Ep #98: How to Get It Done!

Hello, Empowered Principals, welcome to episode 98.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal Podcast, a not so typical, educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy, by refining your most powerful tool: your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach, Angela Kelly Robeck.

Oh my gosh, 98, two away from 100, I can’t believe it. And another week has gone by. Happy Tuesday, happy November. Welcome, if you’re new to the podcast, I’m Angela Kelly Robeck and I am a coach for school leaders and I love my job. I love all of you too.

And I want to take a moment to acknowledge you and ask you to really stop and celebrate the year so far. Congratulate yourself on all that you’ve done. Setting up the year is a lot of work and so much of what you do goes unrecognized, especially by others. And this is why it’s so important to recognize yourself and acknowledge all of the work you have done and the effort and the mindset work you’ve done to get you from the beginning of the year in August to now.

So take a moment, list out all you’ve done, and then do something fun to celebrate your work. Celebrate you. Get into the practice of recognizing, acknowledging, and celebrating yourself. Some of my clients get really hung up on wanting other people to acknowledge them and they’re waiting for a pat on the back from somebody else to approve what they’ve done, to say that they’re good at their job, to have them be the rockstar, to get the gold star or certificate, or whatever.

And I want to say, yes, I understand that it feels amazing to be acknowledged by others, and it is important to set the example of how you want to be treated and that you want other people to acknowledge you. That’s great. It feels really good. But I also want you to know that the way that you treat yourself is how you expect other people to treat you. So you must be willing and able to acknowledge yourself and recognize yourself and celebrate yourself if you want other people to treat you in that way.

We teach others how to treat us by the way we treat ourselves, and when you honor your own work, you’re going to rely much less on needing other people to acknowledge you and approve of your work because you do it for yourself. So I am here to acknowledge and celebrate each and every one of you. Congratulations on doing the hardest part of the job; starting up the year, setting up systems, and getting people on board.

You, my friend, have stepped up in a way that so many people aren’t willing to do and I ask of you to acknowledge yourself. You have to have your own back and I believe this to my core. I’m doing it for myself in my business and I want you to do it for yourself as a leader.

And speaking of acknowledging you, I want to do a belated shout out for National Principals Month, which was in all of October, and here we are in the middle of November. And I realized that I was recording the episodes so far in advance that it didn’t even dawn on me until afterwards that I had failed to mention it and congratulate you during the month of October.

So I hope that you were celebrated in some way by your staff and your community, and I hope you celebrated yourself. And I believe your job is the most important one in the schools, right along with those teachers. And I’m not saying that just to kiss up, you guys.

Listen to this; a new study out of the Pew Research Center states that K12 principals are among the highest trusted leaders in the entire nation, how about that? Principals are believed to be honest and fair. They truly care for kids and they manage their resources well. They approve of principals above congress, the president, it’s amazing, right?

So you are to be honored and respected and people really value the work that you do, even if they’re not saying it to you directly. So I think being a principal has been one of the biggest honors of my life and I feel so much gratitude for having had the opportunity to have held that position and for all that the position taught me about myself.

I personally developed dramatically in those years and even though they weren’t some of the most impressive years – they were actually quite painful – what I will say is that through the process and through that journey, I am by far a better person and a much better coach for it. So I’ve lived it in order to be able to coach people through it.

Know that whatever situation you are dealing with right now in this moment, that situation that feels so real and so scary and so painful, know that on some level it is being presented in your life for you. It’s happening for you and not to you.

I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but your future self a year from now, five years from now, is going to thank you for learning what you are learning right now in this moment. Okay? So, onward.

Today, we’re going to talk about the how in time management. Lots of people want to know the how. We’ve spent the first two episodes discussing time mindset work and that’s really where your heavy lifting is. You’ve got to get your mindset around time to shift before you’re going to be able to do the how and to take action about how you time manage.

So I’m going to share with you a process that, over time, I’ve created for myself and I’m going to teach you what it is and how I do it and why I do it so that you can try it out for yourself and see if it works for you. So you’re going to start, in terms of taking action on time management, you’re going to start by creating a to-do brain drain.

You know that list you keep up in your head, like a mental checklist – I’ve got a 504 meeting at seven, I can’t forget to schedule Sally’s observation, oh yeah, I’ve got to run by the district office and drop off the site plan packets for the board meeting, and oh my gosh, I totally keep forgetting to schedule my own child’s dentist appointment. I need to get that done. I’ve got to make that call.

So you know that list that’s in your head running all of the time, that is called a mental to-do list. And when it stays inside of your brain, you don’t have the capacity to turn it off because, if you turned it off, you’re going to forget something, right? And it spins and spins in what I call an open cycle in the brain.

For every task that’s not complete and you want to complete, you’re holding onto that mental memory and it’s an open cycle spinning in the background of your brain, of your mind. And if you don’t do something to capture all of those tasks that you want to accomplish, you’re going to have dozens of these spinning cycles in your brain which is taking up energy, time, and focus that could be used to focus on other more challenging tasks.

