Strategic Schools
Get simple and practical ideas to enhance your educational leadership in under 20 minutes. Join educational researcher and author Dr Simon Breakspear as he shares key insights and practical tools that can help you to find greater focus, flow and impact in an increasingly overwhelming educational landscape.
Each year Simon Breakspear works with hundreds of schools and thousands of educational leaders. He received a degree in Psychology from The University of NSW, a Master of Science from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Education from The University of Cambridge.
Strategic Schools
Ep. 24: Embracing Personal Pruning
In this episode, Simon shares why the best place to start pruning isn’t at the system level - it’s in your own life. From deleting unused apps to unsubscribing from email lists, he offers practical, low-stakes ways to reclaim clarity and focus. Learn how small acts of personal pruning build momentum, reduce overload, and shift your sense of agency - one strategic subtraction at a time. A timely listen for leaders ready to do less, better.
Explore the Book and Resources
📘 Get The Pruning Principle book - https://simonbreakspear.com/pruningbook/
🔧 Download free tools - https://simonbreakspear.com/pruningprinciple/
Well, hello and welcome to the Strategic Schools podcast, the show designed to give busy educational leaders the most practical value in the least time. I'm your host, dr Simon Breakspear, and in each episode I unpack one key idea or tool and outline practical steps you can apply with your team, all in under 20 minutes. When leaders first start getting into the pruning principle, I've got to tell you, most of the time the conversation goes as high up in the system as we can. People say why isn't the Minister of Education engaging with these ideas? Why isn't the head of our system and the senior leaders engaging with these ideas? The system's giving us too many things to do. They need to learn to prune, and I couldn't agree more. But the interesting thing about pruning is that I've learned that the best way to begin this pruning practice in our world is not to think about the biggest and highest levels where pruning needs to happen, but actually focus where you can have direct influence, and so the place to start running your pruning experiments is actually in personal pruning Small incremental adjustments that you make to both develop agency around strategic subtraction and then also, over time, build your own muscles and processes to do this work.
Speaker 1:When I'm working with leaders in this area. Often I'll start with something really small and simple and superficial. We'll take out our phones and say all right, everyone, pick one of three things. Could you delete some apps from your phone that you don't often use? And they'll say what I say yeah, we just keep all these things that we don't use anymore. It's hanging around, creating frustration and bandwidth problems for you to find what you need to find. Just go ahead and delete three or four apps. And people do this and they say why did I leave those things around? And they go and delete a few right there in the room. These are highly capable leaders and they say it's strange, I feel terrific about that. That was liberating.
Speaker 1:The next one we'll do is we'll open up our emails which, to be honest, I try to get people to avoid during my programs but I'll say, hey, you guys signed up to different subscriptions and various things where you get emails every day, emails that you have to clear and delete. Do you typically these days just delete them or do you unsubscribe? And I say, well, just delete them. You think about how many things you're just deleting. And we sit there and we pick a few and we go through and we do the two or three steps to unsubscribe. Now this one's an interesting one because two things come up.
Speaker 1:One people say you know, subtraction takes that little bit more effort than just to delete the email. So they learn that actually often when they're flat out and they're exhausted, they do almost no subtraction. They don't even think about subtraction as an option. And so by just saying I'm going to commit for one week to do unsubscribe rather than delete creates an incredible little experience of agency. I'm going to actually unsubscribe so that I can actually save future bandwidth and time in my inbox because of short-term efforts here in unsubscribing.
Speaker 1:The other strange thing that happens for people is they'll say oh yeah, but look, I haven't looked at one of these emails from this airline or this provider for years. But what happens if, just at the point where I'm booking a holiday somewhere, there's a sale flight that comes out and I don't see that thing? And this is all about that loss aversion, that sense of bit of I remove this. What happens if there's some time in the future that I lose a potential benefit? And so sometimes people put up with in the short term a sense of oh yeah, well, I'll just put up with this kind of load on my inbox just in case there's something I need in the future. And again we have to make that trade-off and say no on the impact benefit analysis here. Just unsubscribe. Again, people find strange experiences of that was kind of liberating A real sense of agency. They tell me Again, people running big teams and big organizations are surprised at how often they've overlooked that subtraction in their life is an opportunity that they don't typically even engage in.
