As most of you know, I only teach in the afternoons. I work from home in the mornings and then head to school after lunch. It’s been my schedule for the past six years—ever since SCM became too large to maintain while teaching full time.
It wasn’t an easy transition.
At first, I felt like I worked a lot harder than when I had less time. I also had a lot more stress. I’d think about writing and working and improving the blog all day long and into the evening. I couldn’t turn it off.
Since we’re all working from home now, many teachers are feeling the same way.
They can’t turn it off. They’re working harder and longer than ever before. They’re stressed-out and struggling to maintain all their other responsibilities.
So this week I thought I’d share a few things that have made the biggest difference in my life working from home. They’ve saved me mountains of time and stress and even made me a better writer.
I hope they’ll be as helpful to you.
Set strict time limits.
Sitting down to work without knowing how long you’ll be there is one of the worst things you can do for your productivity. The open-ended nature of it removes valuable urgency (see below) and encourages your mind to wander.
It also triggers what is known as Parkinson’s Law, which states: Work tends to expand to fill the time available for its completion.
In other words, if you give yourself hours and hours to prepare lessons, for example, then psychologically you’ll increase the difficulty and complexity of the task in order to fill the time.
You’ll overthink, look for problems rather than solutions, and add nonessential busywork.
Limiting your time, on the other hand, increases focus and improves your problem-solving capacity. Remarkably, the quality of your work will also improve, becoming sharper, clearer, and more comprehensible.
The trick is choosing the right time limit, which can take practice.
A good place to start is to cut the amount of minutes you think you need to complete a task by 20 percent and then set a strict work-time limit. Keep cutting day after day until you get comfortable with just the right amount of urgency.
When your time is up, take a break to eat, exercise, read, clean, take care of your family, etc. Get away from your work to keep your mind fresh. When you’re ready to return, set a new limit.
In time, you’ll be able to quickly assess the work you need to do and set the most limited time you need to do it. It’s the secret to getting a lot done in a short amount of time.
Trust yourself.
Once you sit down to work—or stand if that’s your preference—try not to think too much. Overthinking is a form of writer’s block that will slow your progress, if not stop it altogether.
You must trust your instincts and have faith in the ideas and visions that come into your head. If you let them pass or talk yourself out of them, then you’re missing out on your best work.
Just go for it. Rely on your gut and intuition.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t research, study your material, or be aware of pros and cons. It just means to believe in yourself when it comes to making creative decisions, whether on a micro or macro scale.
You have enormous natural wisdom available to you. Your job is to let it flow. Let your body and fingers do what the super computer in your head is telling you.
Trust it and your work will be essentially YOU.
It will be creative and original and the best you can offer. But you must take a leap of faith. You must act on your best hunch, then move on to the next thing and do the same.
Put your subconscious to work.
I recommend setting a time limit on your day as well. Maybe it’s the same time as your school’s dismissal. Maybe it’s when you typically leave for the day.
Or maybe, if you’re using Parkinson’s Law, you’re able to cut out even earlier. But the key is to leave the work behind you entirely at a predetermined time. Don’t allow yourself to even think about it until you sit down the following day.
Put your laptop away or shut down your computer and get busy doing something else, even if it’s just reading on your porch.
Not only does this help free you from the stress of cycling thoughts, but it actually improves your work. You see, all the problems and work you leave behind for tomorrow are best resolved with your subconscious mind.
Psychologists have been writing about the ability of the subconscious to find solutions and move toward goals since the early 1960s. It may seem a bit new-agey and a little out-there, but it really works—with more and more research supporting it.
If you leave the problems, puzzles, and dilemmas to your subconscious, while you’re doing other things—even sleeping—it will do the job better than if you noodle them relentlessly in your current awareness.
It will add to that wisdom that mysteriously jumps into the forefront of your mind when you finally sit down to work. Again, it’s about trusting the knowledge and experience you have inside you.
This is why coming back fresh to a problem or task is always easier and results in better and faster solutions than continually thinking on it.
When you step away from your work for the day, really step away. Forget about it. Relegate any leftover conundrums and future decisions to your subconscious.
Let it prepare you for the next day while you’re enjoying life happening right in front of you.
Everyday Habits
When it comes to the productivity techniques above, do not seek perfection.
Just get better each day at trusting yourself and the wisdom inside you. You’ll be amazed with the results. You’ll spend less time working, more time playing, and yet will produce higher quality work.
Like all things, in time this too will become part of who you are.
The techniques will become everyday habits you no longer have to discipline yourself to follow. You may even get to the point where you don’t have to set time limits.
Working with soft urgency and trusting your instincts will become something you do naturally. It will become just the way you think and the way you are.
The only negative is that it can be frustrating to work with others, who may now appear ponderously slow and inefficient. (We’ll be sure to cover this topic on another day.)
