Photo by Andreas Klassen
As Week 3, Term 4 comes to a close, pretty much everything on your ‘to do’ list becomes time limited. Hiring people, spending budgets/creating new ones, strategic planning, appraisals, – there’s a whole plethora of ‘stuff’ that is rolling towards the annual deadline.
There’s only so much that you can fit in your day (40 hours or not) so being able to prioritise is certainly an essential skill (my rule of thumb is that anything to do with people rises to the top of the pile). But you also have to get the work done – a priority order is the first step, then actually doing the work is the next, and this is where the art of ‘batching’ comes into play.
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We’ve written about batching before and the term is borrowed from Tim Ferriss, a well-known entrepreneur and thinker.
It’s actually a very simple tactic – block out periods of time where you remove distractions and focus solely on a particular task. This sounds easy, but to work, you need to use some strategy.
The first part is to sort that priority list. I’m talking about the key tasks you simply have to achieve before you wave your learners goodbye in 35 more school days (or much less if you’re in a secondary environment).
The next step is to identify periods of opportunity in your day/week where you have the least likelihood of being interrupted and the most likelihood of being able to shut your office door and focus. Experience has taught me that after 9:30am and before midday is going to be my best opportunity. Up to 9:30am most days is a critical connection time with students, teachers, parents and admin staff. Shutting your door then will cause downstream problems.
The other winning reason for choosing an earlier rather than later time is simply that you are fresher. You haven’t yet missed lunch or drunk 4 cups of coffee so the likelihood of being productive is higher than later in the day.
Step 3 is to gain the support of the key gatekeepers in your school. It is critical that the people who can prevent interruptions know why you are going off grid. My experience is that if you share the reason why you are not available well before time (e.g. it’s in people’s diaries), they will willingly support you. My rule is that unless it is a genuine emergency, I’m out of contact while batching and when I initially started using this tactic, I specified what constituted an emergency from my perspective – and needing an icepack, or someone with a “I’ve got a quick question”, do not qualify. Your personal definitions may vary.
I suggest an hour of batching is the minimum reasonable time block. Two hours is also about the upper limit. Any more than this and you might as well open your door back up as focused productivity will be fading by then. It’s all about holding focus and avoiding distraction.
If the interruptions can’t be easily controlled, you should take your batching off-site. Just like when you are unwell, or your youngest child is getting married, school will continue for the 2 hours you are absent. If it doesn’t, then you are either a sole charge principal with no relievers, or you need to urgently empower others in your team.
And if you’d like to can read a fuller post on this topic that we wrote earlier, that teases out some of the key details, just click here.
Dave