EPISODE #277

Planning Your Day and the Myth of Self-Care

You're listening to the school leadership reimagined podcast episode 277. 

Hey, builders. Before we begin today's episode, I want to tell you about something really cool that's happening. So usually inside a buildership university, we do live workshops. These live workshops are hands on. They're about solving a specific problem, and this month's live Workshop is all about understanding will drivers. It's called How to motivate anybody, and it's about looking and understanding your will driver and other people's will drivers, so that you can motivate literally anybody. This topic is so important that I've decided to make a few seats available for non bu members. So if you're a member of BU, your seat is already secured. It's a part of your bu membership. You'll be getting information about that. But if you're not a member of BU, but you want to get in on this amazing, incredible workshop, then all you need to do is go to buildership university.com/master, class buildership university.com/master, class, and you can get one of the tickets that I've made available for non bu members. It's all going down on September 16, so again, go to buildership university.com/master class to get your seat on this incredible live workshop now on with the show you're listening to the school leadership reimagine podcast episode 277.

How do builders like us make a dramatic difference in the lives of our students in spite of all the obstacles we face, how do you keep your vision for your school from being held hostage by resistant teachers, uncooperative parents, ridiculous district policies or lack of time, money or resources if you're facing those challenges right now, here's where you'll find the answers, strategies and actionable tips you need to overcome any obstacle you face, you don't have to wait to make A difference in the lives of the people you serve. You can turn your school into a success story right now with the people and resources you already have, let's get started.

Hey, builders, welcome to another episode of the school leadership reimagine podcast. I'm your host, Robyn Jackson, and today I want to talk to you about something really practical. And it's all about, how do you manage your time? How do you manage your day, so that every single day you get in, you are getting stuff accomplished and you feel good at the end of the day. So this is not going to be a time management podcast. This is not going to be about, you know, use this schedule or use your Google Calendar. This is going to be more intuitive. And it started out with a conversation that we were having inside of buildership University during office hours, where people were talking about how drained they were already at the beginning of the year, and and we were looking and exploring why, and I was talking to them about ways that they could manage their days so that even on those days when it's a chore, day when you're when you're just doing a whole bunch of chores, and you're really frustrated, you're knocking things out and getting stuff done, but you don't Those are the chores. It's not the real work that you really want to do.

How do you manage your days so that you can still end even those kinds of days energized? How do you manage your days and your time so that you're not depleted at the end of the day? And so today is going to be a little more practical. So it's not about, you know, time blocking or some of the other scheduling things that you're doing today is really going to be about how builders think about their day and set their days up so that even on those tough days, they still come home and they still feel good. All right. So you ready to dive in? Let's go. So it starts out by understanding three things about yourself. The first thing that you need to understand is you need to understand your own rhythm. Are you better in the morning? Do you have an energy slump in the afternoon? Are you do you get a new surge of energy in the afternoon? What is your own energy rhythm? So I'll talk about that more in a second. But the first thing is, you need to understand your energy rhythm. The second thing you need to understand is you need to understand your will driver. Now I'll be doing a workshop inside of buildership University on will drivers, coming up next week, and we're going to make a few tickets available for those of you who want to kind of peek inside of buildership University and and get the information about will drivers. And to do that, you can go to buildership university.com/masterclass dot com, slash master class. But you need to understand how you are motivated so that you can design your day in a way that meets and feeds your will driver. 

So let's first start with the energy piece, and then we'll end with the will driver piece. 

