Well, that was a nice half term, wasn’t it? One of the things that I love about teaching is how much time off we’re guaranteed. Every year, you’ll get 13 weeks off – possibly more if you teach in a different setting, like in a private school. I always like to make the most of my time off by going away and exploring different parts of the world. Most recently I went to Spain, but a couple of years ago now, I made a childhood dream come true and toured Japan for 3 weeks – and had the best time.
Now, as the nights begin to draw in, you’ve already completed a week of half term 2, and you might be ready for another break. Strap in, since you’ve got a good 6 weeks or so until the Christmas holiday! Instead, let’s think about how you can refine your present to make the You of next week have a better time.
Here are four ways to rebuild your systems for the winter term, and how to ride that wave until the Christmas break.
Is Your To Do List Working?
Virtually everything that I do is planned through a couple of different systems.
My Bullet Journal captures my to do list, habits and a daily diary of what I’ve been up to throughout the year. OneNote is the place for my Second Brain, but I’ve recently added a new journal to my systems.
Most BuJo systems incorporate some sort of a weekly tasks tracker, where you brain dump everything you need to get done in any given week. I did try this when I first started recording everything but, because I put so much into one pretty small book, I found that my lists were getting lost. It was a little purposeless.
Then, at the end of the last academic year, my colleague bought me this great new journal that was Lord of the Rings themed. I’ve dedicated this little book to all of my weekly to do lists, so I’ve one place to turn to whenever I’ve seemingly ‘run out of work’. This approach has been especially useful since becoming Head of Department, as I’m often given a number of tasks that don’t necessarily need to get done on the day that I’m assigned them, and can wait till later.
The 30-Minute Mid-Term Audit
All of that rambling about my super duper new journal led to my own 30-minute mid-term audit. Take 30 minutes out of your day – either at work or on a Sunday, when things might feel a tad calmer, and assess how things went last term. Ideally, you’ll do this at the end of each term.
The systems that you used in September and October were essentially a rough draft, concocted in the final weeks of your summer break, but may have crumbled when put to the test. Did your Second Brain work in the way that it was intended? How about your marking calendar? Were you able to get everything done, or were you constantly falling behind?
Such a short task should help you hugely in the long run. You’re giving yourself time to reassess the systems that you had in place for the last 6 or 7 weeks and figuring out whether they made you more, or less, productive.
Review what actually saved time last term, versus what created administrative friction.
Prune the Clutter
As part of this 30-minute audit, you should assess the tools that you used during the first half term. How did your lessons feel to teach? Were they over-engineered, or mapped perfectly to the Long Term Plan?
Actually, let’s check for a second – are you on track with your department’s Long Term Plan? Is there anything that you need to reduce or remove to catch up? Or do you have time to play with, where you can slow down while waiting for the rest of the team to catch up?
Don’t just think about your teaching, though, consider anything that might slow you down. Are your digital folders organised in a way that makes them easy to navigate? Poorly organised Google Drives can add seconds to each day, which quickly turns into minutes and hours of navigation over a year or more of teaching. Check out this post if you want to optimise your Drive. Think about how you’re optimising the day for Future You, and make a plan to improve it.
You don’t need to make the improvements now; they could take place over a number of weeks if you’ve a lot to do, but you should absolutely have a plan in place to ensure it gets done. Apply the same concepts to your Second Brain, ensuring that it’s working for you, instead of feeling unnecessarily restrictive.
Establish Harder Evening Boundaries
We all know that the nights are going to draw in, especially after the clocks went back an hour, and working long into the dark hours of the day is only going to further drain your battery.
If you’ve not already, start using your Google Calendar to assign a time, each day, when you’re going to clock off. It might be that you leave site every day at half 3, promising to get more done at home. Or, you might leave work at half 5, taking nothing with you.
Whichever method you opt for, ensure that you stick to it and continue to make time for you. That means doing what you love, be it a passive activity, like going to the movies, or an active one, like hitting the gym or rock climbing. The last thing you want is losing all of your beloved habits out of a duty to spending all of your free time working.
If you take away one thing from this post, it’s this: get out your digital calendar and make an event that’s 30 minutes long, where you’ll promise to take a 30-minute audit this weekend. And if you enjoy that, and have a little extra time, you might want to start scheduling in life audits throughout the year. They’ve been really beneficial to me, and I know that they’ll help you, too.
While you’re here, why not read…
- A guide to rebuilding your systems for the winter school term
- History through stories: using cold cases in the classroom
- How to run a calm, high-impact registration: setting the tone in the 15 first minutes of the new term.
- How video games made me a more productive teacher
- How to build a sustainable reading habit in just ten pages a day
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