Time Management Secrets for the Non Stop Educator

By Zainab Cheema 

Expectations seem to be endless for today’s educators and professionals. Personalize lesson plans. Customize teaching to unique student levels. Diplomatically handle the administration. Be compassionate in assessments. Get on the ED Tech treadmill and learn cutting edge new technologies for the classroom. Publish and network. The workload imposed by the expectations is non-stop. No matter what your profession is, the odds are that you are juggling with an incredible volume of tasks. The question remains, when do we get the time to manage the infinite vanishing point of all these expectations? In this blog post, I’m going to be introducing you to 3 time management strategies to help you do it all.

I’ll mostly be curating the tips from Organize Tomorrow Today: Eight Ways to Retrain Your Mind, the best-selling book from Dr. Jason Selk and Tom Bartow. Selk is a trainer who works with Olympic athletes, Fortune 500 executives and organizations to help them develop the resilience needed to achieve peak performance. Bartow channeled an award-winning career as a basketball coach into becoming one of U.S.’ top financial advisors. However, I’ll also use strategies mentioned by other books like Tim Ferris’ classic The Four Hour Workweek, and Holly Reisem Hanna’s Time Management in 20 Minutes a Day.

1. Break Through Mental Blocks with Science Based Methods

The secret to productivity is to guard time for your high value projects. At its core, time management means recognizing and demolishing the barriers to your productivity. In this blog post, I call these kinds of projects “the deep flow projects” (you’ll see why later). Personally speaking, I sometimes use busy work to procrastinate from my deep flow projects because I’ve hit a mental block. The satisfaction of getting the busy work done creates a dopamine high that helps me get around the negative feelings when I’ve felt like I’ve hit a wall in a high value project or new lesson plan. However, as Selk and Bartow remind us, “’Busy’ isn’t what gets rewarded long-term in the marketplace. ‘Productive’ is.”

Selk and Bartow suggest a science-based strategy for getting around the mental blocks and dry spells—it’s called the ‘Zeignarik Effect.’ According to this principle, just before you go to bed, try to read over or muddle through a certain problem or piece of writing in which you are currently ‘stuck.’ Because the brain is hard-wired to dislike unfinished business, it will continue to work through the problem on a subconscious level while you are asleep. By the morning (or a morning after successive nights of trying this exercise), you will wake with a breakthrough. Selk and Bartow discuss how “in the 1920s, Russian psychology researcher Bluma Zeigarnik quantified the phenomenon after her professor, Kurt Lewin, noticed that waiters who hadn’t been paid for an order had much more recall of the details of those orders than they did for orders that had been paid. Working from Zeignarik’s research, Lewin came up with the concept of ‘task-specific tension,’ which persists in both the conscious and subconscious mind until the task is completed.” Our brains are problem solving machines, and titillating it with task-specific tension will make it continue to work through a frustrating task even while the body is at rest. (Just don’t stress out over your task, at the risk of losing sleep).

To sum up, read over work in which you’ve plateaued or have hit a mental block over successive nights, right before you go to bed. Your brain will continue to work on thinking through the blocks and breaking into new insights on the subconscious level, which you will tap into when you awake. Mathematicians and writers have used this technique to push back the roadblocks and tap into the creative reservoirs from which we generate our great work.

2. Smart Tasking—Crafting your Work Flow

Productively means effectively managing your time to maximize our flow states. Often times, we confuse busy work for productivity. Sometimes, I’ve glanced at my checked off list and felt satisfaction at seeing the number of tasks that I’ve gotten done. However, later I come to realize that I’ve made the classic mistake of substituting quantity for quality, or in other words, busy work for productivity. Tim Ferris talks about creating time blocks for deeper creative work to avoid interruptions. Multi-tasking simply doesn’t work because of the mental energy we lose when we switch gears in the middle of a task. In The Four Hour Workweek, Ferris discusses how “[t]here is an inescapable setup time for all tasks, large or miniscule in scale. It is often the same for one as it is for a hundred. There is a psychological switching of gears that can require up to 45 minutes to resume a major task that has been interrupted. More than a quarter of each 9-5 period (28%) is consumed by such interruptions.” Blocking out distractions for creative work allows us to unleash the alpha waves that help us make the critical insights and deep, connective creative work that our high priority projects usually demand.