So I'll be honest, I am not. Not a morning person at all. If you know, if it were up to me, I'd sleep late. I stay up far later than I should, but I just don't do well in the morning. And so I like a slow morning. I like to kind of come in to work and kind of ease into work. And when I was a teacher, that meant that a lot of times what I would do is, if I could arrange it, I would try to get my planning period to be the first period of the day so I can come in, I can ease into work, I can get myself together and be ready to go. So every time I could, I would try to get my planning period the day when I was an administrator, it meant that I would try to not stack my mornings. Now, you know, as an administrator, you walk in the door and you don't know what's going to hit you, but what I tried to do is I tried to keep my mornings pretty spare. You know, I was doing the the monitoring before school and, you know, outside with the kids, and then when we let the kids in the building, in the halls, and, you know, getting them ready. But I try not to do too much heavy lifting. In the morning, I tried to key I, you know, I could get through that if I knew that as soon as the kids got in class, I didn't have anything really scheduled. So I could go to my office and kind of decompress and get myself together and get ready for the day. That's how I work. Now, some of you are brilliant in the morning. Some of you do your best thinking in the morning, and for others of you, you're somewhere in between, like you, you know you okay in the morning, but you really get a peak mid morning. You need to pay attention to where you are energetically. A lot of times we just come in and we just plow through our day because, you know, the day is waiting for us, and we don't really understand how we work best. We just let the day kind of plan things for us. So I want you to pay attention to where you are energetically. You know, it's I'll give you another example. 

I am. Even though I'm not great in the morning, I have my best. I do my best thinking in the morning, first thing in the morning, really late at night, when it's quiet, when my brain is fresh and unburdened. And so even though I'm not a morning person, I do my best writing in the morning. So when I'm working on a book, first thing I do when I get up, before I check email or do anything else is I write for one hour because that's where my thoughts are clearest, and so that's when I write. So understanding how I work energetically helps me to be my best productive self. It helps me to arrange a day where I'm not stressed out. And so I would argue that the same thing is true for you. If you are a morning person and you do your best thinking in the morning, protect that time so that you can spend your time doing the thing, the work that requires thinking. If you're not a morning person and you don't do your best thinking in the morning, you set time to be kind of out with everybody in the halls, with kids going into classrooms, checking, you know, work that doesn't require big parts of your brain, like checking email. And then save the times of the day for the that where you are energetically the most productive for the work that is going to be the best work for you. And make sure that you have a day with both. Never create a day where you're just slammed all day with kind of like busy work, and you never have time to do the creative thinking you want to make sure that every single day that you look at where your best energy is, and you protect as much as possible that time of the day for your energy. 

You know, I was working with a principal once, and when we looked at her energy, we realized that she really gets the best, you know, her best thinking and her and her most energy right around lunchtime. But she was spending her lunch times, doing lunch duty, and she was doing, you know, back to back lunches. And so she was depleting herself every single day during her most, her most productive time. So what we did is we looked at her schedule and we said, Okay, you're doing three back to back lunches, and it's depleting you. You leave every day depleted, because when your brain is most alive, you're in the lunchroom, you know, telling kids, pick up that trash, make sure you clear your tray, and not doing your thinking and so, but then, on the other hand, you have to be present for lunch. And so what we decided to do was, we decided to get some to spread out the lunch duty. So instead of her doing all three lunches, she would do one lunch, and then she split the other two lunches with some of her lead teachers. She rearranged the schedule so the lead teachers could take the other two lunches. She did one lunch, and then she split the other two lunches with the lead teachers, and that way she could do. Protect that time, move, do some work that really required all of her brain, and then when she finished, go into lunch. But then by the time she did that, she would take the third lunch. By the time she went to the third lunch, she had done work that really energized and excited her, and it fixed her attitude for doing that she could easily do the third lunch. She was happy. She was she had spent that time thinking and doing that work, so when she walked into lunch, she was she was in a great mood. She got along better with the kids. Her relationships with the kids got better, and we protected that time. If you are better at the end of the day, then don't stack up a whole bunch of meetings at the end of the day, that that that that deplete you of your energy. 

Pay attention to your energy. 

Pay attention to when you are at peak energy, and make sure that you are preserving those parts of the day for the work that you that that that really feeds you and that you can bring the most energy to and then when you leave the rest of the day feels different, because the rest of the day feels like, Okay, well, I've gotten that done. I've I've used my brain in the ways that I like to use my brain. And so then it changes your attitude about the other work that you're doing for the rest of the day. When you can it doesn't always happen that way, but when you are intentional about doing that, you will find that it will happen a lot more often and a lot more frequently than you think. Protect that time, protect your best parts of the day so that you can use your brain to do the work that matters most. Okay, so that's the first thing. The second thing you need to do is pay attention to your will driver. So I'm not going to be able to go deep into will drivers doing this podcast, but I will tell you that there all of us are motivated by four things. We're motivated by this need for mastery, the idea that I can be good at the things that matter. We're motivated by need for connection or belonging, that I matter to people who matter. We're motivated by a need for autonomy, that I have choices over the things that matter, and we're motivated by a need for purpose. I am doing work that matters. 

