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The 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Club © Angela Watson

Learn how to choose actionable steps to help you:

Bonus materials The 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Club

“THE BIG FIVE” PRINCIPLES FOR PRODUCTIVITY AT HOME & SCHOOL

q  Eliminate unintentional breaks

q  Figure out The Main Thing and do it first

q Work ahead by batching and avoid multi-tasking unless the work is mindless

q  Look for innovative ways to relax any standards that create unnecessary work

q  Use scheduling to create boundaries around your time

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I’m calling this set of bonus materials The Big Five, because these are overarching strategies that will be woven into everything else you learn. If you implement The Big Five with intention and focus, you can start trimming measurable amounts of time off your workweek...permanently and immediately. I recommend that you start practicing The Big Five now during the summertime, applying the principles not only to your back-to-school prep whenever you choose to begin it, but to your home and personal life, as well. Let’s get some strong productive habits in place so you’ll be able to hit the ground running the fall. Read on to learn how you can: 1)  Eliminate unintentional breaks 2)  Figure out The Main Thing and do it first 3)  Work ahead by batching and avoid task-switching 4)  Look for innovative ways to relax standards that create unnecessary work 5)  Use scheduling to create boundaries around your time What you get out of this will be directly proportionate to what you put in, so give it all you’ve got this week and do the work of reflecting and creating new habits. It WILL pay off big time for you right away! 1) Eliminate unintentional breaks Every teacher I know who works a reasonable amount of hours follows the same basic principle: Go to school each day with the mindset that you’re there to WORK. And yet the amount of time you spend actually working is probably very different from the amount of time you spend in the school building. If you stay after school for two hours and spend just five minutes on each of the activities above, you’re not really working for two hours. You’re spending over 30 minutes on extraneous tasks!

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Every time you’re working before or after school and you stop to do one of the following, you prolong the amount of time it FEELS LIKE you’re working without actually accomplishing work: -checking social media -emptying your personal email inbox -talking to family members -fixing and eating snacks -chatting with co-workers who pop in -halfway watching TV that’s on “for background noise” -attending to your household to-do list

BONUS MATERIALS: “THE BIG FIVE”


We’re going to call these unintentional breaks: non-work diversions that you either don’t plan to take, don’t realize you’re taking, or that expand to fill way more time than you wanted. You can allow yourself those breaks and diversions if you want. But don’t fool yourself into believing you had no choice but to sit at your desk until dinner time. It’s your decision whether to stay focused and leave school a half hour earlier. You probably notice the same unintentional breaks stealing your time at home. If we see a juicy conversation or interesting article on Facebook, most of us can easily get sucked into a 15-minute diversion without realizing it. A family member yelling, “Hey, watch this!” to show you something on TV can lure you into a 30-minute show you never intended to watch. One detour into the kitchen for a snack can lead to wiping up spills on the counter which leads to putting dirty dishes in the dishwasher...until 10 minutes have passed, and you wonder, Wait, what did I come in here for again? There’s nothing wrong with stopping to grab a snack or watch a TV show or check your social media notifications. The problem arises when we do these things habitually rather than intentionally: we’re not really choosing to do them, it’s just instinctive, and so we’re not creating boundaries around how long those breaks will last. You don’t have to stop what you’re doing to check every phone notification the moment it pops up. Avoid training people to think you are available anytime and will drop everything you’re doing to engage when it’s most convenient for them, regardless of whether it’s convenient for you. Don’t impose an unrealistically high standard on yourself: most people do not expect immediate replies (or can be trained not to expect them.) Be intentional about when you respond to others and when you take your breaks.

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START THIS WEEK! Pay attention to the difference between the amount of time you feel like you’re being productive and the hours in which you actually ARE productive. Be on the lookout for time-wasting habits and 5 minute breaks that turn into 20 minute diversions.



