How to Time Block Your Work Week [Episode 240]

Rebecca Joyner [00:00:01]:
Recently, I was asked for advice about how I would time block a typical 40 hour work week as a teacher in order to get everything done. Be efficient with your time and really simplify how you are spending your planning time. Maybe a little time you have before school starts and before you go home at the end of the day. And I thought this was a really great question to turn into a podcast episode. And I’m excited to dive in because I think one of the most important things I hope you hear from me as we do this episode is one of the reasons why you may not be having a very productive planning period. Or if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the tasks on your plate, like you can’t manage it all, you just constantly feel overwhelmed. It’s often because you’re using your time inefficiently because you’re switching tasks too much. You’re trying to do everything at the same time rather than batching and, and really being strategic with how you’re using your time.

Rebecca Joyner [00:00:56]:
And so that’s kind of what I want to dive into today. Now, I will say as a preface, I know every one of you listening is on a different kind of work schedule. You know, maybe you only have a 45 minute planning period, maybe a 40, maybe you have 90 minutes, but you spend 30 minutes on hall monitor duty. Maybe you only have a planning period every other day, which is insane. I will say right now, you, if you do not have some sort of planning time every day, go to your admin run, don’t walk to your admin and get that changed. Because as a science teacher, that planning time is critical because of lab prep. That is an entire other task that we have that no other discipline has. So that’s a quick aside, but I’m saying all this to say I understand that you all have different unique teaching scenarios and setups.

Rebecca Joyner [00:01:44]:
And so I understand that it would be impossible for me to speak into each and every situation right now. But you guys know I love talking about simplifying your lives in the classroom and outside of it. And so I think this is an important topic to tackle. I want to get as practical as possible for you and share some principles that then you can take and apply to your specific teaching situation. Now, I am going to break down a 40 hour work week teaching at a school. Like my most recent teaching gig, which was six class periods every day, 50 minute class periods. Our first period was like really more like an hour because it included homeroom, but essentially six 50 minute class periods where I taught five of those periods and had one planning period for 50 minutes every day. So I’m going to kind of talk through time blocking a work week like that, and then hopefully you can take some of these principles and transfer them to your specific scenario.

Rebecca Joyner [00:02:39]:
Ready? Let’s dive in. This is Secondary Science Simplified, a podcast for secondary science teachers who want to engage their students and simplify their lives. I’m Rebecca Joyner from It’s Not Rocket Science. As a high school science teacher turned curriculum writer, I am passionate about helping other science teachers, love their jobs, serve their students, and do it all in only 40 hours a week? Are you ready to rock the time you spend in your classroom and actually have a life outside of it? You are in the right place, teacher friend. Let’s get to today’s episode Foreign. First, before we talk about time blocking your work week and simplifying how you’re using your planning time and being efficient in all of that, I think it’s incredibly helpful to do a time audit now. This is tricky because you’re listening to this episode when it first airs in the summer, so you can do your best to guesstimate how you’re spending your time, but you really won’t know until you’re back in the classroom and you start actually collecting data on this. I highly recommend doing that at some point early in the school year in August or September.

Rebecca Joyner [00:03:48]:
Track how you spend every part of your planning period. It’s hard to do because you can get lost in some different tasks, but once you do it, you can really see where you’re spending all of your time and where time is getting lost. Maybe you’ll do this and find out, like, I’m spending 80% of my time grading do that’s not sustainable. You’re going to have to cut back on grading if that’s what you’re doing. Maybe you’ll realize like, I feel like half the time I don’t even know where it goes. Like I’m only really working 50% of the time and then the other 50% it’s just getting lost in little things everywhere. That’s really insightful to see. Doing a time audit is going to be really informative for you and your specific scenario to see where are you getting stuck? Where are you getting held up? Where are you getting distracted? A time audit is going to identify that for you if that’s something you really struggle with.

Rebecca Joyner [00:04:36]:
I walk through how to do this really specifically and also a lot more tips about how to time block your work week in my balance Virtual Mini Professional Development course I will link that in the show notes so you can check it out. But one review I have to share with you about this, which I really loved comes from Jenny E. She rated, she took the full bundle, the secondary science simplified PD course bundle and she said despite 18 years of teaching and unit design experience, I found extreme value in this course bundle. Rebecca’s step by step videos encouraged my expertise, helped me reflect and gave me a framework to develop aligned lessons and assessments for my new courses I’m teaching now. This is my favorite part and this is why I’m sharing it with you. I thought I wouldn’t even need the balance unit, but then I ended up really engaged and plan on implementing the recommendations into my life this school year. So I just want you to hear that because it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been teaching, you may struggle with work life balance more than you even realize. This is.