In the meantime, send tomorrow’s work to your subconscious and feel all that stress you’ve been hanging on to begin melting away.
PS – I love your comments, especially those that help the SCM community. They are much appreciated. We also welcome genuine disagreements.
However, meanspirited comments, or those that purposefully mischaracterize our beliefs and motives here at SCM, will not be approved. This has been our policy from day one.
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Great insights Michael! I appreciate your wisdom and transparency. One of the things I do to increase and manage my work from home productivity is to take daily vacations!
These “daily vacations” occur…wait for it… DAILY! I have a locked in timeframe each day while working from home to stop and do something that I enjoy that refuels me. It could be watching an episode of a show, listening to music, calling someone who is uplifting, reading a good book, etc. This self care element must be scheduled. It helps me to be more productive, less stressed, and more successful in my work once I return to it. I do know some home situations are more difficult than others to do this. However, use your creative thinking and see if you can come up with a built in daily vacation. If needed, ask someone for help and suggestions too.
Finally, bless all of you for who you are and what you are doing to help others in and outside of the education world. Michael, again thank you for your very insightful and helpful work!!! Much RESPECT!
I love the idea, Anthony! So important. Thanks for sharing, and good to hear from you again.
I do that! I don’t set time limits but I do set tasks for myself. Today I will outline at least three of next weeks lessons and tomorrow I will outline the other two. Then I will grade late work which usually takes about an hour.
Each day I grade the lesson from the day before and then grade late work and answer questions which takes about 3-4 hours each day. My day is about four hours of planned work.
I love this article! I plan to do it!
Great article! I am often guilty of digging in on a tough problem and refusing to walk away. I need to take productive breaks to allow my subconscious to do its creative thing.
Thank you Michael for this!! It is so easy to get caught up in work when it’s at your fingertips at home. Thank you for the helpful tips. I will pass this on to my colleagues as I do with many of your articles. 😃
You’re welcome, Jackie.
Mr. Linsin,
I appreciate your blog. It speaks to my heart and pours into my practice.
One thing I notice as majority of teachers adjust to how we grocery shop, our homeschool and how we teach and reach our relational learners, is how crucial our teacher mindset is. Many school aged children may not have internet or a device to connect to our online class, districts scramble to provide food boxes and printed learning packets, I encourage educators to keep in mind it’s important to let off steam AND I hope we have some gratitude in our hearts. In many ways we’re lucky if we are still getting full time pay plus benefits for whatever we get it together to do. We are not being paid to judge others for not working hard enough!
A strict schedule coupled with appreciation for our students, families, jobs is important. And a little overcomer in our spirit.
To create a strict schedule, figure out how to upload and make a fillable pdf, Video a mini-lesson or two these are great problems to solve.
And be sweet to ourselves. Do one self caring thing per day.
Thanks Essie! Well said.
“If you leave the problems, puzzles, and dilemmas to your subconscious, while you’re doing other things—even sleeping—it will do the job better than if you noodle them relentlessly in your current awareness”.
———————————–
I was employed by Companies for 40 years and have been retired for 20 years; I have maintained the same methods of developmental thoughts.
Most of the time over that period I have awaken in the middle of the night; yes! I got out of bed wrote down the key to a solution to a problem that I had spent many hours at work thinking about but not reaching an answer!
I am still doing it today!
Note to readers: Roger was a NASA engineer in the 1960s, among those responsible for getting astronauts to the Moon.
I am a middle school string orchestra and guitar teacher. Online teaching these classes has hurdles that are all it’s own. I have mostly done what you suggested in this article — in which you articulated the reasoning behind each area quite well. I am curious to know your thoughts on maintaining ones mental health. Yesterday all 8 string teachers (5-12) had a zoom meeting with our division fine art coordinator…in which he told us there is yet one more form we have to complete that monitors all of our students progress…each of us probably teach at least 150 students. I understand why a summary document like this is important for our admin but a couple of my colleagues had a serious melt down…this on top of learning a whole new system of delivering content and reaching out to our students. We are used to the face to face interaction that is so critical to us and our students. I want to reach out to my coworkers and I want to be encouraging and send them positive vibes. Any thoughts or previous articles you have posted?
Hi Marie,
This is the topic of next week’s article. I think you’re right, many of us are struggling.
Hello Michael,
Thanks for this article; it is a great reminder for us teachers. If you ever wanted to approach the subject of online teacher meetings, I feel like it could be useful. It seems to cause me a lot of stress, knowing if I am participating too much or not enough, when to jump in, when to let it go… Thanks!
Thanks for the suggestion, Sara! I’ll definitely consider it.
I am going to share this sensible and really excellent advice with my son and daughter who both work from home at present.