What should you do with the leftover tasks? I like to reframe multi-tasking as “smart-tasking.” This means be strategic about when you are shifting gears. As an example of this strategy, Holly Reisem Hanna advocates batching. In other words, instead of spreading out the busywork and interrupting the deep work projects, batch those small, insistent tasks together. For instance, dedicate a time in the day, week or month when to bundle together activities “like laundry, email, running errands, ordering groceries and supplies online, chores, learning activities, and paying bills.” Personally, I normally batch together emails and laundry, grouping the two together. Hanna describes how she batches together appointments and errands on Fridays, reducing the time she’s spending driving and in traffic. Find and group together the non-deep work activities in batches that feel intuitive to you and your workflow.

3. Create Mindset with The Mental Workout

Top performers in all fields agree on one thing—consistent and sustained success depends upon mindset. The good news is that the right mindset can be cultivated, no whether what your personal circumstances are or daily schedule looks like. I highly recommend Jason Selk’s 1 minute 40 second Mental Workout, which he discusses in his book. Selk has used this method with top clients including the St. Louis Cardinals. I’m going to walk you through his method, but if you want to read more about the reasoning and science behind it, I highly recommend purchasing Organize Tomorrow Today.

The Mental Workout can be performed in the morning and takes no more 100 seconds to complete—the time it takes to brush your teeth. At its core, it is a process for connecting with yourself, creating a powerful self-image, and visualizing a pathway to achieving that self through your goals and priorities. It is composed of five steps. 

• Take a Centering Breath: Breathe in for six seconds, hold your breath for two seconds, and then exhale for seven. As Selk explains it, breathing in this way calms the parasympathetic nervous system, which controls your body’s natural response to stress. This puts you in the state where you nurture your brain to operate optimally.
• Create an Identity Statement: After you control your breathing, recite your personal identity statement to yourself. An identity statement is a mantra in which you affirm a powerful self-image. You can customize your identity statement to meet a certain challenge you’re experiencing in your life. Or if you have a certain version of yourself that you’re working on, you can use this moment to imagine and deeply connect with it. For instance, when I am up against a challenge that is requiring unique mental and emotions reserves of energy, I like to recite to myself: “I am strong, I am resourceful, there is nothing that I cannot do.” It’s that simple. If you’re working on crafting one and need some templates, Selk has some recommendations. Googling affirmations and identity statements will also bring up a helpful list.
• Create a Personal Highlight Reel: In this step, spend thirty seconds visualizing three things that you have done well from the previous twenty-four hours. Next, spend an additional thirty seconds visualizing three things that you want to do well in the next twenty-four hours. We tend to believe the things for which there is strong evidence. However, our habits of negative self talk in our daily lives can often erase the track record of the successes and breakthroughs that we’ve achieved. The highlight reel will allow you to project your visualized goals by grounding yourself on the confidence of having achieved things (no matter how small!) in the day before. 
• Repeat your Identity Statement: Repetition is part of how we plant things in our minds and transform information into the certainty of knowledge. Whatever mantra you’ve created for yourself, repeat it once more. 
• Take another Centering Breath to prepare yourself for the performance, the task that you’ve set yourself, or for the day ahead. That’s it. 

In the nonstop tasks of our lives, the secret for time management is self-management. Crafting your method and above all, your mindset, will help you to accomplish all that you want and more.  

If you liked this blog post, you’ll love my newsletter—sign up today. You’ll find the sign-up box on the right margin of this webpage under “About Me.” I publish my newsletter on a bi-monthly basis. It’s full of additional content you won’t find on the blog—info-rich summaries, e-resources, book reviews, and cutting-edge ideas for the educator and businessperson of tomorrow. It won’t clutter your inbox, but it will give you an edge over the competition.