Rebecca Joyner [00:05:32]:
Jenny is an 18 year old of experience in the classroom and she found it really, really helpful. So I will link that in the show notes. You can check it out. It talks about a time audit in there. I also talk about doing like a task audit, but that is in the core values unit, which is the first unit. So the full bundle, seven units. First one’s core values, last one is balance and then there’s a bunch in between. You can buy them a la carte as units just like you can my curriculum or like as a full year bundle.

Rebecca Joyner [00:05:59]:
But I’ll link all that in the show notes so you can check it out. Do a time audit. Do a task audit too. A task audit which I have a whole spreadsheet of this in the core values course. But essentially you write down everything you do in your job and then you rank these different things two different ways. There’s a color coding, there’s numbers and I have a whole spreadsheet that doesn’t. It changes the color based on what you type in. And then we do a lot of reflecting on that so that those are just ways to really get some good data on this area that can be hard to quantify what’s going on.

Rebecca Joyner [00:06:27]:
So get some data on what you’re doing. Do a time audit, that kind of thing. Second, I want you to be proactive rather than reactive. So we are going to make a plan. We are going to set up a rhythm, a routine, a system. Not so that you can feel like legalistic about it and, and stressed out if you don’t keep the system, but so that you can be proactive about implementing it and Then you’re not reactive. And in getting to your planning period, and you’re so frazzled and you’re like a chicken running around with your head cut off and you end up wasting time, like running around spiraling through all these different tasks you have to do. When we make a plan, it gives us some guidelines.

Rebecca Joyner [00:07:04]:
It helps put everything in its proper place. And then you can use a plan and you can deviate from it as needed. But the plan is there in place. The rhythm is set to serve you and help your body know, okay, what’s the default? What do I need to do? So here’s what I recommend for a proactive plan for time blocking your work week so you don’t end up being reactive first thing every morning when you get in, I like to get in at least 30 minutes before students. You may like to get in earlier than that depending on what time your day starts, what time you can get out the door, depending on your own children’s schedules, all of that. I personally like a 30 minute and I keep my door locked. I have trained students. I am not available before school.

Rebecca Joyner [00:07:44]:
Like, I may be in this building, but I’m not available to you. Like, if you have a question, this is not the time. Okay, so first thing in the morning I’m going in and I’m first doing a very quick email scan and, and I’m gonna fl. Like I’m mainly gonna look for things from admin. And one great tip I recommend is setting up a filter. You can like Google how to do this in Gmail or whatever, you know, email software you’re using. But I have a filter where anything from admin or like my department chair automatically goes into this one folder. And then when I’m pulling open my inbox as the day begins, I’m linking that in my bookmark that I’m going not just to my general inbox, but I’m opening that specific folder when I open my inbox.

Rebecca Joyner [00:08:26]:
That way I am only sorting and seeing the most important things that I need to see right then from those admin, those time sensitive things, you know, the update about the pep rally, that kind of thing. Then depending on your time, you can go and do a scan through your general inbox and see, hey, are there any things I can quickly respond to right now? Are there any that I need to flag and respond to later If I see that anything is a long email from a parent or student or like it has several paragraphs, like, I’m not even going to look at it because the problem is if you read it and don’t have time to really respond to it, then you’re going to be really anxious about it as opposed to just being like, okay, I can just see this is a long one. I’m going to save it for later. So you’re going to do a quick email scan, very quick response, like I’m talking like a 10 minute timer. Respond to what you need to in that time and then move on. And then you’re using the rest of your morning time to like pull out lab supplies, you know, set up any stations you need to set up any general prep you need to do for the day. That’s what we’re doing in the morning. Now I want to talk about planning period and how you’re going to use your planning period each day of the week because we’re going to use it differently.

Rebecca Joyner [00:09:33]:
I personally like to save Mondays as a lab prep day for the week. I’m going to use my Monday planning period to set up any labs, test any labs out, anything like that. Do I need to print anything and laminate it like that is a tip the day of the week that I’m doing a lot of lesson planning and that kind of prep work. If I have time, I will grade maybe one thing that’s going to be 10 minute or less task and then I’m going to set another 10 minute timer potentially at the end of the planning period where I could do more email during that time. My rule of thumb is if you’re reading an email and it’s going to take you longer than 2 minutes to respond to that email, then your email instead needs to be a quick email response that says let’s schedule an in person conference. That’s gonna be a better use of your time. When are you gonna schedule those? Before or after school? That’s my biggest recommendation. I honestly personally love to do it at lunch too, if you can.

