When you ask a senior leader what their biggest challenge is at school, 99% will say they don’t have enough time.

It’s funny, because we are all given the same amount of time. We all have the same number of hours in the day and same number of days in a week.

Perhaps it isn’t that we don’t ‘have enough time’ but that we are not managing the time we do have, effectively.

One of my favourite quotes about time is by Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks.

“When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer…instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable.”

If we delve a little deeper into the feeling of not having enough time, we actually soon realise that it is down to having too much to do, we are struggling to prioritise or we are spinning too many plates at once.

Edward Hall describes time as a conveyor belt. There are containers on our conveyor belt that represent days, weeks, months and we feel the need to fill them. If they are not filled, we watch our containers go by and worry we are wasting time. If they are all filled, we become stressed that we are doing too much. So how do we find the balance?

We can use diaries, scheduling techniques and give ourselves new strategies for trying to use our time better, but effective time management often goes far beyond tangible tools.

Let’s look at prioritising as an example. It’s easy they say – go write a list! Of course, methods like Alan Lakein’s ABC model for prioritisation works effectively, but we have to be aware that it may not be a quick process! The model supports you in thinking about A – the important and urgent, B – the important but not urgent and the C – neither important nor urgent.

But it’s actually not that easy if you are unable to see what is more or less important than the next thing. When you are feeling overwhelmed and are in a state of burnout, it is almost impossible to see that one thing has more or less importance than the other.

I experienced this when I was in burnout in my senior leader role as Head of Key Stage 1, PSHE lead and classroom teacher. Everything seemed huge and everything seemed the most important thing I had to do.

Prioritising then became far bigger than just trying to write a list. It became an exploration into my values. What things did I need to get done for work that had a deadline but also what things did I need for myself to keep me sane? What was I absolutely not going to give up and prioritise? I then had to work on rediscovering my boundaries and work on my confidence to do this.

As you can see, there are so many complex factors that have to be explored in order to work on something that initially seems so simple.

Time is something that goes so fast in a school and we feel as though we are always up against it. We end up losing sight of the things that are important to us because we need to get things done in a given time. We often feel like we are scrambling and frantic but it really doesn’t have to be that way.

In the short term, we do have to think about the ways we can schedule, time table and plan accordingly as well as organising our days. There are many methods we can use to organise and plan our time effectively. Things like time blocking or the Podomoro technique where you work for 25 minutes, have a 5 minute break and get back to another 25 minutes of work before a 5 minute break again. We can set daily, as well as weekly and monthly, goals to break down our work.

Yet, in order to feel as though we are in control of our time and the things we have to do within it, we must make sure to have time for ourselves to do the things that we are interested in and enjoy. We have got to work on delegation skills and the ways in which we communicate with others. We must also try to understand the reasons why we might be finding sticking to our strategies so hard.

Perhaps our boundaries have become blurred or we are too exhausted to see levels of importance within our workload. Maybe we want things done perfectly or in a specific way or ironically, we feel we just don’t have the time to think about how we can best manage our time!

It is really hard but time management can be easy. It can be done well. There has to be time put in to begin with to understand yourself better and we know how hard that can be!