Okay, all of us need all four, but I have observed over the last 20 years that all of us have a dominant all of us has a dominant will driver. We all need one of those things more than we need the other, the other three. So for some of us, our need for mastery outpaces our need for everything. It's the source of our motivation. For others of us, it's a need of connection that's the source of our motivation. For some of us, it's a need for purpose, and for others of us, it's the need for autonomy. If you understand your dominant will driver, then you can start to think about how what you need to stay motivated, and you can begin to be intentional about feeding your source of motivation. Hey, it's Robyn here. Real quick. I just want to interrupt this episode for just a second, because if you are enjoying what you're hearing, then would you mind sharing this episode with somebody else? So all you need to do is just go to your phone, if you're listening to on your phone, or your podcast player, and then click the three dots next to this episode, and it'll give you the option to share the episode. Now if you do that, three things are going to happen. First, the person that you shared with is going to think you're a hero, especially if they're struggling with what we're talking about right now, they're going to love you. Secondly, you're going to feel good because you're going to get the word out about buildership and start building this buildership nation. And third, you will get my eternal gratitude, because I really want to get this out to the world, and you'd be helping me out. You'd be doing me a huge favor. So please share this episode with someone right now who's who's dealing with this same issue, someone you think would really benefit and now back to the show.

So here's what I mean by that. I'll use myself as an example again, my dominant will driver's mastery, the thing that motivates me the most, the source of my motivation, is this need to get good at things that matter. And so my day, though, the quality of my day, is determined by whether or not I spent some time in that day getting good at something, whether or not I spent some time a day using a skill in a way that made me better, that made other people better. And so because I know that about myself, even on days when I know I'm slammed with other stuff, I try to carve out some time for mastery. So just recently, I had a day where I just had back to back meetings. All day I'd been out of the office, and so when I came back in, I just I had this backlog of meetings. And when I wasn't in meetings, I had deadlines, things I had to get to, people wasn't. Necessarily the work that I wanted to do, but it, you know, the stuff had been packed backing up, and so I had to get that stuff. We all have days like that, but I knew that I needed mastery. And so when I had an hour in my day where I didn't, you know, between meetings, I'd gotten all the stuff done from my deadlines, and I had an hour that I had complete control over. I spent some time in that hour learning. Now other people might look at that and say, well, that's frivolous, because you still have all these other things on your to do list, and why didn't you just knock all that stuff out? I didn't, because I knew that if I was going to be able to walk out of that day feeling some sort of accomplishment I needed to feed my need for mastery, and so I took an hour to learn something, and that one hour I spent learning something was the best hour of my day, and the thing that I learned helped me to navigate and solve some other problems that had been kind of bubbling in the back of my head. So at the end of the day, even though it was a day that was back to back meetings and a lot of chore work and busy work, at the end of the day, I felt a sense of accomplishment because I had fed my wool driver. Let's say that your wheel driver is connection or belonging, and you are just in back to back meetings, or you're locked in your office doing all this paperwork and trying to get caught up writing up evaluations or teacher observations.

You need to carve out some time in your day to just go and connect with other people. 