Rebecca Joyner [00:10:28]:
Cause it’s a clear boundary for when it’s gonna be over. But then it makes it hard to eat. So unless you could eat during your planning, that’s a tricky one. But before or after school I’m gonna set up a conference. So if you’re setting a 10 minute timer, you’re not gonna spend more than two minutes on an email. You can knock out five emails during this time and hopefully again you did some at the start of the day. Then we’re, we’re done with email, guys. We’re done.

Rebecca Joyner [00:10:49]:
Okay. We’re not checking it again between classes or during classes or during lunch or Anything like that, that’s it. But the majority of Monday, the number one priority Monday is lab prep. If you have remaining time, you can maybe grade something and then you’re going to set that timer to do like a 10 minute email check at the end if you need to. Tuesday’s planning period. That’s going to be a grading day. Tuesday is set aside for grading. I like to do Tuesdays and Thursdays are like my batch grading days.

Rebecca Joyner [00:11:13]:
This is when I’d be like grading tests. This would be when I’m, you know, grading labs. Anything like that, That’s a Tuesday, Thursday. Wednesday’s planning period is like another lab prep or maybe lab cleanup day. So Monday and Wednesday are kind of like our lab and lesson preps, those kinds of cleanup days. And then Friday I don’t plan anything. So Tuesday, Thursday, grading, Monday, Wednesday, prepping, lobbying, that kind of thing. Friday, I leave it wide open.

Rebecca Joyner [00:11:40]:
I plan to do nothing during Friday planning, which never happens. It always gets filled up and that becomes an overflow day. Any tasks that didn’t get finished during the week, anything else, I need to figure out if I’m still writing a test for one class or something like that. That’s going to be happening on Friday and then I’m going to be prepping for the next week. Also, I don’t leave my class on Fridays until everything is set up for me to walk in on Monday ready to go. Obviously there might be certain things you have to set up again. That’s why that Monday morning we’ll still do any of that. We need to tie up those loose ends.

Rebecca Joyner [00:12:12]:
But I’m really trying to walk in well on Mondays and prepared on Mondays. That to me, your Friday planning is how you prevent Sunday scaries. Because, you know, like Sunday I don’t need to be scared because I’m gonna walk in ready to go on Monday. I have a whole podcast episode on this episode139 that I’m gonna link in the show notes for you. So just a summary of what I was just saying. One day a week, I like to make it. Mondays typically is like my lesson prep or lab prep day. And then Wednesday would be the other version of that.

Rebecca Joyner [00:12:38]:
So if I do lesson planning on Monday, Wednesdays is lab prep, something like that. Tuesdays, Thursdays is grading. Friday. Friday I’m leaving open. If you have a ton of email, you also need to maybe spend 10 minutes of your planning period doing email. I like to do it at the end because then there’s just a natural end to it. You can go ahead and set timers in your phone. So like every day at the same time, Monday through Friday, the last 10 minutes of your planning period, a timer goes off and says, hey, let’s go ahead and do an email check.

Rebecca Joyner [00:13:03]:
Then you’re checking your email twice a day before school where you’re doing the immediate stuff. And then during planning period, I think that is substantial amount of email checking. For a job that is primarily teaching and prepping to teach and assessing what you’ve been teaching, email cannot be taking up 50% of our time. We have to set boundaries there. If you need more help with setting healthy email rhythms and boundaries, episode 77 is for you. Okay? It is like myths we believe about our email and how you can combat them. And I feel really passionate about this, so check that out. Also, if you’re like, okay, I hear your plan, but like I always get distracted or people come in or there’s always all these things that pop up.

Rebecca Joyner [00:13:43]:
Episode 62 is for you. That’s about having a productive planning period. But that is just in general how I would batch those things and try to spend my days. I’m not going to try to be grading, lab prepping, lesson planning and doing email every single day because then you’re going to spend like seven minutes on each thing and it’s going to get really chaotic. Now, before I let you go, I do want to talk about some boundaries you need to set because these are things that will waste time and they’ll be sneaky about it too. And you won’t even realize, okay, I have a lot of opinions about boundaries. I’m actually going to start off August in the new school year with a series called New Year, New Boundaries. So stay tuned for that.

Rebecca Joyner [00:14:19]:
But here are just a few to get you started again. First, check email first thing when you get to school and then set your timers for maybe your quick check during planning. And that is it. You cannot be constantly checking your email because then you train the people in your inbox that you’re constantly available when you’re responding quickly and often and maybe multiple times a day. We have to train them that you’re not constantly available. Especially cause a lot of the emails are often questions that are, hate to say it, stupid questions that they could, if they were a little bit more resourceful, they could look in the learning, the lms, your learning management system. They could look in the grade book and find the answers themselves. So we’re not going to be checking email multiple times a day.

