Positively Leading

S3E13 - Productivity Hacks Part 1: Boundaries, Deep Work and Getting Time Back as a School Leader

• Jenny Cole • Season 3 • Episode 13

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Productivity isn't about doing more—it's about doing what matters most with the limited time and energy we have. As school leadership becomes increasingly complex, with endless demands competing for our attention, finding ways to work smarter becomes essential to our effectiveness and wellbeing.

In this solo episode, I share my journey as someone who is "naturally disorganized" and a "follower of shiny objects" who has nonetheless developed systems that work. Rather than offering advice as a productivity expert, I'm speaking as a fellow traveler who has tried countless methods and found what actually works in the educational leadership context.

The cornerstone strategy I recommend is setting firm boundaries around your time. I also unpack practical techniques like the Pomodoro method for focused work sprints, calendar management strategies, and simple ways to leverage technology tools you already have but underutilize. Just as most of us only use our microwave's "one minute reheat" despite having thousands of settings, we typically scratch the surface of our technology's capabilities.

Try implementing just one of these strategies this week. Your future self—less frazzled, more accomplished, and with greater headspace for strategic thinking—will thank you for making the change.

Did you know there is more? You can access every episode, show notes, links and more via my website Positively Beaming.

Jenny Cole:

Hello, lovely listeners. Thank you for joining me, Jenny Cole, at Positively Leading the Podcast. I hope that you've been enjoying my long season of fabulous guests. I've been really fortunate to work with many of them as clients and some of them I've admired from afar and really wanted to get them on. So I hope you really enjoyed what they had to bring. I certainly love the conversations with really clever, insightful school leaders. This episode is going to be a little bit different. It's going to be just me.

Jenny Cole:

Some weeks ago, I asked the readers of my Sunday Love Note whether or not I should do some training on productivity hacks. So first of all, if you're not already subscribed to the Sunday Love Note, then we will put the link in the show notes below, or you can just head to the website positivelybeaming. com. au and follow the subscribe links. Or one more way if you're on Instagram, you can just go to the link in my bio and I send this Sunday Love Note out each week. It is full of information and good ideas and tips, and sometimes I use it as a way of gauging what it is that my audience need. So a few weeks ago I said would you like some productivity tips? And this had come about because I had had a couple of weeks of fabulous coaching right at the beginning of the year, restarting many of my existing clients and also talking to some new ones, and most of them loved being back at school and it had been a busy start for many of them. But there were others who just said, oh gosh, each year it just gets busier and busier and busier and I'm just not getting to my work. And I absolutely agree.

Jenny Cole:

Schools have become far more complex. There are many, many more demands on your time. It's often the enrolment, transition, support of students with special educational needs or additional challenges, with or without diagnoses, and often without any resources. And in a leadership role, you're often responsible for that. I suppose today I am talking directly to existing leaders, principals, deputies, maybe heads of learning who are already in a leadership role. But if you're not in a leadership role, listen up and take notes, because you might find a lot of what I talk about will save your bacon, if not now, but really soon.

Jenny Cole:

So, productivity, managing our time, managing our energy, managing our diaries, trying to get through our to-do list it's a constant challenge. But I want you to know that I am not coming to you as an expert. Instead, I am coming to you as someone who has tried every single productivity hack known to man. Why? Because I am naturally disorganized. I am naturally unstructured. I am naturally a follower of shiny objects. I don't like being tied down. So, particularly in the past, I would find appointments and making firm bookings for things. I would find that a little bit anxious-inducing, anxiety-inducing, and I am naturally untidy, both outwardly and in my brain. My mum, if she's listening, would say that I could make a mess just breathing. So I have worked really, really hard my entire adult life to stay more organised.

Jenny Cole:

I am very naturally a people person. I prefer to be around people. I like the ideas and the interactions and the energy of most people, and I find tasks at best boring. At worst I would rather poke myself in the eye with a rusty fence picket than sit down to an Excel spreadsheet or some of the hard work that leaders have to do. So just a reminder I am not coming to you as an expert.

Jenny Cole:

What I am going to share with you is some of the things that work for me and also some of the things that I have seen work really successfully for other people but don't actually work for me. So this is actually about finding some tools and tips and strategies that you can implement that don't take a lot of extra time, that don't take an extra effort, so that you can streamline some of the works that you do, and I'm going to talk a little bit later about how it is. Using tools you already have to get the most out of your day, and the analogy that I use is many of us have a microwave. Some of those microwaves might not have been used much due to the advent of an air fryer. However, we all have a microwave, and that microwave has, I don't know, probably 4,000 different settings if you did all the permutations and combinations, but most of us only use one minute reheat. Exactly the same happens. You have a computer, a desktop or a laptop or even an iPad or device full of the latest technology by the cleverest people in the world, and you probably only use it to send emails and to write Word documents. So I'm going to share with you some of the ways that we can leverage technology, particularly Microsoft, the entire Microsoft suite, which you probably already have access to.

