Your 168 Checkbook

Burnout!

Teachers by no means have sole proprietorship over this state of existence.  In fact, there is a plethora of wisdom regarding burnout in the workplace.  I recently came across an online article from the Mayo Clinic that seems to sum up workplace burnout quite well.   And, as if there was a force at work in the universe, around the same time I found an article in the Washington Post about “compassion fatigue”, otherwise known as secondary trauma stress.  From day one, the teaching profession will make extraordinary demands on your time and elevate your sense of commitment to the kids in your care.  Driven by compassion, a.k.a. “caring”, you will quickly learn how too many commitments and too little time will lead you down the path toward burnout. Overcommitment is the hallmark of burnout and usually starts with having more commitments than time, or put another way, not enough time to meet all one’s commitments.  And, let me assure you, if you want to find your healthy life balance so you can survive past five, you will need to be deliberate and purposeful about what you do with one key resource: 

Your Time is Your Life

Being deliberate and purposeful starts with a basic understanding of one fundamental truth.  Time stops for no one. It’s finite. You know exactly how much time you will have available as each week begins.  It’s simple math.  Seven days a week times 24 hours a day leaves you with exactly 168 hours to accomplish your week’s work while maintaining a healthy life balance.  One of my fellow teachers and I started referring to our weekly time resource as our 168 checkbook.  You will spend every one of your 168 hours doing something.  Spending time on any task or activity equates to writing a check for the time spent and lowering your balance for the week.  This checkbook is unique, however, because every time Mickey’s big hand goes all the way around, you are one hour poorer whether you used that hour productively or not.  Once you hit zero, your week is over and you start again with a new week.  Step one on your journey to survive past five is to balance your 168 checkbook. That begins with knowing how you spend your time.

I found over the years that most of my high school students lacked time management skills. It was partly a developmental issue and partly because no one had taught them the skills to visualize and manage their time.  I also noted that almost every reputable college had some program for helping college freshmen deal with time management when they arrived on campus without adults to direct their daily lives.  So, I started having my high school students complete a “168 drill” and then get their parents to sign it.  This was an early assignment for my tougher courses. I wanted students who had signed up for multiple AP and similarly challenging courses to have some idea of the time commitment for their heavy load.  I provided a grid that I made from a google sheets spreadsheet.  It had 7 columns labeled Sunday through Saturday with 48 rows labeled 12 A.M. through 12 A.M. in half hour intervals.  They had to list their routine weekly activities over which they had no control, ie, someone had already scheduled these for them.  These included work/school hours, travel time, meal times, extracurricular times to include clubs, sports, fine arts and similar activities, out of school activities like work, babysitting, household chores, and SLEEP.  Once they had the list, they would then fill in their grid to produce a color coded visual of their routine week.  The blank or open spaces represented their unstructured time.  Those were the times they could expect to routinely schedule themselves. Homework, recreation, and similar pursuits would fill those slots.  Interestingly, two patterns emerged. First, the majority of students tended to leave out or forget about some of their key, time consuming activities, and many could or would not admit how much time they were spending on social media.  And, when their time tables approached reality, almost every student had a visual that showed they were not getting the hours of sleep recommended by most pediatricians when they tried to “do it all”. There simply were not enough hours in a day to meet school, work and similar commitments while remaining attentive to an “always on” social media paradigm unless they sacrificed something as basic as sleep.  

There are two takeaways for new teachers from this exercise.  First, many of your students are struggling to get it all done, and most of them are probably sleep deprived. Second, a lot of teachers are in the same boat.

All teachers, not just new ones, need to be deliberate about how they spend their time. They also need to learn how to be at peace knowing that programming their own recovery time is also important to the students they serve.  Fact: You must learn to cope with too many tasks and too little time.  Sometimes, some things just don’t get done. The key to your success will be how you choose what won’t get done which requires you to be deliberate with your time.  You need to create your own 168 road map. 

