It’s the beginning of a new Term.
You find yourself standing in the staffroom looking at the Term planner. It’s full of rows and columns, numbers and days.
At one point, very recently, the planner was pretty much empty. Now you look at it and you see the empty boxes made up by the intersecting lines (the days) filling up with stuff; special events, deadlines, meetings, discos, camps, school productions, more meetings, working bees, school reports and other meetings.
Maybe it’s colour co-ordinated. Maybe you have a key to the side that tells everyone what the colours mean. Maybe there’s a friendly motivational quote adorning the top of the board just to soothe the busyness of it all. Maybe.
There’s something about the staffroom Term planner that seems to keep everyone on track. If it’s not on that planner then it may never ever happen. If you want something done, it needs to be somewhere on that piece of board.
If you’re lucky you’ll be looking at two or three weeks towards the end that aren’t quite filled in the same as the initial weeks. There’ll be a few blanks.
If you’re wise you’ll keep it that way.
If you want to help your team get through the term without feeling fried, frizzled, overworked, over stressed, burnt out, exhausted and crawling on all fours, then jealously guard over those blank spaces. And if you can’t do that, then write into the blanks imaginary “stuff” that only you know aren’t true – call them space savers.
No one else needs to know.
Your future self will thank you.
Steve