So it might be that you have lunch with somebody, or you spend 10 minutes having a completely frivolous conversation with one of your your work besties. It might mean that you spend some time connecting with kids and and talking to kids meaningfully, not just go to class, get out the hall, pick that up instead, spend some time getting to know a kid. But you have to be intentional, because you need connection. That's what motivates you, and that 10 minutes of connection, that hour of spending time, just you know, being with people and connecting with other people, will dramatically change how you feel about your day, especially when you're slammed with all this other work. If you need autonomy, then a lot of times this job is going to be hard, because a lot of times you walk in, you have a sense of what you want to do for the day, and then your day gets blown up. Somebody gets sent to the office, and you've got to do an investigation. Somebody, you know, falls down, and you need to, you know, run in and deal with that, and then call parents and and, or somebody comes to your office and ask you if you've got a minute, and you really don't, but you can't say that, because you want to be accessible to teachers. Whatever it is you, you're you're constantly being challenged with, with the a lack of control, or a sense of a lack of control over your day. So if you need autonomy every single day, you need to carve out some portion of your day or that you protect and you have complete control over. You need to figure out some part of your day that you will that sacrosanct for you, so that you feel like you have some control over something that matters to you. If you don't do that, you're going to just go home depleted at the end of the day, because you've never had a moment where you had you were able to exercise some choice during that day, and that's what motivates you. 

And then if you need purpose, if, if, if your dominant will driver's purpose, then every single day, you need to be carving out some time during the day where you can play with ideas, some part of the day where you feel like you are doing something that is getting you closer and closer to your big why people who are purpose driven, you love ideas, and you need to spend some part of the day, every single day, playing with ideas. That might be a 10 minute conversation with somebody that's completely philosophical and doesn't come to any kind of conclusion, just an opportunity to say, Hey, I've been thinking about this, and I'm playing with this idea. And what do you think about that you need to go get into a philosophical argument with somebody you need to do work that is so aligned with and connected to your purpose, that you feel a sense of purpose at after it's over. So if you if your big purpose, the big why in your life, is really about about helping kids have opportunities, then every single day, you need to be doing something that directly impacts a child's opportunity. You need to spend time every single day specifically working towards your purpose. This is something that so many people ignore. And even if we think we're doing it, we're really not. So you know, a lot of times people say, Well, I just, you know, I spent 10 minutes today doing something really cool. But. But if it's not specifically aligned to your will drivers, it's a very temporary hit when it's aligned to your will drivers that 10 minutes that you carve out that's specifically focused on feeding your dominant wheel. Driver that 10 minutes will turn your your your busy, exhausting day into a day that still feels satisfying, a day that still feels like you accomplished something. You could knock out 120 emails and get to Inbox Zero. You could finish all of your observation write ups and get them uploaded. You could go through all the data in your school and and have an analysis. You could revamp your schedule for the fall the fall, whatever you could do all those things throughout the day and knock all those things off your to do list. 

But if you don't spend time, at least sometime during the day doing something that directly feeds your wheel driver, you won't feel truly fulfilled, even though you've accomplished a lot, but you could get through half of your to do list, but spend 10 minutes feeding your wheel driver and walk out and feel like today was a good day. I got a lot done. Didn't get everything I needed done, but I got enough done that I feel ready to face tomorrow. It really makes that dramatic a difference. So two things, paying attention to your energy and where you can deliberately organizing your day around your peak and low energy. So peak energy, I'm doing work that that requires my brain, that that that that the work of the of the work. That's what I'm doing during peak energy, low energy, I save that for chores and where I can, I try to batch my chores into my lower energy thing, and so that I can just knock stuff out and I don't have to have my full brain there. I can get through the work very quickly. But I don't feel depleted by the work, because I spend some time every single day in that high energy time doing work that matters to me. And then the second thing, making sure that every single day, no matter how slammed I am, that I try to carve out 10 minutes to at least an hour more if I can handle it. I mean, if I can, if my schedule can handle it, but time doing work that feeds my dominant wheel driver, so that no matter what my day looks like, I still feel at the end of the day that I've done something that matters, that I have that I that I feel fulfilled in the work. And when you do that, then, even if you get interrupted, even if you have tough days that are kind of chore days, even when you're pulled in 27 different directions, how you feel about your day changes. And can I just be honest with you for a second, because a lot of people feel like that almost feels frivolous, that that shaping your day in order to feed your will driver shaping your day when you can so that you honor your own energy cycles. 

It feels indulgent. 

