A post about putting teeth into time management:
As you lay in bed, if you find yourself saying, “Now I have the hand-outs and the extra chalk. I finished that Google Doc and I sent the spreadsheet to Maria. I have set up tomorrow’s online activity on volcanoes and I think Renata’s mom has figured out how to find the links…” Etc. STOP!
Try online guided meditations. Visualize a favorite ocean beach. Read a book. I find books written in Spanish or French to be especially effective. I enjoy myself but the mental effort puts me to sleep fairly quickly. If necessary, to break the mood, get out of bed and make yourself some cocoa or tea.
It’s 2021, and the cost of being zonked has potentially increased by an order of magnitude, especially for the unvaccinated who are in classrooms. Feeling exhausted right now is not a good plan. Ducking haphazard attacks by a new microbe requires alertness. You need to be aware of masks, distances, hand sanitizer and trickier tells, such as flushed faces in quiet bodies.
I suggest setting a stopping point. It might be 7 PM or 9 PM, or earlier if possible. Set alarms. Then force yourself to stop when you hear that alarm.
If you are not done preparing the dinosaur WebQuest or preparing the latest spreadsheet for Dr. X, put the world down anyway. Simply put it down. Be done. Watch Netflix and defog your brain. Bake a cake with the kids. Watch the basketball game with your spouse in peace. Paint a watercolor pterodactyl. Whatever. As long as what you are doing refreshes you.
Too many teachers are living too zonked as we try to do it all. We have gotten used to hitting difficult and even irrational targets. We adapt, adapt, adapt.
“What?! I need to prepare 18 spreadsheets covering the last three years’ tests by Friday?! Dammit. I guess I’ll have to skip lunch. I can pick up Chinese for dinner on the way home.”
Then we fill the DVR with all the programs we can’t watch and start working.
Eduhonesty: Readers, for many of you, if you keep going until you are done, you will never rest — because you will never be done. Your family relationships will be strained, along with your own mental health. If you have thirty hours of work to do in your eighteen waking hours, IT’S TIME TO TRIAGE. Dump the less important items first, but don’t feel compelled to stop there. At the end of the day, you should only have to skip those movies, cakes, and basketball games for emergencies.
And your whole life should not be an emergency.
This post comes from the far side of the moon where I lived during my last year of teaching before retirement. I made a few mistakes that year. One was cutting sleep. Another was trying to fulfill a plethora of irrational demands. Can’t do it all?
Again: Set a deliberate stopping point. Otherwise it’s too easy to fall into that trap where we decide to do just one more thing, because there’s always one more thing — and then another and another and another.
P.S. Yes, sometimes genuine emergencies do arise. That comes with teaching, especially in these times. But somethings wrong when all these emergencies begin to seem normal.