005 | A Simple Plan to Get Things Done: Calendar Blocking for Teachers

As educators, we often find ourselves caught in a whirlwind of responsibilities, juggling teaching, planning, grading, and administrative tasks. It's easy to feel overwhelmed and scattered, especially when our precious planning periods seem to slip away without much to show for them. But what if there was a way to regain control of our time and make the most of every minute?

In this episode, we explore a powerful strategy that can revolutionize the way you approach your day: calendar blocking. This technique isn't just another productivity fad – it's a game-changer specifically tailored to the unique challenges we face as teachers.

Why Calendar Blocking Works for Teachers

• Combats decision fatigue during those mentally drained moments
• Provides structure to recover quickly from inevitable interruptions
• Helps prioritize tasks when everything feels urgent

Implementing Calendar Blocking in Your Teaching Life

• Simple tools to get started (hint: you don't need fancy planners!)
• Step-by-step guide to mapping out your day effectively
• Tips for aligning tasks with your energy levels throughout the day

Real-World Results

Discover how this method has transformed my own teaching practice, and learn from the lessons I've picked up along the way. We'll discuss:

• Practical examples of calendar blocking in action
• Common pitfalls to avoid
• Strategies for adapting the system to your unique schedule

By the end of this episode, you'll have a clear action plan to reclaim your time and focus. Remember, it's not about perfection – it's about progress. Every small step towards better organization can lead to significant improvements in both your professional and personal life.

Are you ready to take control of your schedule and rediscover the joy in teaching? Let's explore how calendar blocking can help you achieve more while feeling less overwhelmed. Your future self will thank you for the time you invest in learning this valuable skill!

