Managing Your Time

Reduce Your Stress

“The important thing is to believe that what you are trying to do is possible, and then keep doing it until it is done.” –Sir Earnest Shackleton

Observe Stephen Covey’s Quadrants on page 43. Quadrant one is the quadrant of necessity where compulsory things must be done now! Quadrant two is important but finding time for it is at risk because it is not urgent. Quadrant three has activities that disguise themselves as urgent but are not. Quadrant four wastes time. Keep out! Since this article is about how to effectively manage time, it will be about quadrants two and three.

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Quadrant 2: Securing the Future

Make time to plan. It is you that must act. This is the quadrant of proactive action, where you plan for an efficient future. Time management novices will only spend 15% of their time in this quadrant. Experts spend 65 to 80%. It does not come easily. Every day you will need to consciously devote some time to this quadrant.

Jim Collins, in Good to Great, states, “Good-to-great transformations never had a miracle moment.” He then describes a heavy fly wheel you must get rotating. With great effort, much pushing, you get it to move forward imperceptibly. You keep pushing and at some stage: Success! Each turn compounded what you had already done. The breakthrough push is unknown because it is all the pushes added together in an accumulation of effort.

It is difficult to get your fly wheel of time management started. Try a small issue such as knowing the student’s names before the first class and how to pronounce them, thus building relationships from day one. Relationships are not only the basis of good teaching. Such an action by the teacher is a step to building a class culture of camaraderie and rapport, which in turn will provide joyful teaching as an antidote to stress and burnout. Being called by their name is important. One student replied to a survey of mine, “After two weeks of a lesson a day he still didn’t know my name – maybe trivial but to me infuriating and almost insulting.” Here the relationship was breaking down even as the year started.

From there, move on to more sophisticated activities, but do not rush. At the 13th International Conference on Thinking, I presented on how the philosophy of the Seattle Fish Market adapts to education. The Attitude segment is a suitable starting point. Here is the link: http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/021/vol2/005/ ecp2107v2005.pdf

Keeping up to date by learning about new areas that intrigue you, or areas you want to further develop also comes in here. The ASCD’s daily newsletter, Smart Brief, is an example of this. The headings make it easy to skim and select what interests you. You can subscribe to the newsletter by visiting the following website: https://www2.smartbrief.com/signupSystem/subscribe. action pageSequence=1&briefName=ascd&campaign=ed_edu_ originalslink_0419

“Arranging time for yourself is essential.”

Joshua Freedman, the CEO of Six Seconds, put an automatic
out of office reply on his email. He started with the subject line, “Didn’t get your email – vacation!” Then, in the body of the letter, “I did not get your email — I’m on vacation, so all incoming emails are deleted! (Reason why is below in PS).” Then comes the invitation to write later, so a positive relationship is at least implied. I have left to your imagination what you could write in the PS to justify this.

Curriculum overlap can find time, where the students are given a learning process which is best done through independent self-directed work. This prepares them for life beyond school, but they need quiet practice time. The overlap is that it provides you with the space and time to undertake such as the metacognition by dialogue as advocated in my article in Teachers Matter number 42. It also models working alone to the students.

Use your imagination. My father used to lie in the bath for about an hour at night when he got in from work, regardless of the time, “To do his thinking and planning.” Plenty of hot water, no mobile phones: All total peace and quiet. It does not have to be about planning. For instance, I go to the gym and peddle on a bicycle while I read a book and relax

Quadrant 3: Quadrant of Activities Without Substance

Without training or awareness, 50 to 60% of time will be spent in this quadrant. 45% or more of this time must be cribbed and transferred to quadrant two. Alex Czarto gets it exactly right when he emphasises the need to disrupt previous practices, “Your phone rings. It seems to be screaming at us, ‘Pick me up! Pick me up! Pick me up!’ Most people will pick up.” The sound and what we read into it, fools us into believing that it is urgent, and making us feel as though we must answer it.

Such mental models need purposeful disruption.

Your first task here is to clear the clutter in this quadrant. It is likely you are unaware of how large the clutter is as it will be outside your consciousness. So, you need to do an inventory to see what is in the clutter. At the end of the week list all those things that in hindsight could be considered as unproductive and drop doing them. The fly wheel will not move easily here. To start, you may struggle to find just one thing.

The brain works through patterns, but patterns do not exist in a vacuum. Every initiative you take, however small, adds an extra dimension to the pattern. As these dimensions are added they become pointers to further patterns, not previously observed, which integrate, as the fly wheel spins faster and faster, to become new all-inclusive patterns and sub patterns.

This cannot be rushed. Recognised experts suggest that it
takes ten years to move from the novice to the expert stage. Nevertheless, even a small adjustment will provide more time to be expended in quadrant two. Then it is a case of looking after these pennies and the pounds will look after themselves: keeping on, keeping on.

Long ago Dame Jean Herbison, then Principal of Christchurch Polytechnic, stated, “Change begins with me.” It had a huge impact on me: It must on you, too, as you adjust your time management skills. In so doing, reducing stress and burnout. To quote David Parker, “If you don’t move forward, the tide takes you backwards.”

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Alan Cooper


Alan Cooper is an educational consultant based in New Zealand. As a principal, he was known for his leadership role in thinking skills, including Habits of Mind, learning styles and multiple intelligences, information technology, and the development of the school as a learning community. Alan can be reached at: 82napawine@gmail.com