002 | Productivity Mindset for Teachers: From Reactive to Proactive

Are you tired of feeling like you're always playing catch-up in your classroom? Do you find yourself constantly reacting to urgent tasks, leaving little time for important but less pressing matters? It's time to shift your mindset and take control of your productivity as an educator.

In this episode of the Productivity for Teachers podcast, we're diving into a crucial topic that can revolutionize the way you approach your work: the Productivity Mindset. As a fellow teacher and ed tech coach, I understand the challenges you face daily. That's why I'm here to guide you through a transformative journey from reactive to proactive thinking.

Why Mindset Matters

We'll explore common scenarios that many educators face:

• The never-ending to-do list that paralyzes you
• Constantly putting out fires instead of making progress
• Wasting precious time searching for misplaced materials
• Spending entire planning periods trapped in your email inbox

These situations are all too familiar, but they don't have to define your teaching experience. By shifting your mindset, you can reclaim your time and focus on what truly matters in your classroom.

Strategies for a Productivity Mindset Shift

Discover practical approaches to cultivate a proactive mindset:

• The "Eat That Frog" method for tackling challenging tasks
• Using the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize effectively
• Embracing the "Power of One" for focused progress
• Implementing calendar blocking to structure your day

Putting Your New Mindset into Action

Learn how to use your newly reclaimed time to:

• Create time-saving templates and systems
• Organize your teaching materials efficiently
• Explore new tools and automations to streamline your workflow
• Develop tracking systems for continuous improvement

Your Invitation to Change

This week, I challenge you to choose one strategy and commit to it. Remember, discomfort often signals necessary growth. Give yourself permission to adapt these methods to your unique circumstances, but stay committed to the process.

By the end of this episode, you'll be equipped with:

• A clear understanding of the reactive vs. proactive mindset
• Practical strategies to shift your thinking and approach to daily tasks
• Ideas for maximizing your newfound productive time
• The motivation to embrace change and resist perfectionism

Are you ready to transform your teaching experience and rediscover the joy in your profession? Join me as we explore the power of the Productivity Mindset and take the first step towards a more balanced and fulfilling career in education.