2) Figure out The Main Thing and do it first In your other sign up bonus for joining the club (The 40HTW List Making System), I’llshow you how to use the editable forms provided to make prioritized to-do lists. At the top of each day’s list, there is a large space for you to write your Main Thing for the day. The goal is to figure out and concentrate on The Main Thing at the beginning of your work block. Here’s how to do that, even when all of your tasks seem urgent and important. When you plan out your schedule for the day ahead, ask yourself, What is The Main Thing I need to do today in order to leave work feeling a real sense of accomplishment? At home, ask yourself, What is The Main Thing I need to do in order to feel a real sense of accomplishment and know that I’m moving toward my long term goals? There will be many tasks on your list, but you’ll always have The Main Thing you really need to get done: •  Maybe you have a pile of two week-old tests you feel guilty about not having

graded yet, and it weighs on you every time you look at them. •  Maybe you’re being observed the next day, and haven’t even begun to think

about what lesson you’ll teach. •  Maybe you have a meeting coming up, and are feeling anxious because your

documentation isn’t in order. •  Maybe it puts you in a bad mood every time you look at the disorganization in a

particular spot of your home or classroom. •  Maybe your spouse has been asking you for a week to get something done

around the house and you can’t bear the thought of being questioned about it again.

Then, get The Main Thing done first. The earlier in the day that you can focus on The Main Thing, the better. But whenever your dedicated work block begins, do whatever it takes to get The Main Thing finished before unexpected demands on your time crop up. You will feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment when you get The Main Thing taken care of, and it will set a productive tone for the rest of the day. It won’t matter nearly as much when “emergencies” interrupt you later, because at least The Main Thing got done.

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The Main Thing is usually an urgent, important, or overwhelmingly large task that will create anxiety if you procrastinate and focus on other work. If you can’t choose The Main Thing, pick the hardest task (the one that you most dread and are likely to keep putting off.)



Doing The Main Thing first is also what allows you to stop feeling guilty about putting off other tasks. Some days, you will run out of energy before your to-do list is empty. You may feel like you’d do a better job with the remaining tasks and get them done more quickly if you handle them tomorrow when you are rested and energized. You can move the tasks to the next day’s list and relax if you know that you got The Main Thing done, confident that you’re not working yourself so hard today that you’ll be exhausted tomorrow. Rest and regroup, then wake up the next day and keep moving forward. 3) Work ahead by batching and avoid task-switching You can fold laundry while watching TV. You can scrub the bathroom while listening to a podcast. You can chat with a co-worker after school while straightening your students’ desks and erasing the board. You can eat a sandwich at lunchtime while placing stickers on student work. This kind of multi-tasking works because at least one of the tasks is fairly mindless and doesn’t require your full concentration: you can do both reasonably well at the same time. But every time we stop preparing dinner or grading papers to read an email, we lose precious seconds as our brain registers the email notification, reads the subject line, checks out the message, decides whether to respond or not, and so on. We then lose more time when we return to the original task to try to remember our next step and shift back into the mindset for cooking or grading. Thirty seconds later, another notification pops up on our phones, and the process repeats. You see, we’ve convinced ourselves we’re multi-tasking (doing multiple tasks at once.) But what we’re really doing is task-switching: focusing one thing and then another in rapid succession. Our brains are not able to do this as efficiently as we’d like to believe. The truth is that when you are constantly task-switching, each individual task takes longer to complete. Just about every activity can be done more efficiently and more enjoyably when you remove distractions and finish one thing entirely before moving on to the next.

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START THIS WEEK! When you schedule tasks into your To-Do List, figure out The Main Thing you want to get done and circle or highlight it. Start on The Main Thing right away: don’t take care of “just this one task real quick”. Do The Main Thing first!


You can practice batching at home over the summer. For example, instead of standing in your kitchen every night trying to figure out what you can make for dinner, plan it out once a week and then you don’t have to think about it again for seven more days. You’ll save not only time but money, because you’ll be thinking holistically about your meals and will notice opportunities to re-use ingredients, re-purpose leftovers, and so on. You’ll be able to go to the grocery store with a list of what you are actually going to use so you’re not buying things and then throwing them out when they don’t fit into a meal after all. You might be thinking, “But I’m barely keeping up with the tasks for today! How can I possibly plan ahead?” And yet batching is the way to GET ahead.