Thank you so much .I am going to start next Monday
morning.
I’ve been following SCM for almost 2 years now & it’s helped me tremendously. I’m looking forward to your future article about dealing with colleagues. I no longer have problems with students, but I have an over-controlling coworker. She has no boundaries, is always stressed out, makes more work for our grade level team outside of paid hours, and my principal encourages it. This was even before schools closed. I’d love to hear your insight.
Hi Allison,
I think we’ve all been there at one time or another. I’ll put it on the list of future articles. Thanks for the suggestion.
I’m a rotation specialist, art teacher in elementary, now with schools closed and I’m setting up lessons on Google classroom. My question is how do I get more students to at least attempt to work on art lesson when your own principal does not recommend students work on the fine art lessons? We have been put at the bottom of the list.
Hi Lisa!
I’m an elementary school music teacher and I really relate to the struggle of getting kids to participate! So far I’ve had some success with reaching out individually to students/parents via email/text/phone call/whatever method their classroom teacher is using. I haven’t reached out individually to every kid, cuz there’s a lot, but, when I’m done with prep, I’ll try to reach out to someone new and check in on how they’re doing and how their learning is going if I can. (I’m trying to go easy on myself though, I know I can only do so much.) I’ll ask did they find the music activity ok, etc etc. I’ve scheduled personal video chat lessons too, and that has been really good for some of my students who need that extra attention right now. I’ve also asked classroom teachers what is working for them as far as getting in touch with their students. Classroom teachers at our school are having some trouble too with reaching kids because a lot of our parents are essential workers and it’s just…busy. So, don’t be too hard on yourself, do the best you can with what you’ve got, and find out what’s working for others. For the students I’ve been able to have consistent communication with, it is reallyreally good.
Do not wait for your principal!! I know it’s soo frustrating. But you know how important your subject is and you go out there and make it happen. Actually, now I’ve had some parents get in touch with the principal to say how important the music lessons are to their kid and my principal then told *me* that what I was doing was important. Haha cool, yeah, I agree! You know the kids who need you, so, try to be there where they can find you and good luck!!!! Be well, Becca
I agree that your subconscious will work it out. I usually don’t stop working until I’m really upset; but, after I quit, I think of the answer to my problem. My technique is to not go back to work right away; I text myself the answer. I then have those notes tomorrow when I’m back to work. Some days I have lots of text ideas to work with. I have my contact number twice in my phone; because sometimes I’m working on school and family issues, I can keep them organized.
Proper time management greatly helps. There’s a time for everything under the sun. Let’s set a time to teach and learn but take time to relax as well especially on weekends. If we won’t look after ourselves, who will?
Time management is even more essential working from home, since the physical boundaries of the classroom have been removed. It took me a couple of weeks doing online learning before I finally gave myself permission to work LESS. I was spending my days giving student feedback on assignments, replying to emails, attending and holding online meetings. Then I would spend 2-3 hours in the evening creating the next day’s lessons, trying to find just one more video or idea. I was my own worst enemy without realizing it! So I made time boundaries and task boundaries. I took a screen break every couple hours to eat, go outside, watch tv, or read. And I became more productive in less time… exactly what you have written! It seems counterintuitive to work less and get more done, but I’m guilty of stretching out a task to fill the time. I now have a shutdown time of 5 pm each day, and I literally leave my work area and computer until the next morning. Thank you for reaffirming some common sense approaches!
Thank you so much for sharing your valuable thoughts. I will share it my family and friends.
Setting time limits is a little confusing for me. I’m just coming to the end of my first year teaching. I’m not sure how much time things should be taking. I feel like everything takes much longer for me now because it’s all still new. I was hopeful that next year would be faster and easier but with COVID-19, I’m not sure. I’d love more insight on how one creates time limits. Anyone?
I feel very stressed since the school demands videos for each day, then zoom class, work planning formats to send them so I am thinking all the time what I have to do but at the same time my activities at home. I will try to follow this and relax my mind. Thanks and take care!!
This article really comes in time. I have been literally burning myself out. Thank you so much!
Really insightful and helpful ideas, Michael. The idea of letting the subconscious work is something I too believe in but somehow forgot to apply the concept in this stressful situation. Happy realization to me! Thanks.
This has been an ongoing struggle for years. Three years ago I actually started leaving school at 3:30 instead of staying until 4:30 or 5:00 everyday thinking this somehow makes me a more dedicated teacher. However, even after leaving on time, work is still done outside of school. There’s grading or additional planning to be done. There’s the annoying feeling of what a student did or said. Or, it was something that went wrong in a lesson. Even though I’ve gotten somewhat better at venting these frustrations to my spouse, it’s still there. I envy the teachers who can truly shut everything off about school after hours.