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Transcript

Hi Teacher Friends. Welcome to the Productivity for Teachers podcast. The show where I teach educators how to organize materials, curate activities, and save time by creating simple personalized systems. If you are looking for quick action steps you can take to gain back valuable time, you are in the right place. I am your host, Dr. Sarah. I am a teacher, ed tech coach, and productivity enthusiast. I understand just how valuable your time is and how short those planning periods are. Join me as we talk about strategies you can implement today to free up time so you can focus on what matters. Hi teacher friends. I am really looking forward to talking about today's topic, the Productivity Mindset. This episode will be a little different than others because I won't be sharing specific tricks or inviting you to implement a time management strategy. Our podcast typically focuses on specific action items, Right? But today we're going to go a little bit on a different path and talk about our mindset instead. Because I think changing our mindset, even just becoming aware of our present mindset, is perhaps the most important step in becoming more efficient and productive. So let me explain. Here are some examples. Do you have an endlessly long to do list? And it's so overwhelming and you look at it every day. Maybe you even rewrite it every day and then don't know where to start. So you go for the low hanging fruit, the easy things like checking your email inbox or checking that your lesson plans are ready to go and you push the more difficult things or the more overwhelming things to next day and you just keep doing that over and over and over until you hit a really urgent deadline and have to deal with that one thing that you've been putting off. Does that sound familiar? Or maybe you don't even have a to do list and you just spend all day putting out fires. You're just reacting to emails and colleagues asking you for things and students needing help and you're just constantly reacting and not really moving forward with other things that matter, projects that you're in charge of or other things that you wish you had time to work on to improve your teaching or improve the way you grade. But you just can't find the time because you feel like you're just spending all day long either teaching or putting out fires. Or maybe this scenario sounds familiar. You created a fabulous activity last year. You spent a lot of time on it, you perfected it, you tweaked it, you're so proud of yourself and you want to use it again this year and you can't find it and you spend half a day looking for it. And hopefully you do eventually find it. But even so, you just wasted all that time looking for that one activity. Or maybe you spend your whole planning period answering emails, just dealing with that inbox that's just constantly in your face. Oh, you have 10 unread emails, 20 unread emails, or maybe many more than that. And you just spend your whole planning period dealing with emails and not really moving anything else forward. Those are just some examples. They've all happened to me before, so I am right there with you. There is no judgment from me. But we want to change our mindset from being reactive. All of the scenarios I just described are reactive scenarios, or certainly not proactive scenarios. We want to change our mindset from that reactive to being more proactive. And not only will that move important things forward for us and allow us to really focus on important things versus low hanging fruit, but it will also save us time in the end. And that is the goal, right? That's what the goal of this show is, to save you time so you can focus on what matters. So there are different strategies that you can use to change your mindset from a reactive to a proactive or from a kind of time wasting mindset to a time saving mindset. I have tried all of these. I actually like all of these and I use all of these depending on the situation. I've used all of these and I use them regularly. So the first one is one that's just so memorable just for what it's called. And it's called Eat that Frog, based on a book by Brian Tracy. And mind you, it's not eating frog legs. I know some of you probably think that's wonderful, but it actually is Eat that frog. And the premise is do the thing. The most difficult thing like eating a whole frog first thing in the morning or, or first thing when you get to work and get it out of the way and so eat that frog. You're definitely not eating a real frog. You're just taking care of that most important thing first thing in the morning. And I do like that strategy. If you can get to work early enough to actually do that right, once the kids get there, kind of doesn't work so much. Not all of us have that first period of the day off. But if you can get to work early enough to eat that frog before other people start to show up, it is a strategy that can work really, really well. Another strategy is called the Eisenhower Matrix and it has a couple of other different names. But Stephen Covey also focused on it in his book the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And so if you'll imagine a grid with an X and a Y axis, and one axis is important and not important, and the other axis is urgent and not urgent. And so if we are living a reactive lifestyle, we tend to focus our attention on the urgent things, right? The urgent things. And oftentimes those urgent things are also not all that important. We feel like they're urgent, and maybe they are, and that could be because we've procrastinated, or it could be that they just popped up. But oftentimes they are not the important things. Where we really need to focus our time is on the important but not urgent quadrant that we have in our matrix. And I'm going to do an episode on the Eisenhower matrix all on its own, so you can look for that in the future. But if you just think about all the things in your life that are important but not urgent, those tend to be the ones that we push off, right? We know they're important, but we just don't know how to deal with them during a busy day. And so we just push them from one day to the next to the next until they become urgent and we have to deal with them. And so the mind shift here is that we commit to spending at least a little bit of time every day in that quadrant of important but not urgent. One simple strategy that I've used in the past is just to tell myself that I'm going to do one thing a day that I don't want to do. Because typically that one thing that I don't want to do is the thing that I really need to be doing, like planning out my next unit or planning ahead for next school year or researching that new textbook or whatever it is. Typically, if I don't want to do it, it's because it's a little bit more involved. And usually that means it's also important. And I tend to push it from day to day, right? So if I tell my I'm going to do one thing today that I don't want to do and I'm going to spend 20 minutes on it, or 30 minutes, then now I'm moving things ahead that are important instead of focusing on just the urgent things. Another strategy you could use, which is all similar to the ones I've just talked about, is the power of one. Just identifying that one thing that you can do today to move something important forward. The power of one. You know what that singular focus is going to be, and certainly there are many other things that you need to do, but you can just focus on that one thing again, maybe just for half an hour. Maybe that's all the time you have for it, but at least you are doing something focused on that one thing that's really important. Another strategy that we'll talk about in future episodes is calendar blocking. This is perhaps the one that works best for me, but it may not work best for you. I think the reason it works well for teachers is because many of us have schedules that rotate and aren't the same from day to day. So we can't really say every day from 8 to 9, I'm going to focus on XYZ. My schedule is like that at my school. It's different every day. So calendar blocking is just saying, okay, today, given the schedule that I have, I am going to block out this half an hour to focus on this one thing. And then this other half hour I'm gonna focus on this other thing. And just being very intentional, kind of planning out your day. Now, it does take time a little bit in the morning to do calendar blocking, but it pays off in spades because once you're done teaching and you have maybe your planning period or some time at lunch or after school, you can just look at your calendar, not have to decide what you're gonna do. You've already mapped that out. And no day is ever perfect, right? Things happen, but at least you have a plan. And so when you do end up with that time that you can do things, you can look to your calendar to see what you had planned. So what would you do then with that time that you've now created? Right? You've changed your mindset. You know, you're going to be a little bit more proactive than reactive. Well, this is what our podcast is all about, right? And so here are some examples of things that we will talk about in the future that you can do during that time when you're trying to be very proactive and have a mindset of spending time now to save time later. So creating templates would be a great example, or creating inventories of activities and worksheets that you have. Learning a new time saving tool, right? Every episode I'm going to give you a specific strategy that you can implement, a very simple action step that you can take. So that could be your focus. Like, okay, I'm going to implement that. Or setting up an automation. We will talk about that as well. Lots of things that we can automate and save us a little bit of time. Or setting up a new file naming system so you don't spend hours and hours looking for things or scanning some of those ancient paper worksheets that you love and getting them into a digital format, or creating a tracking system so you can kind of keep track of what went well in your lessons and what didn't go well so you can fix it for next time. Those are all examples of things that you can do to create that mindset of being proactive and following through on it so while our podcast focuses on specific strategies, usually today I'm glad that we just had this time to talk about our mindset. Oftentimes we tell ourselves we don't have time to create that new tracking system or that template. But if we change our mindset to a more proactive mindset and we do create that template or that tracking system, we'll be so glad in the end because it will save us a lot of time and effort. So I am here to guide you in developing personalized systems to meet your unique situation. And I love helping others find peace of mind. But we won't accomplish anything if we don't change that mindset. So this week I invite you to think about which strategy might work best for you. Would eating that frog first thing in the morning work best before the students arrive? Or does the Eisenhower matrix speak to you? Kind of that visual way of looking at your priorities? Or perhaps you like to keep it simple and just want to commit to doing one thing a day that you don't want to do? Or does the phrase the power of one appeal to you more? Or perhaps calendar blocking is the thing for you? I invite you to try one of those things. It doesn't really matter which one you choose, because you're changing your mindset no matter which one you try to implement. So I invite you to pick one of those strategies I just mentioned and try. Might make you uncomfortable, and in fact, it probably will. In my experience, the more uncomfortable we are, the more that change is necessary. So give your new strategies some time. I would say ideally a month. Live into the uncomfortableness of it. Give yourself permission to tweak the strategy to meet your unique circumstances, but don't change the strategy so much that it lets you off the hook. And remember to be gentle with yourself and resist perfectionism. That is the biggest productivity killer of them all. Well, friends, I hope this episode was useful and I will see you again next week. Until then, happy teaching. Thanks for listening, teacher friends, if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe or follow the show so you don't miss a thing. Have a great week and I hope you will consider implementing one thing you heard today. Small steps have a big impact over time. Happy, productive teaching. See you next week.