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Here are some ideas for batching work tasks: •  Photocopy all your lesson materials for the week in one trip to the office

(instead of going daily) •  Search online for all your science activities for the month (instead of

waiting until the night before you teach each one and ignoring all the great stuff you’re finding for other lessons because you haven’t planned that far ahead yet)

•  Make all your parent phone calls before Open House in a single afternoon (instead of calling a few a day and feeling like you spent every afternoon on the phone for an entire month.)

•  Block off 2 long afternoons each week for grading all papers (instead of having to tackle that dreaded tasks 7 days a week.)


And if you can batch similar activities and complete them all together, you’ll save even MORE time and energy. Have you noticed how much quicker it is to grade the last few papers in a stack than it is to grade the first few? That’s because you get into a flow after awhile. You recognize the answer patterns, and your brain is trained on what to look for. That means it’s more efficient to grade all the papers for an assignment at once, rather than just getting to a couple papers whenever you can. It’s also more efficient to respond to all of your emails at a designated time rather than answering them one by one as they come in. This is called batching. Because batching is such a powerful strategy for productivity, you don’t want to use short blocks of time (like your planning period) to try making a dent in big tasks. You’ll feel frustrated because you worked non-stop but didn’t get anything finished. Instead, use those short blocks of time to remove smaller tasks from your list so you can concentrate on the big stuff when you have more uninterrupted time.


If you do all your meal planning for the week on Monday instead of planning day by day, you can then use the time you’d normally spend planning meals on Tuesday to plan outfits or pack lunches for you or your family so that your mornings will run more smoothly. And then Wednesday, when you’d ordinarily be trying to get dressed and figure out what to eat, you suddenly have free time you can use to move on to the next task on your list. Use those longer blocks of uninterrupted time to batch tasks from cleaning toorganizing to errand running. This will create a positive forward momentum in which you are feeling ahead instead of behind. 4) Look for innovative ways to relax standards that create unnecessary work Often we create more work for ourselves by making tasks overly complicated and spending time and energy on things that aren’t necessary. We’re taught to always give 100% effort to every single task we do. No one ever mentions that this is physically and mentally impossible, because there are limits to our time and energy. Perhaps more importantly: not every aspect of a task is worthy of our full time and attention. Often the only person who notices or benefits in any measurable way from our effort is ourselves. It’s our own standards we’re trying to live up to. If you can relax your standards for a task without anyone else realizing it, then your standards are probably too high. Let’s take lesson planning for an example. Maybe you’re used to spending hours online every week looking for lesson ideas, and then spending several more hours re-creating and adapting every single thing you found because none of them were

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START THIS WEEK! Choose ONE task that you’re dividing up into too many different work periods, and set aside a longer block of uninterrupted time to get it done well. If you are easily distracted and in the habit of unproductive multitasking, make this block of time relatively short so that you can experience success.


exactly what you wanted. Maybe you then take another whole afternoon to document everything according to district guidelines and create a separate set of detailed color-coded lesson plans for yourself. The only thing that’s necessary is that you plan and document engaging lessons that move students toward learning goals. There are thousands of effective ways to approach that task, and many of them are significantly less time-intensive. Think outside the box--there has to be a better way! What if you: •  Co-planned with a team of teachers and divided up the work of lesson plan

documentation? •  Used a co-worker’s activities for science and let her use yours for social studies? •  Purchased a few ready-to-use activities from books or online sources like

TeachersPayTeachers? •  Turned ownership of the learning over to kids through student-directed projects? •  Re-used the same materials from last year and simply adapted your delivery? •  Created a basic activity instead of an elaborate one, and developed it over time

