Strategic Schools

Ep. 25: How to find 1 additional week per year

• Season 1 • Episode 25

Share episode

By trimming just one hour of meetings per week, you could reclaim a full work week each year. In this episode, Simon explores how small shifts in meeting cadence, duration, and structure can unlock major time savings and boost focus. Learn how to run low-risk pruning experiments with your team - and start creating margin for the work that matters most.


Explore the Book and Resources

📘 Get The Pruning Principle book - https://simonbreakspear.com/pruningbook/

🔧 Download free tools - https://simonbreakspear.com/pruningprinciple/

Speaker 1:

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. Well, if you're looking for ways to get into your own strategic subtraction practice what I call pruning I've got to tell you working with colleagues around pruning meetings is a great entry point and one I'd really recommend you explore. Let me read a little bit from the way I set this up in chapter 7 of the book, the Pruning Principle and then I'll give you a couple of nudges about where you might be able to begin this work. Pruning away at our meetings cadence is one of the easiest ways to start flexing our pruning muscles. By pruning meetings, we're going about a simple process of seeking to create more margin and unlock some compounding gains In our calendar. We need to examine a range of small group, one-to-one and full staff level meetings and evaluate their effectiveness against the amount of time and energy we spend. We can then do the work of removing, where we eliminate or reduce the ineffective to stimulate fresh growth. Then comes the hard work of nurturing the space we've created holding the line and ensuring that we nurture, focus on and cultivate what's left rather than mindlessly letting things fill up again.

Speaker 1:

Given the regularity of so many meetings in educational settings, the potential upside of pruning meetings is huge. For most people, meetings are part of the fabric of educational life. It really isn't a surprise that we're drowning in them. Educational work is human centered work, so ongoing communication and alignment is crucial to ensure we are sharing necessary information and making collective decisions. Given that the adults in the building are often separated while working with learners for much of the day, there is little predictable opportunity to solve problems and meet on the run through the course of the day. Structured, regular meetings of various types have become the default way of getting on the same page. When done well, meetings can be highly effective and efficient way of sharing information, making decisions and taking action. Yet over time, teams, schools and systems build up a legacy of default meetings that can diminish in purpose, effectiveness and efficiency. Enter the benefits of pruning.

Speaker 1:

Pruning our meetings can pay back substantially. If we could prune away just one hour per week of meetings, you could win back a full work week per year. I'll say that again. If you could win back one to one and a half hours per week by pruning meetings across 40 school weeks, that would add up to 40 to 60 hours. This means you have the ability to find an entire additional work week per year simply by cutting down one hour of meetings per week. If you and your team of another three other leaders or peers did this in your school, you could unlock an additional full month of time in the year. When applied to a staff of 40 to 50, that could equate to unlocking the time and energy of an additional full-time staff member.

Speaker 1:

There's lots of different ways you could start to explore this work. I often get people to kick off by just setting a simple target, like finding 20 minutes a week or one hour a week, and then go through and use a set of categories to see where you might be able to best find that time. You might be able to delete a single meeting. You might be able to collapse two different meetings that occur maybe one-on-one meetings and collapse them into a trio meeting. Maybe there's two different meetings that occur with a lot of an overlapping, people and agenda. Could we collapse them and make them more efficient. Probably the number one one that I find works is to reduce the default length of time from a 60 minute meeting to a 40 minute meeting, or from a 30 minute meeting to a 20 minute meeting. If you do three, lots of adjusting a 60-minute meeting to a 40-minute meeting. Well, three times 20 minutes saving there's your one hour a week. But even better, it often makes people focus even more intently on turning up on time and contributing efficiently. Other options might be to change the cadence of a two-hour weekly meeting to fortnightly. Maybe you can even have things like a blackout period where on certain weeks of the term, all the normal scheduled meetings are paused and allow people to go a little bit deeper. Scheduled meetings are paused and allow people to go a little bit deeper.

Speaker 1:

In the book I unpack a great example of this by a non-educational organization, shopify. There they were able to save thousands and thousands of hours of meetings by having a period where they had a two-week cooling off where all reoccurring meetings were paused, especially that involved three or more people, and then, after that cooling off period and people experienced that little pruning experiment, then only the ones that were really necessary and missed were added back into the calendar. So why not consider a two-week cooling off period where you examine what's really happening in your meeting cadence? After that, go through and decide very carefully about what might need to be added up and added back. So often we've got the ghosts of principles past, who've set certain meetings and norms and ways of working that we've now inherited and they may not be the best ways to achieve the outcomes that we're looking for. So critically examine your current use of time through meetings. Explore potential targets through those different options.

Speaker 1:

Consciously remove by running a small pruning experiment where you don't ask people to give up that time forevermore but just say for this month or for this term, we're going to run this pretty experiment and see how it goes. And then, lastly, make sure you nurture the time. We want to help people focus on using that time that we've created on the things of the highest possible impact or contribution, nurturing that time and championing the meetings that we keep to make them even more efficient, even more effective. I'm a huge fan of well-structured meetings to share ideas, to do deep thinking together, to build shared mental models, to make decisions and to debate and to bring broad ideas to the table. But it's worth systematically reviewing and pruning our meetings and then nurturing the ones we've got.

Speaker 1:

So let me know how you go and when you might set this up with your team, whether you might have agency just to do that with a few people, or perhaps, if you influence a whole team, organization, school group of schools, network, run it at even that higher level. Run the experiment, see where the impacts are and then move to a more streamlined, focused and efficient use of time. It's time to prune meetings. 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.