Rebecca Joyner [00:14:59]:
I want you to brick Your phone if you have a brick or put it on. Do not disturb during the workday. You will be amazed how much time you’re wasting with personal life things during your work hours. And for me personally, I’d rather go dark from like 7:30 to 3:30 and then have the rest of my day to be go dark at work and be present in my life at home than be constantly bringing work stuff home and bringing home stuff to work. I like to have a clear boundary, so that really helps me. A reminder that I said at the top of this episode, task switching, waste time. Again, these are all suggestions. Maybe different days of the week work better for you than others like the ones that I suggested.

Rebecca Joyner [00:15:38]:
But try to pick days that you do certain tasks and batch them on those days so you’re not switching texts constantly. The last thing I’ll say too is about the email is I highly recommend you can add an autoresponder even when you’re not on vacation. It is a little bit annoying. I personally like to set up an autoresponder though for weekends that I turn on every Friday before going off for the weekend. And definitely on like fall breaks, winter breaks, spring breaks, that kind of thing that basically says, hey, we are on winter break, we are on fall break, or hey, it’s the weekend. I will not be checking my email. I will be checking it on Monday, first thing, and addressing things as needed. And during my planning period, or another thing I’ve seen that I’ve absolutely love is when teachers put a disclaimer and their email signature.

Rebecca Joyner [00:16:26]:
So that way it’s on an autoresponder, which can kind of, you know, muddy up your inbox. But it’s a disclaimer. You have like under your name, so you sign like, you sign your email, sincerely Rebecca Joyner. You know, high school, upper school science teacher, whatever. And then below it just say in Italy’s note, I check my email before school every day and during my planning period. I I do my best to maintain the inbox, but I am unreachable outside of those periods and outside of school hours. I’ve seen teachers say before in their little signature, you know, I cannot check email outside of those times because I’m busy teaching your students or I’m teaching like the future scientists of America or statement like, I’m just simply unreachable outside of school hours. Like, I just think making it clear when you’re available is really important.

Rebecca Joyner [00:17:11]:
And then they’re not constantly questioning, why haven’t I heard back from her? Like I’ve set it there and I’ve set the boundary and that’s the standard I’m going to set. So I want to encourage you to do that for your take home challenge. I know that you’re in a unique situation and I know it’s easy to listen to suggestions like these and get defensive. Just basically be arguing back to your speakers right now or your headphones and saying all the reasons why none of these will work. But I want to lovingly remind you that that’s a fixed mindset. And just like we want to train our students to have growth mindsets, we have to do it ourselves too. And having a growth mindset means things can change and I can think about things differently. And there’s always opportunity for growth and for things to be different.

Rebecca Joyner [00:17:52]:
And so I want you to consider these suggestions and what would it look like to try to make them work in your specific scenario even if they don’t translate perfectly, how could you adapt them to work and serve you? And make sure you’re using your time wisely and in a simple way where you walk in every morning and you walk into your planning period and you have clarity about what you need to do. And you can tell students like, oh, I’ll be grading that on Thursday, or oh, I’ll be grading that on Tuesday, or hey, you have a free period on Mondays during my planning, come and help me with lab prep because that’s when I do lab prep, you know, those kinds of things. I just think it provides a lot of clarity and clarity is kindness for you and for your students and for their parents. So if you do have a really specific scenario you want to dialogue further about, you want to get feedback on or tips, feel free to DM me on Instagram, send me a direct message over there. I’d be happy to dialogue with you there. I can also dialogue via email, of course, always. So my Instagram, it’s. It’s not rocket science.

Rebecca Joyner [00:18:48]:
My email is rebecca@itsotrocketscienceclassroom.com and I would love to talk with you further if you want to check out those other podcast episodes I mentioned that I think could really help you with those specific situations. Or you want to check out the Secondary Science Simplified Virtual PD bundle or just even the core values or balance mini courses that I referenced. All of that is linked in the show notes, which you can find@it’s not rocketscienceclassroom.com Episode 2 40. That’s 24 0. All right, teacher friends, that wraps up today’s episode. If you’re looking for an easy way to start simplifying your life as a secondary science teacher, head to itsnotrocketscienceclassroom.com challenge to grab your classroom Reset Challenge. And guess what? It’s totally free. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I’ll see you here next week.

Rebecca Joyner [00:19:36]:
Until then, I’ll be rooting for you, teacher friend.