Speaker 1:Well, the third one that I get people to do is to actually think together about being um, particularly around subscription device, subscription services and you know it's a fun by words here. I want you to think like it's beyond you now. I want you to think in your kind of family unit and your broader family unit all the range of different subscriptions you might have Like do you have one for a sports channel? Or do you have, obviously, your Netflix? Do you have Apple TV? Have you got kids, like I do, and you maybe have Disney, and bit by bit you're like, well, we've got all these subscriptions. Oh, we like music. So we have Spotify and we have this and we have this. Nothing wrong with these, but what you'll find is you keep adding them and there'll be a certain show you wanted to watch, so you subscribe to one, or you've got some special offer and subscribe to them.
Speaker 1:And again, one of the things with pruning is to say, of course there's some benefit to all of these, but there's kind of money going out and it would be useful, on a quarterly basis or so, just to come around and say what are all the subscriptions Like, what are they? And what you find is there's a whole range of them. But then, of course, what's a bit trickier about subscriptions for services rather than just your own emails, is this involves other people in your family and so it involves a discussion with others that sometimes we think look, I've had enough people in my work life, I really don't need to engage with other conversations, I'll just pay that $15 a month. But actually getting together and saying briefly in the family WhatsApp or in a conversation hey, everyone, these are all the subscriptions. Are there any here we're not really getting value from, we're not really using. And when principals do this, they tell me school leaders do this. I say it's surprising. People are actually quite happy to have that conversation in their family and they start sharing. Oh yeah, no, I signed that up a while ago. I'm not really using it anymore.
Speaker 1:And then we just run a simple pruning experiment. Hey, over the next month can we drop out of these few subscriptions? I'm not saying that we won't have some loss, but can we do that and just notice what we miss, whatever else? And then we can come back together in a month and say okay, where do we want to go? Do we want to keep some of these pruning or do we want to bring some of them back Again? It's so simple, but it's such a great way to get you thinking about why people put off pruning and actually what it takes to carve out a bit of time and have a conversation and then run a pruning experiment. Now, these very simple pruning things at a personal level are just there to get you moving, to get you started to explore, to notice that we overlook subtractive change, that often, through loss aversion, we avoid making that decision just in case we miss out on something in the future or to avoid having interpersonal conversations with people who might have different opinions. Often we just let things run. But on the other side of these small experiments, we actually start to feel a greater sense of agency and we open up the sense that indeed pruning is possible.
Speaker 1:I pick up a whole range of much deeper ideas for pruning in chapter six of the Pruning Principle book, under personal pruning. I'm going to give you a little taste of what I capture in that part of the book Taming, workload and workflow. As you'll know from personal experience, there's no benefit in operating at the point where we're constantly overloaded and depleted. A crucial area to begin our pruning experiments is personal pruning, with a particular focus on our roles, responsibilities, commitments and workflow. Too often we're tempted to point out our pruning energies towards external things. We're tempted to point our pruning energies towards external things beyond our roles. This is understandable, because these larger things are often the culprits behind our frustrated conversation about what's going wrong. However, it's important for us to recognize that often these things are being driven by people above us in the hierarchy and in many cases, we can't directly influence them. This may make us feel like we have lost our agency in pruning and it's a thankless place to start. Instead, I recommend beginning with our own backyard. Personal pruning is a fantastic place to begin, as it focuses on the things that we can control and involves making shifts that we will be able to feel swiftly in our own focus, impact and overall well-being. This sets us up for an early sense of momentum in pruning, and it's a rhythm we will want to continue permanently.