Download the calendar blocking template here

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Transcript

Hi, teacher friends. Dr. Sarah here. I hope you're doing well. Thanks for joining me today. Back in episode two, we previewed a few strategies for prioritizing our tasks and managing our time. Today we're going to take a closer look at one of those strategies. Calendar blocking. You know better than I. As teachers, we face a unique challenge. We don't sit at a desk all day. Most of the time we are teaching, presenting material and facilitating learning. And we cannot do other things while we're doing that. We have very little time during the day to prepare for our teaching and accomplish everything else required of us, like answering emails, meeting with fellow teachers, completing paperwork, grading and managing projects, and all the other things that are on our list. And in addition, many of us don't have our own classroom and we travel to different classrooms and sometimes even different buildings within our district. And then there are our schedules. Several of us contend with rotating schedules where one day is not like the last. Other teachers teach block schedules, and some of us have schedules that nobody else really can explain or understand. All this to say that prioritizing our tasks and planning our day has its unique challenges for us teachers. We are in a profession that requires us to present to be on most of the day. But we also have an immense amount of paperwork we need to complete. And often the time to complete that paperwork is short and occurs right after we have just spent hours trying to capture and hold the attention of squirrely children. It's no wonder we sometimes struggle to use our planning periods wisely or efficiently. And often we just need to sit there for a minute and gather ourselves. That was me just this morning. Nothing I have described is news to you, right? Teacher friends, you know better than I how hard it is to stay on top of all of your responsibilities. However, there is one strategy I have used with great success and that is calendar blocking. Some call it time blocking, and the name doesn't really matter. What matters is that this strategy can help us be efficient even when our brains are tired. So let me give you a scenario. You're in your planning period and you have just taught for three or four hours back to back, and your brain is just fried. And you sit down at your desk and you look at your to do list and it's overwhelming, it's long, there are a lot of things on it and, and you feel instantly overwhelmed. And so you just jump from one random thing to the next without really accomplishing much. You might check your email and then you respond to one email, but you leave others in your Inbox, and then you start to grade something, but then you realize, oh, you haven't collected everything yet, so it's really not worth grading all this stuff right now. So then you move on to lesson planning for the next day. And remember, there's this activity that you wanted to create for your next lesson, so you jump into that, but then you realize, oh, you really needed to look at this other thing first. And so you kind of jump around during your planning period, and before you know it, the planning period is over and you feel like you really haven't accomplished much. I have been there and I have done all of those things. No judgment for me. I know what it feels like to reach the end of your planning period and feel like you haven't accomplished really anything. So calendar blocking is the one thing that has helped me overcome that challenge. So why would we want to consider calendar blocking? It does take time in the morning to do calendar blocking. So this is kind of the mindset that we need to have, is that we're going to spend a little bit of time in the morning, or sometimes the night before, to map out our day in a specific way, knowing that the time is well spent and will help us gain back time later in the day. Calendar blocking stops us from being scatterbrained when we need to get work done. It means you decide how you are going to spend your day in half hour or even 15 minute increments. So when you do finally have that time to sit down at your desk, you have already decided what you're going to do for that next half hour or 15 minutes or hour, and all you need to do is jump in. You've already made the decision, you've already prioritized, and now all you need to do is get to it. So calendar blocking really helps us with decision fatigue. When we sit down at the beginning of our planning period without a specific plan in place, then we still need to decide what we're gonna work on right now and when we have to do that more than once a day. Decision fatigue can really set in. Calendar blocking also helps us recover when the day does not go like we planned, which, let's face it, is almost every day, or when we get interrupted, which happens a lot, right? And so calendar blocking means that, oh, I already have this plan in place, so when I get interrupted or when I have to deal with something unexpected, when I am done dealing with that, I can come back to my calendar plan and know what I need to do instead of facing that vicious cycle of trying to Make a decision again of what would be something that I could do in these next 10 minutes. So how do we do calendar blocking? Well, it can be as simple as a pad of paper and a pencil. I use a paper planner that has a separate page for every day. But you don't need to go out and buy a big expensive planner. A plain piece of paper works great too. If you would rather use something that's already been made for you, I designed a calendar blocking template just for you. You can go to my website, www.productiveteacher.academy and click on free resources, that's www.productiveteacher.Academy, and then click on Free Resources. And one of the things you'll see there is the blocking template. If you make your own, just map out your day in 30 minute increments. So once you have either your planner or you've downloaded my calendar blocking template or you've made your own, then the first thing you should do is add everything to your day that is already on your schedule. Like teaching your classes, meetings that you might have other things that are already on your schedule. Now look at your to do list and pick one to three priorities for the day. These could be large projects. If they are, you might want to just stick to one priority if that's possible. If they're kind of smaller things, you could certainly have up to three. But we really never want to have more than three priorities for the day. Now go ahead and put those one or two or three priorities into open 30 minute increments in your calendar. In other words, we are now prioritizing those priorities. We put those in our free time first. And when you're doing that, another thing to keep in mind is to try to schedule the most demanding of those priorities. The things that might take the most brain power in time slots where your brain is likely to be the least tired, and also when you might be least likely to be interrupted. Again, no day is perfect. But those are just some things to keep in mind when you're trying to decide where am I going to put these priorities. It's also a good idea to kind of highlight or circle those priorities once they're in your calendar blocking scheme, just to kind of draw your attention to them. Now look at the rest of your to do list for the day and fill in the rest of your free half hour slots with those other things. And if they are things that don't take a lot of brain power or kind of routine things, go ahead and put those. When you expect to be maybe a little tired or Maybe right after you've taught for three hours straight. So here is how calendar blocking helps me. It forces me to look at my day before I get going. I know what's on my plate before I get started. No surprises. Because you and I both know there are going to be enough surprises during the day as it is. It helps me prioritize. It really helps me focus or hone in on those one to three priorities that I know I really need to get done today. It also helps me recover quickly from interruptions or when things don't go as planned, which again, you and I both know basically every day. It helps me stay on track even when my brain is tired. And it teaches me to be realistic about what I can and cannot accomplish in 30 minutes. And calendar blocking also helps me learn about myself and when my brain is likely to be tired during the day. So let me just give you a quick example of how I use calendar blocking on a typical day. My school day starts at 8 and our schedule is one of those strange rotating schedules where one day is not like the last or the next. So some days I teach at 8 o'clock and sometimes I don't. I prefer to get to school early before most others arrive. That's just what works for me. And the first thing I do when I arrive at school is block out my calendar. I do this calendar blocking exercise. It doesn't take me very long. I've been doing it for a while now, so I'm getting pretty good at it. But I also know that arriving early and doing calendar blocking is not possible for all of us. Many of us have to get the kids to school and drop them off at daycare. And we unfortunately don't have that extra buffer in the morning before we have to jump in and teach. So if that applies to you, I would say definitely do your calendar blocking the day before, either before you leave school for the day or maybe in the evening at home. So anyway, after you've mapped out your day, whether that is the night before or the morning, I just get to it as best I can. I get interrupted a lot. We all do. So what I love most about calendar blocking is that when I do get interrupted and I've dealt with that interruption, all I need to do is look back at my calendar blocking to see what I was focused on or what I was working on or what I had planned to work on during this time right now. Trust me, I am not perfect. There are days when I do not do calendar blocking and it always shows on those days I spend a considerable amount of time just looking at my to do list, jumping from one thing to another without much of a plan and struggling to recover from interruptions. So let me give you a few tips for success that have worked for me to make calendar blocking really effective. So it is a shift in mindset, right? We do have to spend that time to plan our day and not feel like we're wasting time when we're doing that. Sometimes when I'm calendar blocking in the morning, I feel like, oh, I should just really just be jumping in. I have to remind myself this is time well spent and calendar blocking goes beyond the to do list. It is actually a plan for how we're going to tackle that to do list. So after you schedule your priorities for the day, I would group things together like grading. Maybe you have some things you need to grade on paper. Maybe you have some electronic things you need to grade. Maybe you have several things to grade for various classes, but group those things together. Or group your lesson planning together. Or group writing quizzes together. Here's a big one. Resist the temptation to switch contexts while you are working on the thing you put in your calendar block. Don't check your email or texts if you are not supposed to be doing that right now. If you're supposed to be grading, stick to grading. Every time we switch contexts, it can take minutes, and I mean 10 minutes, or longer for our brains to really refocus on what we are supposed to be doing. Context switching wastes time and attention. Be specific when filling in your calendar. Don't just write. Work on this project xyz. Get specific. Write exactly what you're going to do, like grade yesterday's quiz or create an ed puzzle for my class during B period. The more specific you are, the better. Vague tasks are productivity killers and contribute to, you guessed it, decision fatigue. Be gentle with yourself. It takes time to learn how long certain tasks will take. It also takes time to figure out when our brains are sharpest and what we should be doing during that time. So don't beat yourself up if you don't map things out well in the beginning. The point is you are taking steps to improve. It does not matter how long it takes to master it. And again, remember, no day is perfect ever. Just because I'm talking about calendar blocking today does not mean that I execute my days perfectly. Far from it. So be gentle with yourself and know that every little step helps. So my friends, the plan of action for today is use your planner. If you have one that has daily pages or create a template or Download mine at www.productiveteacher.academy and click on Free Resources and commit to trying. Calendar blocking for at least two weeks. Longer is even better. Remember, it does take time to learn how to schedule things. Well, teacher friends, I hope you enjoyed this episode today. Remember to be gentle with yourself and to celebrate your wins. Don't fall into the perfectionist trap. Small steps add up to big wins over time. You can do this and I'll see you next Tuesday.