At its best, teaching can be invigorating and inspiring; at its most challenging, it can be grueling and frustrating. With so much on a teacher’s to-do list, it can be tempting to try to power through your day like a robot, making copies while you eat your lunch or checking emails in the five minutes in between classes.
The problem is, when you run on the there’s-always-something-else-to-do-treadmill all day long, it’s hard to be present when you’re actively teaching. Moreover, it’s especially difficult to inject playfulness in your classroom when you’re feeling weary and exhausted instead of alert and curious.
Since becoming a mom, it’s become essential that I return home with energy left in my tank, so that I can bring levity and enjoyment to the time that I spend tending to my toddler’s whims in the after school hours. Accordingly, I’ve been experimenting this school year with some practices that allow me to infuse my teaching day with a bit more ease. In this post, I’ll share three, easy-to-implement habits that have allowed me to make some space in my busy days at school.
1. Take (and Play During) Your Lunch Break
In the past, I’ve used my lunch as an additional prep period, running around with my Pyrex container and eating on the go. This year, I’ve been intentionally setting aside my lunch time to eat slow enough to actually taste my food and have designated these 20-25 minutes as a “Schoolwork Free Zone.”
I now spend my lunch break doing something enjoyable – for me, that’s usually working on Playful STEM content like this blog post. On nice-weather days, I often bring a camping chair outdoors to a quiet spot (away from the playground!) and spend the time reading or connecting with another colleague seeking the sunshine.
Being intentional about taking my lunch as an actual break has done wonders for the pace of my day. I now know that there will be a moment to pause and slow down and also get the benefit of looking forward to whatever activity I’ve selected for my lunch time. (I tend to choose my activity ahead of time to avoid the temptation to slip into school tasks.) I now come off my lunch break feeling rejuvenated and ready to tackle my afternoon classload with more than just feigned enthusiasm.
2. Close Your Email Tab
I’m an Inbox Zero type of person, so I’m very familiar with the delight of feeling on top of your emails. Email can be particularly pernicious time-sink, though, because it’s low-hanging fruit that can quickly carve up your large chunks of work time into “time confetti” – a term coined by Brigid Schulte and popularized by Ashley Whillans, We create time confetti when we do small tasks – a quick scan of our email here, a scroll through Instagram there – that wind up shredding our large blocks of time into confetti-sized pieces that prevent us from getting big tasks accomplished and leave us wondering where the time went.
This year, I’ve created an email routine that is deliberately designed to prevent email from turning my prep and transition times into time confetti. First, to strike at the root of my compulsion to check my email constantly, I’ve adopted the view that no one can reasonably expect me to be reading and responding to emails during the instructional portion of my day as, of course, they should expect me to be teaching!
Next, I created a routine for checking email that allows me to stay informed without letting incoming emails derail my time and thoughts throughout the day. I now check my school email four times a day, but respond to emails in a large batch during just one of these checks.
| Morning Scan: Read Only | I check my email when I first get to school to make sure that I review the daily morning announcements sent out by our secretary. I do a quick, read-only scan to see if there are any other essential things I need to see – but I don’t typically respond to anything unless it’s absolutely urgent. My goal in this check is to quickly collect only the essential news I need and to immediately delete those emails once I’ve read them – it usually takes 3 minutes or less. |
| Prep Scan: Read Only | I do another read-only scan during my prep period, typically so that I can review the daily attendance email. Because this is during my teaching day, I again tend not to respond to any emails so that I can maximize the minutes that I can spend preparing lessons for my students. |
| End of Day: Responding | In between my last class ending and my hallway duty, I again check my email. This time, I actually process and respond to anything that’s come into my inbox. I don’t leave school until my emails are all processed and my inbox is tidy. Because I’ve kept up this routine, it typically takes me no more than 10-20 minutes to deal with all of my emails in one fell swoop. |
| Evening Scan: Read Only | At some point in the evening, I do a final, read-only review of my emails just to make sure nothing came in that I need to mull on overnight. I never respond to anything, unless it’s an absolute emergency, because I don’t want to set the expectation that I’m constantly tethered to my email or that people should anticipate hearing from me in the evening hours. Typically, it can wait for a response until the following morning or afternoon. |
This practice has made me a much more efficient email processor – while it was tricky to break the urge to click refresh (it’s so easy when you’ve got a spare moment!), I’ve been pleased with this new routine, as it prevents email from derailing my attention without compromising my ability to stay informed.
3. Wrap, Review, Plan
The final habit I’ve adopted this year has helped me to leave school ready to shift into Mom Mode, without unfinished work business percolating in my mind. After my email processing is complete, I do a quick “Wrap, Review, and Plan” session.
Wrap: I reset my room by tidying any materials that have been used during the day and clearing my desk of any accumulated clutter.
Review: I go over my daily to-do list, celebrating what I got accomplished and making decisions about when/whether to tackle the other items. (The power of deciding not to do something has been huge for me this year!)
Plan: I spend 3-5 minutes making my to-do list for the next day. I keep my list as short as possible, evaluating whether each item I’m adding is essential or something that I simply “want” to do but that won’t meaningfully impact the experiences that students have in my space.
I now leave my classroom each afternoon with my work station ready for the next morning – a neat, clutter-free desk and a clear, manageable to-do list already waiting for me. This “Wrap, Review, Plan” process lets me depart school knowing that I have a plan for accomplishing my tasks and grants me permission to leave work at work (at least most of the time!)
I hope these tips can help you enjoy a bit more ease in your days – teacher life is demanding, but you can make space to slow down the frenetic pace with subtle shifts like the practices described here.