Let’s start with task one by reflecting on a “short list” of items on your “to do” list from day one.  You will deliver instruction to students in class for the bulk of your day. You may also have a short time to plan or conference with parents. You may get 20 to 30 minutes for lunch if you are lucky.  When you are not actually delivering instruction, you will create lesson plans, grade assignments, enter grades, evaluate students, contact parents, focus remediation for struggling students, meet the requirements of students with special needs, and monitor hallways.  You will have meetings to attend, software to learn, and professional development to complete (Gotta get those re-certification points!!). You will probably have to set goals, develop a plan to meet those goals, and then maintain a written record of your accomplishments to submit for your end of year evaluation.  You will probably be required to attend new teacher development sessions throughout your first year as well.  Many schools will require new teachers to hand in copies of lesson plans every week.  Things will really start to get interesting when students miss class due to illness, being truant, or simply being pulled out of class for any number of reasons ranging from visits to the counseling office to a host of extracurricular activities or field trips for other classes. You will then have to carve out time to get them caught up while the rest of your students keep moving forward.  Your list will then expand dramatically if you also signed on to coach a sport or fine arts activity.  All the while, you will be developing relationships with your students and learning how you will differentiate based upon individual needs regardless of whether or not they have an IEP. 

Guess What!

There are NOT Enough Hours in a School Day to Do What Your Teaching Contract Requires!

Most schools will have a core set of hours that teachers are required to be in school or “in the building” as we say. Your contract also probably has some clause that states that you, as a professional, are required to spend the time necessary to accomplish your tasks.  It is a great way for administrators, school boards, education bureaucrats and politicians to keep pumping out their "great ideas" without having to acknowledge that they are a big part of the problem in teacher burnout.  In other words, you will have homework. Fair enough. Most of you had some idea that you would be grading papers or planning lessons after normal school hours.  Here is the rub, though. You still have to eat, sleep, grocery shop, do your laundry, and all those other mundane life maintenance tasks as well as carve out some time for fitness to include family and social relationships that are part of being a “whole person”.  And, your weekly limit for all of these activities is 168.

So  if you have not already done so, you should complete a 168 drill and revisit it regularly as your commitments evolve. I have provided resources and examples to help you through the process.  Then, if you have not already developed the habit, you should set a goal to keep a calendar/planner. Managing time requires some method for visualizing where your time actually goes as well as a means for tracking future requirements.  So pick a method, whether a physical planner or a digital calendar like google calendar, and set a goal to stick with it for at least one semester.  For all practical purposes, this combination of your routine 168 and long term calendar will become your 168 checkbook.  

Now you have to manage your time budget as you write “checks” and allocate time for your key activities. That involves three critical steps.  First, you have to plan ahead.  For example, if you teach writing and create an assignment for students to write a paragraph, you have to factor in the time it will take to actually evaluate or grade that assignment. So let’s say you have a pretty good rubric and know that on average it will take you about two to three minutes to evaluate and provide feedback for a student’s paragraph. If you have 80 students and subsequently 80 paragraphs to evaluate, you know that it will take you 120 to 180 minutes to grade that assignment.  You must then decide when that will occur.  So, you need to block out some time, time you will now no longer have for other activities, to grade those papers. 

Your second critical step requires recognition that some things on your “to-do” list will not get done. That’s right, inevitably, you will run out of time before you run out of tasks, especially when you combine your teaching tasks with your personal tasks.  Many financial advisers tell their clients that the secret to saving money is to always “pay yourself first”.  Simply put, you should set aside some of your income for savings at the beginning of your budgeting process.  The same applies to your time budget.  You should set a limit for the time you will spend outside of contract time on your teaching activities and simultaneously carve out the time you will need to sustain a healthy life balance for you and your family.  That means you will routinely set priorities and prepare yourself for the third critical step in managing your time.

You need to learn the art of teacher time management. That means you will learn what “must get done” and what can “slide”. You’ll learn tricks of the trade for accomplishing key tasks more efficiently and learn what resources are available to boost your effectiveness. If you are wise, you will seek out the goldmine of experience from effective teachers around you. Finally, you will learn when and how to say “NO”, to yourself and to your boss. But that topic and many others are left for future posts.