There’s a chance that those supervising aren’t looking out for your well being. You might hear platitudes about self-care. You might receive messages about taking care of yourself while the system continues to pile more on your plate each day.
There’s no way that any bubble bath or nature walk can make up for the exhaustion and frustration brought on by systems filled with friction and red-tape. Mindset is great but actions prove who and what the priority is.
As such, you need to promote yourself to Chief Wellness Officer (CWO). Treat your time and energy as the finite resource that it is. Protect it at all costs, because no one else will.
As CWO, set these boundaries:
Hard timelines. If you have your email on your phone, and you are receiving notifications all night, you need to take it off of your phone immediately. Set time boundaries to keep work contained during the work day. Emails will be there tomorrow. Use a tagline on your email that says “I respond to emails between the hours of 8am through 4pm. I will respond to your email within 24 hours.” Respect your own boundaries so that everyone can respect them too.
Use a Shutdown Routine. Help establish your boundaries by turning off your ‘educator brain.’ Minimize all those extra thoughts that follow you home. Establish a routine that allows you to leave it all behind for the day. In a notebook, write down all of your To-Do’s for tomorrow. Brain dump anything else on your mind. Clear off your desk and create a physical shutoff or power down. For me, I write my next day action items in my notebook, and close the notebook in a drawer. It will all be there waiting for you tomorrow.
Create a Batching Block. During the day, stuff comes up that distracts you from what you really should be doing. Small tasks eat up your time in small bites – a minute here, a minute there. Worse yet, it takes you twenty minutes to refocus on what you were originally doing. Take all of those administrative tasks as they come up and throw them into a processing bin. Spend 15 minutes at the end of the day or early in the morning to quickly tackle all of the unwanted admin tasks. One quick sprint saves you throughout the day.
Stop being the Middleman. Your inbox might be bloated with emails that don’t pertain to you. It could be a tech issue that you aren’t responsible for, or a cafeteria question that you can’t answer. Suddenly, you’re spending your valuable time to hunt down an answer. Stop getting stuck in between, and train those emailing to ask the people who can actually provide an answer. Cut and paste a snippet, “To get the fastest answer on (Insert Topic), please contact (Insert Department) at (Insert Email).” This helps you avoid questions you don’t need to answer, and stops you from being the general help desk.
Close Your Tabs. Look at the top of your screen right now. If you are anxious because there are forty-seven tabs open, you need a way to quiet the visual noise. Each tab represents an unclosed loop, and your brain is constantly trying to close those loops. No wonder you can’t sleep. Try collapsing all of those browser tabs so that you can single task. Open just the one tab that you need to focus on the present task. Focus on only one thing at a time. Or, even better, try a fresh restart by shutting it down completely. Use Command Q (Mac) or Ctrl-Shift-Q (Chromebook) to quit all applications and start over. Your brain will thank you.
Promoting yourself to Chief Wellness Officer isn’t selfish. It allows you to make your role more sustainable. Self-care isn’t a mindset. It’s all of the actions that you take each day to protect your time and energy.
After all, someone needs to look out for your actual well-being. You are officially promoted!
Rich
For more strategies to protect your time and energy, pick up a copy of Autopilot: Practical Productivity for School Leaders.