Jenny Cole:

But let's go back a bit, because I think there's actually something that we need to do first, and that is to put boundaries around our time. If you've listened to an earlier episode, you would have heard me talk about the necessary evil of managing monkeys, and that's about not taking on too many of other people's issues, challenges and problems and how to give it back to them. I can't give you more time in the day, but I can give you more energy, and I want you to be able to use the energy that you have most productively, and that involves putting boundaries around your time and energy so that you get the good stuff done, the important work, the deep thinking, deep writing, really important stuff that you and only you are accountable for. You get that done at a time that suits you ideally, because I know we don't live and work in an ideal world. This involves using your online calendar to its absolute highest capacity. It starts, though, with you saying to yourself two questions. They join together when do I have my most energy? Am I a morning person? Am I a night owl? Am I okay in the afternoon? And I want you to look at your calendar and say to yourself if I'm a morning person, when in the morning can I block out several chunks of time? Maybe one hour a day, maybe two hours, but only twice a week.

Jenny Cole:

So often in the schools, mornings are very busy and you might have an opportunity to sit at your desk between 9.30 and 10.30. Kids are all back in classrooms, you've sorted out all the parent issues and you've come off bus duty and you might be able to sit at your desk between 9.30 and 10.30. Or you might look at after the first recess or break and think it's going to take I don't know maybe a half to three quarts of an hour to sort out some of the behavior issues and then I'm going to have a really clear run from 11.30 to 12.30. It won't happen every day, but I want you to quarantine 45 minutes to an hour every day, two hours if you can squeeze it in, and knowing that you might not have two hours on another day, but one hour every day, so that by the end of the week you will have at least four and maybe much, much more hours of uninterrupted work. So open your calendar, find those times and make an appointment with yourself. You would never miss a doctor's appointment. You would never miss an appointment with the mechanic or the dentist.

Jenny Cole:

This is an appointment with yourself and this is to do the work that only you can do, the work that you are only responsible for your accountabilities, your KPIs. If you're a principal, this is writing and reviewing the business plan and doing the audits or self-assessment tools that schools have to do. This is writing those annual reports and reading reports during report reading time. Writing those annual reports and reading reports during report reading time Deep work. That's going to take a bit of thought. I can hear you already You're saying oh, I don't get quiet time, I just get so many interruptions.

Jenny Cole:

There are always people interrupting me. Now, depending on the literal layout of your school, some people are more likely to get interrupted than others. I can think of a school where the senior leadership team to get to them, you have to go through 10 sort of locked doors, and they are less likely to get interrupted than those deputies where three of you share an office and it's actually in a hallway and people pass through all the time. So you think about this in whatever context, but it's about interruption. So in order to quarantine that time, it might mean that you have to talk to the people around you. So if you do share an office with another deputy, sit down and look at your calendars together and say 9.30 and 10.30, and maybe you could have the hour between 11.30 and 12.30. You might swap it, but essentially what that means is if there's a query or something that comes in or an interruption, the person who has that quarantine time does not put their head up, does not take off their noise cancelling headphones. The other person does. If you want, you're the person on duty for that hour. If you work in a slightly larger but not much larger leadership team, you might have a duty officer that you encourage people to go to on particular days or particular times, happy to talk to you about how that works.

Jenny Cole:

But this is about a group of two or three of you finding time in your own calendars and then negotiating to keep that sacrosanct. That also requires a conversation with your front office staff. Ideally they should be able to see your calendars. They might not see exactly what's in them, but if you color code your calendars they'll be able to see that red means a parent meeting and yellow means that you're in meetings and purple means it's your quarantine time, and they should be able to see if there's a parent complaint or a parent issue or a student at the desk whatever. They should be able to see who is available and who isn't.

Jenny Cole:

The other thing that you need to be pretty clear on and get a little bit more practice and skilled at, and that is encouraging people to make an appointment in your calendar. Why? Because that means that they will get your undivided attention, whereas if they turn up at your door and say, excuse me, have you got a minute, you will be in the middle of something else and that something else will probably be very important. And, because you're a nice person, put your head up and you say yes. Of course, they very rarely want you for a minute, and so you've got to switch your mental energy away from that task. That was very important. Attend to the person who has interrupted you, potentially solve their problem, which will take five to 10 minutes. Then try and switch your focus back to what you were working on. Now we are pretty good at multitasking, but multitasking is a myth because we are monotasking and between each task or within each interruption, it takes us 5, 10, 15 seconds to reorientate ourselves back to the task that we were doing.

Jenny Cole:

The busier you are, the more under pressure you are. Potentially. The older you are, the longer it takes to get your attention back to where it was. So it's never a minute. So what I say to people is I'm just looking at my calendar and I can see that I've got a spot at three o'clock. Do you want to pop back? Then I'll stick you in my calendar and that way you will get my undivided attention and I promise you will go home with your problem solved.

