Time management for school leaders: plan the week before it plans you

Most school leaders I know are not short of effort. They arrive early, leave late and still feel behind. The marking, the data deadline, the report to governors and the parent meeting all land in the same week, and somehow the week is gone before the important work has started. If that sounds familiar, the problem is rarely laziness. It is usually that nobody ever taught us time management for school leaders, so we try to run a leadership role on a teacher's to-do list.

A to-do list tells you what needs doing. It does not tell you when you will do it, and in a school, "when" is the whole question.

Time management for school leaders starts with the week, not the day

By the time you open your laptop on a Monday morning, the day has already been decided by the timetable, the duty rota and whatever is waiting in your inbox. Planning day by day means you are always reacting.

So I would suggest a short weekly planning session instead. Twenty or thirty minutes on a Friday afternoon or a Sunday evening is enough. Look at the week ahead and ask three questions. What are the fixed points I cannot move? What are the two or three things that must be finished by Friday? And where, exactly, will I do them?

That last question is the one most of us skip. If an important task does not have a time attached to it, it is not really planned. It is just a hope.

Put deadlines in the calendar, not just the list

Block the time. If the department self-review is due on Thursday, find the free periods before then and write "self-review" in them. Treat that block as you would a meeting with your line manager. You would not cancel that lightly, so do not cancel this one lightly either.

Work back from the deadline. Large tasks are where deadlines slip. Break them into steps and give each step its own date. A report due in three weeks becomes "gather data" in week one, "first draft" in week two and "check and send" in week three.

Build in a buffer. Something will go wrong. A cover lesson, a safeguarding concern, a sick child at home. If you plan to finish the day before the real deadline, an ordinary disruption does not become a crisis.

Protect your time without becoming unavailable

Leaders worry, rightly, that closing the door looks unapproachable. But being available all the time is not the same as being useful. A leader who is constantly interrupted ends up doing the important work at ten o'clock at night, tired and short of patience.

It helps to be open about it. Tell your team when you are free to drop in and when you are doing focused work.

It also helps to say no, or "not yet", more often. Before agreeing to something new, ask what it will replace. If the honest answer is "my evening", that is worth noticing.

Review, adjust and start again

No plan survives a school week intact, and that is fine. The point of planning is not perfection. It is that when the week goes sideways, you know what matters most and can come back to it.

At the end of each week, look back briefly. What got done? What slipped, and why? Over more than twenty years in education, I have found that this small habit of reflection does more for deadlines than any app.

If you are new to leading a team, the free middle leader checklist is a good place to see what your first weeks should include.

So, a question for this week. Which of your deadlines currently has no time in your calendar? What would happen if you gave it one tonight?

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