Teacher Daily Productivity Planner| Work-Life balance strategy

Hey everyone and welcome back to Miss Esterick Teach and Tell and in this video I'm going to be going through something that is essential for all teachers and beyond teaching really and that is streamlining your workload and productivity. So I'm going to be sharing with you how I go about organising my week and my day to make sure I can fit in everything that needs to be done and sharing some secret tips with you as well. One of the most common questions that I get asked on Instagram and on YouTube is how do I fit everything in? Because if you aren't aware, until this year I was a full-time teacher, I'm now part-time, I have my Miss Esterick biology business, now I've got Miss Esterick Teach and Tell as well, plus I'm a single mum of twins. So the question I get asked is how on earth do you fit everything in? Now yes, one big reason is I do work very hard but the other one is completely down to my time management and how I schedule everything. So that's what I'm going to be sharing with you in this video, how I schedule my time to make sure that I can fit in my teaching job, my online personal business, being a mum but also time for myself as well. So my go-to planner that I use is from The Positive Teacher Company and I use their planners every year because I love them. For me, I find them so much better than the one that you get given for free by your school for multiple reasons. Number one is I love the week-by-week view instead of day-by-day view, is that what it's called? And I know you can get planners where you can get the week view instead of the day view from your school but for me, I really like the layout with The Positive Teacher Company. They have really supportive, inspirational messages on each pages, the way they organise it so you have pages for meetings, you have a little slot at the front where I put all my seating plans. They've got loads of sections where basically it's everything you ever need as a teacher all in one book and because it's created by ex-teachers, they really understand what our needs are. So that's always my start point in terms of my planning and scheduling for the week. In my planner, I put in all of my lessons for the week, just stating what the lesson is, if I've got a practical because I'm a science teacher and what the homework is going to be and what I need to collect. That's my level of planning now because I have been teaching for 15 years, if I write in the lesson, I know what the lesson is going to be, I just check the PowerPoint on the system, check to in case I want to edit anything, can prove it for this year, have a look at what I need to print and that is my planning. So that's always step one, scheduling the entire week. Then I have a look against my school calendar and add in are there any meetings, are there any data drop points I need to be aware of, are reports due, all of those sorts of things. I actually normally put that in for the entire term in advance just so I've got a heads up of what is coming. Now after that, this is where I think I do something different to most people. I think a lot of teachers, that is fairly standard, that is what you do every week for your planning. But I then also have a productivity planner that I use for days that I know are going to be particularly busy at school, but also I always use it for my days where I'm working on my own business, which for me this year is Thursdays and Fridays, I use my productivity planner for that. The reason being, the planner is a hour by hour planner going through what you're going to be doing every single hour of the day, which I realise some people hate that sort of level of restriction, but for me I'm juggling so much, taking that all out of my brain and having it on paper planned means that I can just get on and do with what I've said rather than think what should I do next, what am I meant to be doing. So I schedule in everything, even down to this is when the boys are going to be waking up, I've got to get them ready for nursery, take them to nursery, I have when the block out time is in the evening where I'm spending time with the boys and getting them ready for bed, block out time in the evening which is me time because it's so essential that you don't forget yourself as well and then that leaves me with all the time in the middle of the day after I've blocked out lunch as well to see how much time do I have left and then I'll put in all of my essential tasks and that's where I actually use this second part of the teacher planner page where I split the jobs into each of these sections. So there are seven key sections on my productivity planner, let me talk you through each one. First of all, every day I come up with my top three priorities and this is where I list three jobs that must be completed on this day, these are the non-negotiable jobs. Then I have a look through and think what can I do that are my quick jobs, my half hour hustle jobs and my big thinking jobs. So the quick jobs, as it says, they are quick so I categorise that as anything that I think will take me maybe ten minutes or less to do, that's what I'm going to be bullet pointing down as my quick job. That might be things like I know I've got a quick email that I need to reply to or for me sometimes it might be reply to Instagram comments or YouTube comments, those are like quick ten minute jobs that I can list down that I need to do that day. Then we get the half hour hustle jobs, these are the ones that are going to take a bit longer so somewhere between ten minutes and thirty minutes, those are going to need a bit more time and I list down anything that day that is a half hour hustle job and that then means I can find an appropriate time slot to slot that into where I do have a solid half an hour to think about it. So for me that sort of thing might be scheduling a YouTube video, so uploading the YouTube video, the thumbnail, adding all of the description and so on, that's about a half hour job. Then I have my big thinking jobs, these are the ones where I know I'm going to need more than half an hour, ideally probably an hour or two just set aside to really get stuck into that task. For me in terms of my own business that's typically things like batch filming YouTube content like I'm doing right now or batch filming TikTok content or I'm writing a book for Oxford University Press, that needs like solid time to sit down and think. Now if you're watching this you might have your own side hustle like me but you might be a teacher, so the sorts of things for me for the big thinking jobs as a teacher might be something linked to my performance management, so maybe I'm looking at creating new resources to help neurodivergent students and I'll need a good chunk of time to be able to reflect on the students that I teach, what are their particular needs, maybe do a bit of research into what advice is there out there to try and support the students and then spend some time to create resources, so that'd be like a big thinking job or it might be big thinking in the sense that I've got a stack of practical books to mark or exam papers and I know it's going to take at least an hour or two, so a big chunk of marking would go under that section as well. So now you've got listed down your top three priorities of the day, your quick jobs, your 30 minute jobs and your bigger jobs, I look at the time that I have left available and slot it into what I have left and for me as well I know that I work so much better in the mornings, so I normally put my big thinking jobs right at the start of the day when I know I'm freshest, I'm going to be able to focus the most because by the time it's lunchtime I am pretty terrible at focusing for the rest of the day, which is why I normally put all of my tuition in the afternoon because I know that if I'm working one on one with someone I'll be focused, I'll be able to do the job, but if it's after lunch and I'm meant to be just at my laptop doing something, that's when I'm going to get distracted and start procrastinating. So it's all about seeing where it fits in but also where you work best. The other three sections on there are the schedule, which we've already talked about slotting in everything, but the self-care and the mood and this is what I put into this planner because I found for me last year I was not thinking about myself enough in terms of my needs, my mood and my self-care and that meant juggling everything by the time we got to exam season I suddenly realised I'd completely neglected any me time and I was really starting to struggle and become overwhelmed. So this year I'm really putting in an active effort to schedule in me time and to reflect each day on what my mood was like, if it was good, excellent, why was it so good today, if it wasn't good, why? And then try and think about that so that I can make the next days hopefully all the smiley faces on the mood chart. The sorts of self-care that I also like to schedule in might just be something as simple as this evening I am doing no work and I'm going to have dinner with a glass of wine and watch Netflix or it might literally be I'm going to get a babysitter and I'm going out for the night. So I'm really actively trying to make sure I have me time as well and I fully encourage you to do that and I know it's really difficult if you have children, trust me I do know that's so difficult, but even if it could just be once they're in bed, fingers crossed they stay in bed. You can then have something that you are going to do that isn't work that you know you're going to enjoy. So there you have it, those are my secrets behind how I actually schedule all of my day.