Best Practice

Leadership: Finding focus in the frantic life of a school

Senior leadership Aiming for headship Staff wellbeing
As a school leader you have a never-ending to-do list – but how can we find both the time and the space to focus on those important but non-urgent tasks. Robbie Burns applies two well-known models to help us find focus in the frantic world of school leadership
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If you’re anything like me, you end most days as a school leader wondering what happened. The tasks you set for yourself barely got touched, the meetings you planned ran over, you were late to the duty you said you’d help with, and there are emerging problems that will take up much time in the coming weeks.

And that set of tasks, nice and neat on the page of your notebook is looking menacingly fresh. Not even touched.

When you actually stop and think about the uphill climb towards achieving the items on your development plan that you agreed were priorities, it makes you feel a little sick. You’re miles off. Your team is too.

This is not because they or you are poor leaders, but the demands of school life are so frantic it is very difficult to be able to find the focus you need for “non-urgent yet still important” tasks, “deep work”, or anything that even comes close to strategic thinking.

I don’t claim by any stretch to have the answer, but I can provide some ways of thinking and some tools for discussion which I hope might support you as a team to keep moving your school forwards.

 

Time and space to think

There are two important models that I think can be helpful for framing how you find focus in the frantic life of a school. The constraints we face as leaders revolve around having both time to work and space to think.

We need time to be able to process information, think about the many complexities of our work with teachers, students and parents, and time to just get ourselves right so we can be on top form to keep moving a school forward.

We also need the space – the mental space – to actually solve complex problems, think strategically, and develop our thoughts fully enough that we can articulate how they ought to be implemented, the problems that may occur, and how we can overcome them.

Time to work and space to think. They sound similar but simply having “time” to do something is not enough, you also need to build the mental space to focus on the most important things. With this in mind, I want to revisit two well-known models and apply them to school leadership.

 

The Covey Matrix: Finding time

You have absolutely heard of this matrix before, but for those just arriving from Mars, here’s a quick summary.

Stephen Covey’s time management model (2013) is based on the principle that we should manage time around what is important, not what is urgent. This should be carried out and planned across our different roles and responsibilities.

All tasks we have to do can be distinguished using two categories: importance and urgency. Covey’s four-box matrix shows how each of these important aspects fit together.

Urgency is represented on the horizontal axis, with activities either “urgent” or “not-urgent”. Importance is represented on the vertical axis in the same way to form four-square grid:

  1. Urgent and important.
  2. Non-urgent and important.
  3. Urgent and not important.
  4. Not urgent and not important.

There are many ways that this matrix can be used and applied. It is most often used for personal productivity, enabling people to think about what they ought to do and when. It is very useful in this capacity, but it can also be used at team and teacher development level.

 

Personal: Many leaders will plan their working weeks in schools and then get hit by the many urgent things that occur meaning they are unable to get to anything in the “not urgent but important” quadrant. This can be deflating. Therefore, consider another level to this to try and find focus in your working week – don’t try and achieve too much in one week. It is far better for you to schedule time to a few things you know you will be able to do, and be surprised when you get to more, then to overschedule so that both the urgent and important things and the non-urgent and important things don’t get done to any sort of standard and quality.

Team: The matrix can also be applied to school leadership team agenda-writing. When you develop your senior leadership team agendas, look at them through the Covey matrix lens. Despite it possibly causing a riot given everyone’s individual areas of responsibility, it can galvanise you to work on the things that really matter in the time you spend each week.

Whole-school: The matrix can be helpful to use with teachers as we consider workload and productivity. A discussion about this among teaching teams, perhaps around curriculum decisions or how we adapt teaching to support student attainment and progress, can be helpful.

 

Deep work: Finding ‘space’

Cal Newport, in his excellent book Deep Work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world (2016) describes his concept of Deep Work as: “Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

He argues throughout that shallow work, tasks that are administrative, require less “space” for you to have to think deeply, and are often achieved without specialist knowledge or expertise, can often inhibit our growth, and as a result cause us to lack direction and reduce our impact over time.

Overall, he argues that when we spend more time doing shallow work, work that just “ticks things over”, we are more likely to plateau in our growth (not to mention the improvement of our schools).

Therefore, he argues that we should do all we can to prioritise deep work in our schedules each week. He offers a range of philosophies aligned with the types of work that people might do in society today. They run across a spectrum, but the two which I think are most possible for school leaders to adopt are the “rhythmic” and “journalistic” philosophies.

The rhythmic is about making sure that each day or across a week you block-out time where you can be undisturbed so you can completely and utterly focus on the cognitive demands of the deep work you need to engage in.

For example, Wednesday mornings, between 8:30am and 10:30am may be a key time when you have no duties, interventions or teaching responsibilities, therefore you can block out this time.

You can put this on your calendar and even organise your to-do list for the week so that you are able to prioritise a task or two that you might consider as deep work to do during this time.

Cognitively, there is something significant about knowing you don’t need to do that thing until this time. Knowing that you will have a block of time each week when you can get on with a key task can be an important part of your productivity systems.

The other approach which I think is applicable to school leaders is journalistic, which attempts to fit “deep work wherever you can”.

Although trickier for some, the idea is that you organise and prepare your work and/or supporting documents on your laptop into a folder in a way that means if a meeting is cancelled or something is rescheduled and you find yourself with a 45-minute window, you can very quickly open up your folder and get on with the work.

Examples might include 45 minutes to develop a curriculum map – perhaps doing a year group at a time, unit by unit, day by day. Or it might be working on a new prospectus, teaching resource, intervention booklet or policy document that you know is not-urgent that can be done over an extended period.

If you have a mindset that enables you to do this then you have the potential to elevate the productivity you have as a leader amid the frantic life of the school. The time spent doing this will very quickly add up and contribute to bigger things getting done.

 

Personal: Leaders can apply this to their personal work by taking a moment to think about their daily and weekly schedules to see where they can either block-out a stretch of time where they can be undisturbed each week, or even each day, or prepare themselves to “always be ready” to get on with work that requires focus in small chunks each week.

Team: Leadership teams can support each other by keeping one another accountable for their deep work, which I think is analogous with development plan priorities, strategic thinking, preparing feedback, presentations, or curriculum thinking. By sharing with each other “what they are working on”, what their progress is and where they could do with some help each week, leaders can enable one another to keep moving the school forward in effective ways.

 

The ideas from Deep Work can help leaders think about the systems they have created and the way the school day or even professional development is organised to enable teachers to do deep work each week and feel less frantic.

In some ways, PPA time for teachers already does this, but why not introduce the concept to your teachers and encourage them to think about their productivity in this way? Helping our colleagues to build good mental models for their own work is important, as it can aid the level of their productivity over time.

 

Final thoughts

I advocate sharing these concepts with your leadership team and wider staff to help them think better about their working lives. The benefits are a shared vocabulary, shared understanding and a richness to the discussion that can be had about how, as adults, we can work smarter, not harder, to get the right things done, not simply do more of the same.

The overall reason why all these things are important is that it is hoped that schools can improve at a steady pace, shifting from deep work to shallow work as and when it is needed in a way that is manageable and less frantic.

And at the root of all of this is staff who are focused on the right things in the right way at the right time, rather than feeling flustered and frantic.

 

Further information & resources