gonna look at your calendar and say, actually I can't. I have something in that. It's super important to me that I cannot miss. And then it might be that you want to be involved and you can schedule into another time, but you know what it's actually taking you away from when you look at your schedule. And so you can start to really count up the cost of the things that you are saying yes to. And so there four really quick benefits of scheduling your time.
Dan (10:21):
You become more purposeful with your time. You can balance out what you're spending your time on. You become more effective by doing that. And you can start to say no more easily. Now, if you wanna go into more detail about what you can do to improve your effectiveness, to reduce your workload, then please make sure you go to teacherspd.net/freewltm grab a free copy of my book, just pay for post and handling and it'll come to you and you can read through that and it will help you to reduce your workload as well. So thank you so much for joining me today. And I look forward to chatting with you again soon.
