In Your School, What’s The ‘One Thing’
In schools, fires never cease to burn.
One of the most common complaints I hear from school leaders is that, day-to-day, they have too many things to do. They are always busy — so, so busy. Yet, terms go by and they feel like little has been accomplished.
In a typical day a school leader might having meetings with parents, teachers, and students. Have duties. Manage a crisis (or several). Lead an assembly. Take a staff briefing. Teach a class. Respond to e-mails. Speak to a Board member. Do a learning walk. Enter grades into a school management system. Write student reports. Supervise a detention. Attend to a scraped knee/nose bleed. And complete multitudes of ‘essential’ paperwork. Perhaps all before lunch.
If reading that list made you breathless, it was meant to. That’s how leaders feel all day, every day.
How then to see the wood for the trees? To get out of the weeds? To focus on the future, not the fires?
One trick is to focus on one thing.
Each week, just one thing.
You’ll still have to deal with all the daily ‘stuff’, but to move long-term projects forward, pick one long-term goal and focus on that and only that.
Key is not to add more to your (already full) plate. The students and teachers will do that for you! Don’t choose multiple long-term goals. Choose one. Use whatever time you can scrape between the busyness to focus on that ‘one thing’. Ideally, carve out time first thing in the morning or at the end of the day — the hopefully quieter times.
Whilst working on the one thing, hard as it is (and crisis excepted), try not respond to emails, texts, calls, or messages. Only work on the one thing. If the week gets away from you, set the same focus for the following week. The same one thing.
It may not be easy. It may be a war of attrition. You may have to settle for snatched moments here and there. But, those moments will add up. At the end of the term you’ll have been busy but, hopefully, you’ll also feel like you’ve accomplished something — and not just put out fires.
Before you go…
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