It almost feels like, well, that's a luxury, but I've got to be here to serve kids and and yes, I know you're there to serve kids, and I know that you are there to serve your staff, and that you are probably very sacrificial about how you serve people. Well, that doesn't mean that you can't also recognize and acknowledge the reality of who you are doesn't mean that you can't also find ways to make to keep you motivated, because you can't pour from an empty cup if you are not feeding yourself, if you're not feeding your own, will drivers, if you are not managing your time and your energy in a way that helps you to be the most productive you can if you're not doing things to make each day feel good to you, then you're gonna burn out. And so I know that there's a lot out there about self care and all of that, and I'll be honest, I'm skeptical about a lot of it, because, listen, I love a bubble bath as much as the next person, but it's very temporary. I love, you know, getting a manicure a pedicure as much as the next person. I can't often find time to do it, but when I do do it, it's great, but the results are temporary. And we're out here telling people self care. We're trying to take care of ourselves and do self care, and we're doing all these things that are indulgent, but they're band aids. They're band aids trying to fix a broken system. Okay, so the real system that you need to fix is how you manage your day. The real system you need to fix is understanding your will driver and being intentional about feeding your will driver. That's self care, and that doesn't wear off, you know, we're trying to we have these hellacious days, and then we try to fix that by stopping at Starbucks on the way home and eating some high calorie coffee drink that tastes good but is going to make us feel sluggish at the end. And then we think, that's self care, or we decide, you know. This weekend I'm not going to do any work. The work still piles up, but this weekend I'm not going to do any work. I'm just going to kind of, you know, give me a me day, or do a spa day. I love spa days, but spa days don't fix the problem. Spa days put band aids on the problems.

 So what I'm suggesting is that instead of doing all of that first, fix the problem, fix how your day goes. And there's two things that I know work paying attention to your energy and trying to structure your day to fit your energy, and then paying attention to your will driver and structuring your day so that you feed your will driver every single day, then you can actually go enjoy the spa day, because you're not all stressed out and and you take, you know, 25 minutes to unwind, and, you know, and your half of your massage is over, then you can actually go enjoy your your the massage, or the manicure, or the the whatever it is that you're drinking, you know, you You get to enjoy all of that, because you're coming to that hole. You're not coming to that broken and hoping that the massage is going to fix what's broken. You're coming to that massage and truly enjoying it because you have structured your days. That's so that you're not being depleted by this work, so that you are re refueling your energy and refueling your will driver and your motivation every single day, so that you show up every single day as your best self. That's how you take care of yourself. That's how you you you make sure that you are giving your best every single day. Those other things are great. I don't say not do that, but those things don't solving the problem. What really solves the problem is that you are intentional about how you structure your day, so that your day sets you up to be your best, so that your day constantly and consistently feeds you, so that you can show up for your kids and your staff. That's how you do self care. That's how you manage your time. That's how you are your most productive self, like a builder. I'll talk to you next time.

Hey, if you're ready to get started being a builder right away, then I want to invite you to join us at buildership University. It's our exclusive online community for builders just like you, where you'll be able to get the exact training that you need to turn your school into a success story. Right now, with the people and resources you already have inside you'll find our best online courses, live trainings with me, tons of resources, templates and exemplars and monthly live office hours with me, where you can ask me anything and get my help on whatever challenge you're facing right now, if you're tired of hitting obstacle after obstacle And you're sick of tiny, little incremental gains each year. If you're ready to make a dramatic difference in your school right now, then you need to join buildership University. Just go to buildership university.com and get started writing your school success story today. Hey, it's Robyn here, and I want to thank you for listening to today's episode. Now if you have a question about today's episode, or you just want to keep the conversation going, did you know that we had a school leadership reimagined Facebook group? All you need to do is go to Facebook, join the school leadership reimagined Facebook group. Now they're going to be a couple of questions that we ask at the beginning, because we want to protect this group and make sure that we don't have any trolls come in, and that it really is for people who are principals, assistant principals, district administrators, so make sure you answer those questions, or you won't get in. But then we can keep the conversation going. Plus we do a lot of great bonus content. I'm in there every single weekday, so if you have a question or comment about the episode, let's continue the conversation. Join us at the school leadership reimagined Facebook group, and they'll talk to you next time you.

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