Speaker 1:As educators, it's vital that we have some margin in the day. It's up to us to create resilient systems within our workflow with some capacity left so that we are free to respond to urgent situations and pursue new opportunities that might emerge. This means aiming to run at about 85% to 90% of our full capacity, instead of making the common error of trying to run our steady state at 105% to 120%. When we are functioning in an overloaded state, we will struggle to respond to new demands as they arise or to capitalize on new opportunities. Crucially, we also won't build in the necessary thinking time we need to do our jobs well. It's also, frankly, a horrible way to live out our work weeks, and the good news is that it's entirely possible to find ways to prune back and feel some almost immediate benefits.
Speaker 1:Most leaders don't have a regular routine around considering what needs to be on their stop doing or do not do list. As our commitments and responsibilities pile up, it's possible to discover that we're spending all of our time meeting with others about the work but not actually having any time left to progress the things that matter most. This can feel like a state of frenzied stagnation. Greg McKeown, the author of the book Essentialism, suggests the first thing we lose when we're overloaded is not the ability to do work, but the capacity to prioritize. From my coaching work with educational leaders, I know this to be true of many dedicated educators Run pruning experiments with regular rhythms.
Speaker 1:For many, personal pruning of just 3-5% can make a significant, perceptible difference to the experience of a working month. It may not seem like a lot, but pruning 5% of your time back over a 40-week school year amounts to two whole weeks saved. Some of us who have been running severely over capacity for a long time will need to work up to reducing by 5-20%. Reducing by 5 to 20%. But this is best pruned through a series of smaller pruning experiments where you examine, remove and then nurture getting used to flexing this new muscle. Each pruning target you identify could become the basis of a short experiment rather than a permanent commitment. Make a change, hold and nurture the space for one to three months, then gauge the benefits.
Speaker 1:It's worth noting, too, that personal pruning is not a one done process. It's something that should be returned to regularly with a rhythm in place so that it's automated. As you'll have noticed, roles, commitments and tasks can blow up again very quickly, especially if we're not vigilant through the nurture phase of the pruning work. Many leaders find that implementing a light pruning rhythm every month or so work. Many leaders find that implementing a light pruning rhythm every month or so and then a deeper prune at the end of every six to 12 months works well to stave off overload.
Speaker 1:Well, later in the chapter I kind of unpack a whole range of areas that you might want to think about personal pruning Pruning around roles and the roles that you enact. Pruning around areas of responsibility, the specific areas that you're responsible for delivering. Pruning around specific projects, maybe getting right down to pruning for tasks or commitments and then broadening out to some of the other more voluntary commitments that you've got. Of course, I'm not here to say to pull back on all of those things, but rather to have a systematic process where you examine, remove and then nurture to try to get things back into a sustainable rhythm Again. Just like all types of natural growth, each month and every term, new, wonderful growth will come into your roles, your responsibilities and your work. Growth will come into your roles, your responsibilities and your work, and it's on us to have a regular rhythm of thinking about how would we delay, dump or delegate such that we can keep our workload in a sustainable rhythm.
Speaker 1:So I hope you've enjoyed this conversation about personal pruning.
Speaker 1:Would recommend you have a go of some of those super simple things that aren't even to do with work.
Speaker 1:Delete some phone apps, unsubscribe from an email list, think with your family members about some of your other subscriptions and use that as a really simple little exploration of some of the things that get in the way of our strategic subtraction.
Speaker 1:And then, as you're ready, move into some personal pruning focused in on work, workload, roles, responsibilities and do it with others, gathering together with other leaders, other educators, to review what you're committed to, whether or not it's sustainable, and then make the hard decisions. Of course, there'll be very, very few useless things in your workload, but it's that hard decision about letting go of the good to focus on the even better, to let go of some of the things where there's some benefit, to focus in on your highest potential contribution. Good luck, let me know how you go. Well, thanks for joining me. I hope you're getting a huge amount of value out of these ideas. One last request before you go I genuinely appreciate it if you could subscribe, rate and review this show. It's one of the easiest ways for us to get these ideas into the hands of even more educational leaders.