This advice to set a time limit is the absolute best. You’ll see it other places as well, but Michael’s addition of the “take 20% off what you think it will take” appeals to the math teacher in me. It really focuses you in your time. I had an at home job in the past where the structure forced this kind of scheduling, and it was amazing at increasing productivity – for everyone. I had another at home job before that one where there was no structure unless you created it for yourself, and as a staff we got much less done and spent a lot of time spinning our wheels. When you know you’ve got 2 1/2 hours to figure out how to teach something remotely that you used to teach in the classroom, you’ll get it done. It’s a mindset shift to tell yourself you can’t go over….because obviously, you can choose to ignore the time limit you set. I urge you not to do that. As Michael says, your work will improve, and it will give you that down time to read, take a walk, do a crossword, eat a prepared lunch – which will make you more productive at your next task. Setting time limits is the number one change I’ve made in the past 5 years to improve my productivity.
I am fortunate to live 15 minutes from a wildlife area. So, when I am done for the afternoon, I head out with binoculars and watch birds. This helps bring down the stress. I also tell the parents of my students constantly to change, adjust, adapt, or even ignore whatever parts of the online work are not working for their child. They also have a choice between the regular work and a streamlined schedule that their child can complete in just one hour per day.
P.S. I never would have imagined that a 38-year teaching career would end like this.
Thank you so much for the his article. I am totally guilty of spending open ended hours and times lesson planning. I tried this weekend to take 20% off of the time I thought I would need to plan lessons. It worked the two times I used it. Thanks for sharing.
Very useful. Thank you.
Wow!
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
This article came at a perfect time! The stress of home and work merging into one never-ending day (and night) was really getting to me. Parkinson’s Law is brilliant. I never thought of work and time in this way and it makes perfect sense! Taking breaks to allow your subconscious to solve problems couldn’t be truer. (I just experienced this. I spent 3+ hours on a technical issue. I stood up to walk around the house, and BOOM! I figured out a solution without even thinking about the problem!)
Thank you, Michael, for your timely and sanity saving advice!
To all those educators out there, keep up your fantastic work!
This post really resonated with me. I think I’ve been on a journey my entire life to trust myself. It isn’t that I don’t hear my inner voice, it’s that I’m always interrogating it…which leads to comparison with others, resulting in a cloud of dissatisfaction. It’s a vicious cycle. Also- “…[I]f you give yourself hours and hours to prepare lessons, for example, then psychologically you’ll increase the difficulty and complexity of the task in order to fill the time.” Woah. Yes. My problem is that I like to immerse myself in something, and without boundaries and an awareness of “the forest for the trees”, it can consume all of your fire, having nothing left to give to anything or anyone else. In short, thanks for this! 🙂
You may have already said this somewhere, and I just missed it, but setting up a dedicated space to do your work (and a dedicated space to put it away when done if necessary) has helped me tremendously.
Thanks as always Michael – this really hits the nail on the head. I went through the same transition learning to trust the gut and intuition versus overthinking and planning, and it was a challenging but gradually freeing and amazing process to learn to accept what comes to mind and move forward with it. I also recommend it. And I’ll share an analogy I’ve often used regarding the subconscious note you mentioned: like those animals that repeatedly regurgitate their food to chew again as part of their digestion, we have to repeatedly swallow what we’re actively “chewing on” and let the “stomach” do its work behind the scenes, so it comes back more ready to chew on. OK, maybe not the most pleasant thought! Thanks again, and keep up the great, inspiring work.
Thanks so much Michael,
I have been guilty of trying to fill the entire time with one thing or the other. Time Management has been an issue that I have been grappling with for years now.
Reading your article sends chills down my spine and indeed, I am grateful for this. I will put this into practice right from this morning and will surely feed you bck on my progress.
Once again, thank you for this article.
Thank you for putting this out here. It speaks to many of us in Belize as well. So grateful to know that many of us all over the world are on a similar journey. This resonated with me.
So what I needed to read today. This validated my way that I have always worked and helps me feel good about I am doing enough. Now the part about working with others can be the negative…because of the slow response and snail like moves. I am excited to read that that post!
Thank you for sharing Michael. It’s almost midnight in Belize and I’m wide awake taking some “me time” from a challenging, yet worthwhile day. I’ll definitely take up the challenge of trusting myself and setting time limits to accomplish daily tasks. Now I’m going to let my subconscious work overtime. Have a restful night and a fruitful day tomorrow😊
Great insights! These are helpful in my part time job (farming) as well as teaching. Thanks sharing.
Thanks you so much for sharing nice article.
I am bit late to read the article, as busy with the online classes. Michael I wish I would have read it before and remained stress free. Your posts are always full of solutions and provide insights to combat the class room ramificatons.