Time and Priority #SAVMP

As you can see from the blog archive to the left, perhaps managing time is not my strong suit. At least when it comes to blogging. :)

The problem with managing your time as a school administrator is you never know what your day will be like. There is no scheduling who will walk through your door or what issue is waiting on your voice mail or Inbox. Anticipating the day's events is part of the excitement of being a school leader, it just wreaks havoc on your to-do list.

Everyone is busy. We all have items that need our immediate attention, items that we are excited to tackle, and items that we put off until the very last minute. The difficulty with time is that it is limited. The to-do list is never completed, we just chunk away at it a little more each day.

I saw the quote below on a blog several years ago and I frequently refer back to it as I am deciding which task to tackle.

Everyone is busy. (It was worth repeating.) But our jobs are far too important to haphazardly go through the day putting out fires and hoping to get to the important stuff. Here are some questions I ask myself when my list of things to get done is longer than the day is long:

Are there tasks I can delegate to someone else? I am constantly struggling with this one. It is hard to ask others to do a task that I am capable of completing myself. And then of course I battle with the notion that "Everyone is busy."
Which task has the closest deadline? If something is pressing, I stay late/take it home/come in early to get it done. Sometimes that is the nature of the game.
Which items can be pushed further down the list? The majority of school leaders are overachievers. That leads us to pile more on our plates than may be humanly possible to complete. It pains me to admit, but there are several big items on my agenda that I am not going to have the opportunity to implement this year. It is hard, but sometimes we need to admit to ourselves that our list of tasks is too ambitious.

What are your tips for managing the precious resource of time?

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