Jenny Cole:

Or the front desk rings you and says Mrs Jones would like to have a conversation with you for a minute and you say I can't just now. But I'm wondering if you could pop her into my diary for two o'clock or if you get the sense that things will wait a little bit longer. You say I'd like to make an appointment with such and such at one o'clock tomorrow. Ask her if that's okay. This feels very unusual for those of us in education who are used to having our door open. And I'm not telling you to close your door all day. I'm telling you to close your door for that hour each day where you are doing your work. That will still allow seven, eight, nine, ten hours a day for you to do everybody else's work. That will still allow 7, 8, 9, 10 hours a day for you to do everybody else's work. So it's actually a tiny fraction of time the analogy that I use, and I'm never quite sure how useful this is.

Jenny Cole:

But if you make an appointment to see the doctor, and you might be going to see the doctor because what you've got to talk about is very urgent, you are very unwell, but you don't get to go into the doctor's surgery and knock on the door and interrupt what the doctor was doing and interrupt the patient in front of you and say, excuse me, doctor, I've got this problem and I need to talk to you about it now. No, we value their time. We value the time that they're with other people and even though your time is precious, you wait. But here's the thing in schools, we know that teachers spend most of their day teaching. They have very limited time to talk to us and so we try to make ourselves available to them at all times. And you know, because it's happened to you, you'll be in the middle of talking to someone and they will, if you're lucky, knock and walk in. But they'll stick their head in and say can I interrupt you for a moment? It's the equivalent of opening your doctor's door and say could I just interrupt you for a second and ask you about my sore ear? The answer is no. We've encouraged really bad manners because we want to be helpful and we know that teachers are really busy. However, if they know that they can see you at a particular time, so if they know that your door is closed between 9.30 and 10.30 and you are available at other times, then they will wait.

Jenny Cole:

Or if you have, like they do at universities, office hours, which is I'm going to always be available between 2.30 and 3.30. And that's when I really encourage you to drop in Diary, make appointments with people in your diary, and some of those people include yourself. Put all of your own personal obligations in there. So if you always pick your child up at three o'clock in there, so if you always pick your child up at three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, put that in every Tuesday afternoon. Put in all the staff meetings Hopefully your staff will have done that for you. I know it's on the term planner, but it needs to be in your diary so you can see literally how much work, how much space is left. Put in lunch times. Put in recess times, because their times you're going to go out into the playground. That's an appointment with the kids at playground time, or that's the time that you go and catch up with staff in a more social way.

Jenny Cole:

Put in everything. I put my hairdressing appointments in first. When nothing gets in the way of my hairdressing appointments they are so hard to come by and I put in all of the other events events, so then I can see what time is available to do the work that I have to do. Then, during those times that you've got one hour or whatever you can find, if it's 45 minutes or even 30 minutes, take it as a bonus, because it's probably, if you add it up over the week and you manage to get maybe four hours of uninterrupted time, oh my goodness, what you could get done.

Jenny Cole:

Then, when you sit down, make sure all of your notifications are off. Turn off anything that would go ping. Turn your phone onto silent, whatever it is, close the door, put your noise cancelling headphones on and set yourself a timer. This is called the Pomodoro technique, pretty famous, you can look it up. Pomodoro is Italian for tomato, and the person who came up with this technique had a little kitchen timer shaped like a tomato. These days you can buy very flash productivity timers that you can use, but it doesn't need to be flash, it can just be the timer on your phone.

Jenny Cole:

But the Pomodoro technique is about working in sprints. We assume that our brain can keep going for an hour at a time. We just know that that's not right. It's not right with kids, it is not right with us. Instead, I encourage you to set your timer for short sprints. Pomodoro technique makes the sprints as short as 15 and 20 minutes.

Jenny Cole:

I find I can work a little bit longer, but if you've got an hour, I would recommend two 25-minute sprints with a break in between, and the break is the important part.

Jenny Cole:

So our brain gets really fatigued. So if you're doing a lot of writing writing a report put the timer on for 25 minutes, write as much as you humanly can and then, at the 25 minute mark, when the timer goes off, stand up, do some exercises, have a sip of your tea, do some kind of brain break. Then sit down for the second 25 minute sprint and either finish off the same task or choose a different task. It really does depend. I'm not very good at switching tasks, particularly if I've got something big that needs to be completed, but it is definitely a way that if it's just a day and we think I'm going to spend 20 minutes on emails, then I'm going to spend 20 minutes on writing that behaviour report, then I'm going to spend 20 minutes on writing that behavior report and then I'm going to spend 20 minutes on disability resourcing and in those 20 minutes you would be absolutely amazed at what you can get done.