with student input? If you had an unlimited amount of time and energy, you could plan lessons the way you prefer. But if you’re spending hours every week finding, creating, and documenting your lessons, it’s time to relax your standards to a level where no one else will notice but you. Think about any unnecessary standards you might be holding at home, too, such as those related to cleaning. Do you really need to clean as thoroughly and frequently as you do? There are some people who change their bed sheets twice a week and some who change them once a month. Some people vacuum daily and some vacuum every 10 days or so. The difference in the workloads these people are carrying is quite significant...and ultimately, is the payoff worth the effort? The only thing that’s truly necessary is for your home to be sanitary enough that it doesn’t pose a health risk, and tidy enough that you can find the things you need (and put them back again) fairly easily. What if you were to go one or two extra days without cleaning? Your house would probably look the exact same way to everyone else, and you’d end up saving countless hours by the end of the year. What if you were to delegate tasks to family members so they’re empowered to handle more work around the house? If you’re only doing a task because no one else in your family can do it to your standard, relax your standard. 80% done by someone else is better than 100% done by you.

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Again, if you had an unlimited amount of time and energy, you could run every aspect of your household exactly in the way you prefer. But you don’t. When you’re spending hours each week doing the same time-consuming tasks over and over only to find your work is undone 30 minutes later and your family doesn’t seem to care, it’s time to relax your standards to a level where no one else will notice but you. You see, every time you say “yes” to unnecessary work and personal standards, you are saying “no” to something else: your health, your family, your hobbies, and so on. But when you say “no” to unnecessary work, you free yourself up to say “yes” to an infinite number of other things that matter to you. This is not an easy thing for many of us to do. But I encourage you to take the risk and try it. Create systems that automate your household tasks and invest time in training family members to take more responsibility so you can permanently delegate tasks to them. When you see that your family is still cared for, the world has not come to an end because there are toys on the floor, and you suddenly have two extra hours every week to enjoy your life, the new standards you’ve created for yourself will begin to feel natural. You’ll be ready to relax your standards at work, and will be pleasantly surprised to see that your students are still engaged, your principal is still happy with student progress, and you suddenly have another two hours free every week. You’ll recognize that the original bar you set was far higher than it needed to be, and settle comfortably into standards that are actually achievable.

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START THIS WEEK! Pick ONE area in which you’re working harder than necessary, and ask yourself, What’s a creative way to relax my standard while ensuring no one else will notice but me? Think about the most time-consuming aspect of that task and how you can remove it, simplify it, delegate it, or share it.

5) Use scheduling to create boundaries around your time Most tasks at home and for teaching will expand to fill whatever amount of time you allow. That means you can’t keep working until everything is finished. There will always be something more you feel like you should be doing!


When you plan in advance how long you’re going to work and when, you create a sense of urgency that makes it easier to stay focused and be productive. If you try to do household tasks or school work on and off all day on Sunday, you’ll find yourself dawdling and getting distracted, and your whole day will be gone before you know it. But if you set aside just 1-3 pm and have a set list of tasks to accomplish during that time, you’re more likely to get things done and be able to fully relax afterward. It can even become like a game: How much can I get done in two hours? You MUST set boundaries around your time and decide on a schedule for the week, even in the summer. It can be a very flexible schedule. But you need to have a plan and be intentional. Use your To-Do Lists (from your 40HTW List Making System bonus) to ensure you are focusing on the right things at the right times, and don’t let distractions pull you off course or cause a task to take significantly longer than the amount of time you’re willing to dedicate to it.

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START THIS WEEK! Decide what you want to accomplish each morning, afternoon, and evening for the day ahead (and yes, rest and relaxation count as accomplishments!) Schedule these tasks into your Weekly To-Do List to create goals for each day, choosing one task as your Main Thing which you’ll do first.. Practice pacing yourself and estimating how long things take to get done so you can get better at managing your time.


Your goal Think about how you want to apply The Big 5 at home: •  Do you need to eliminate unintentional breaks and balance your time

between focused work and family better? •  Do you need to figure out the Main Thing at home and do it first each day? •  Do you need to practice working ahead by batching and avoiding task-

switching? •  Do you need to relax your standards to a level where no one else will notice

but you? •  Do you need to use scheduling to create boundaries around your time? Decide which one of these strategies will make the biggest difference for your stress level and productivity, and focus on that first.

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Remember that these are overarching principles we’ll return to again and again throughout your year in the club. You are NOT expected to master them right away! Just practice putting better habits in place slowly over time. We are here to support you!

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