ECT Tip: Managing your Workload and Wellbeing

This is an excerpt from my book ‘A Little Guide for Teachers: Thriving in Your First Years of Teaching’ which you can find on Amazon or all good bookshops.

Whether we are new to teaching or we have been in the profession for a long time, managing our workload and focusing on our own wellbeing is a challenge.

There is so much advice out there and I don’t claim to be good at implementing these as a self proclaimed workaholic. If anything, the advice in this chapter is first and foremost a reminder to myself that there is only one of me. I am irreplaceable to my loved ones but my job and role is replaceable.

I hope the hints, tips and ideas help you reflect.

Focusing on Energy Management Not Just Time Management

An interesting way to think about our wellbeing and workload is considering our energy management rather than our time management. In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy note that ‘To recharge themselves, individuals need to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviours and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they’re facing.’ 

In their article, Schwartz and McCarthy share how a group of employees participated in the Wachovia study which was ‘a curriculum of four modules, each of which focused on specific strategies for strengthening one of the four main dimensions of energy…body, emotions, mind and spirit.’

Let’s be honest, how many of us place our physical health at the heart of our wellbeing? How habitual is it for us to skip breakfast or lunch, forget to exercise, sleep binge (as Kat Howard calls it in ‘Stop Talking About Wellbeing’)? 

Wellbeing is more than just tea and cake. It is about prioritising you. Your body, your mind, your emotion and your spirit.

How might we do this with our busy and sometimes exhausting work? 

Hannah Wilson in one of our coaching sessions for ‘Resilient Leaders Elements’ asked me to complete a task where I created a table and in one column, I wrote down what energised me and in the other column, I wrote down what drained my energy. Seeing this written down was incredibly insightful as I realised that what I found energising were things like spending time with my loved ones, delivering CPD and coaching others. While I found that marking assessments and exam papers and spending long days at my desk in the office drained my energy. 

As a result of this activity, I started to reduce how much time I spent marking assessments during the exam period by limiting myself to a five-a-day approach: only marking five assessments per day in the lead up to the deadline. I scheduled activities to do during the week and the weekend, including scheduling in rest. 

NOTE IT DOWN

a) Complete the table below noting what energises you at work and in your personal life and what drains your energy:

b) Reflect on what you notice from the completed table. How will you direct your time to do more of what gives you energy and less of what drains your energy?

Another way to manage your energy, Schwartz and McCarthy suggest is by understanding one’s emotion on a day to day basis and noticing patterns and triggers. Can you notice what leads to positive emotions during the school day and what might cause negative emotions? 

Reflect

For one day, plot your different emotions on the graph by each session.

Reflect on what you notice about your emotions?

By tracking these on a day to day basis for a week, you may be able to notice patterns emerging. You may, for example, notice negative emotions when you teach a class or topic. Speak to your mentor or leader about your emotions and ask them to visit you when you teach this topic or class. 

Ask them to list the positives on different post-its while visiting the lesson and one specific target to help you move forward.  Keep the post-it notes in a box like Haili Hughes suggests and use this to remind yourself of your successes. Apply the feedback given and ask your mentor or leader to revisit the lesson to see your progress. 

Facts versus Feelings 

While our feelings and emotions change and can be unpredictable, the facts are based on evidence and data. A student once told me: ‘Miss, facts don’t care about your feelings’ and he wasn’t wrong. 

To help me separate my feelings from the evidence and data, I now tend to create a table like the one below as I find it useful in seeing it written down on paper rather than letting it fester in my head:

Activity: Create your own ‘I feel/ I know’ table for something you might be worrying you:

You can read the rest of this chapter on managing workload and wellbeing in my book with more hints, tips and ideas.

Buy here: https://amzn.eu/d/4o8tsoB