It’s like having your smart phone or your computer that has all these applications running in the background and your battery wears down really quickly and you’re like, what happened to my battery? Well, it’s because all of this stuff is running in the background taking up time and energy and focus. It’s consuming energy.

So when you have a list of things in your head and you don’t have a process and a system for organizing them and getting them out of your brain, they’re going to, very, very quickly, drain your focus and energy. You’re either going to be thinking about the list and what you need to get done, or you’re going to be thinking about what you have to do at hand.

And one or the other’s going to get lost in the shuffle, so you need to have a process. You need to get the list out of your brain and onto paper. I personally like to split the list into two. I just draw a line down the middle of my journal page and I put professional and personal.

I jot everything down on one side because one task triggers the memory of another task and I go, go, go until I’ve exhausted my brain out and I can’t think of anything else. And then I do it for my personal side. And sometimes a professional will trigger a personal, it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to do it in an exact order. But I like to split it up just because I can see where my head is and where I am needing to spend a little more energy and time.

So I jot everything down on the list for as long as it takes, and I’m talking everything. I’m talking about showering, getting ready for the day, taking breaks, having lunch, all those quick little phone calls you think are only going to take a minute, calling the dentist or the doctor or the eye exam, I put those down. Every single thing that you do every minute of the day, put it down.

It’s very important that your brain sees how you are spending every minute of your time. Time is an asset, just like money, and we want to see how we spend it because how we spend it shows us what we value, and if we don’t like the way we’re spending our time then we can see it on paper, neutralize it in terms of what we make it mean, and then just adjust.

So, write down the to-do brain drain of all the things that you want to get done at work and all the things you want to get done in the rest of your life; showering, sleeping, cooking, eating, errands, watching TV, social media scrolling, reading a book, going to the appointments, getting a workout in, just having downtime with friends and family or by yourself, all of it. Get it down.

I personally love to make this list at the end of my day because doing so allows my brain to rest much more peacefully at night. When I don’t do it at night, I find myself waking up and thinking about that one more thing I need to do.

So I’m going to talk a little bit more about the process I use in a minute, but I want to share with you why doing it at the end of your workday or the end of your evening can be helpful for you. So if you’re a person who wakes up with a list running in their head and then it’s like, you know, backspace, repeat, backspace, repeat, it keeps going looping, this can be really helpful; getting it out in the evening.

Because then your brain’s like, okay, I know what I want to get done, I have a plan, I don’t have to worry. And if something does wake you up in the night, you just add it to the list, write it down, get it out of your brain. It’s so powerful.

So, once you’ve done the brain drain and you’ve just got a list of everything and there’s no order, there’s no priority at this point, what I like to do – and I think this is different than what other people recommend is – I like to do a very quick scan. I’m going to do the scan twice and I’m going to explain it to you, scan each task and I rate it a plus or a minus.

The first scan is how I feel in my body about doing each of the items. I get out of my head and I drop into my body and I just go down the list and I give it a plus or a minus depending on if I want to do the task and it feels good and I’m excited or motivated, I do a plus, and if I’m not super jazzed about it or it’s kind of neutral or I don’t want to do it at all, I put a negative.

I just do that because I want to see what my physical body’s reaction is to that task. And I do this for a reason. I’ll tell you in a second. The second time I do the scan, I get up in my head, like what would my head tell me to do, my head being the boss of me, what I think I should be doing?

So for example, you might have some things you want to get done on your campus and you might want to spend 30 minutes reading an article that was really appealing to you, but you don’t think you should do it. What you think you should be doing instead is, I don’t know, checking emails or responding to a parent or getting on to your campus; not that any of those things are right or wrong, I’m just simply noticing, there’s a difference between the way you feel about tasks versus the way you think about tasks.

So do a quick scan, give it a plus or minus in terms of how it feels to you, and do it again, give it a plus or minus how you think of what you should be doing or not, I hope that makes sense. So, the reason I do this is to get a sense of what mental or emotional state I am in as I approach my day’s agenda. And this process, it’s very quick, it takes less than a minute. You’ve got to just do it by gut instinct, and it helps you get very real with your priorities and tackle the tasks that are going to matter the most to you, okay?

And let’s be honest, when we wake up in the morning, we’re going to look at that list that we created the night before and we’re all of a sudden not going to want to do everything that we said we wanted to get done. That’s totally normal, and here’s what happens; this happens because when we make the list, at the time we’re making the list, our brain is thinking about how great it’s going to feel when all of those tasks are done.

So when we’re doing a to-do list and we dump 20, 30, 40, 50 things on it, our brain is already in that space of, done, done, done, check, check, check. And it feels really good. So the night before, it’s like, yeah, I’m going to do all this stuff and I’m going to feel great.

Then, when you wake up in the morning and you see this whole list that you created the night before, your brain’s going to go, I’m in resistance, put the brakes on, because even though it’s something you want to do or don’t mind doing, the fact that you have to shift into the energy of actually doing the work can put you into full resistance.

So, this is what I tell my clients; your brain is like a teenager. It will roll its eyes whenever you ask it to do anything. So just know that it’s normal and it’s not wired to want to work. It’s wired to want to be lazy. And the secret with this brain game that is played in our minds is to identify the tasks that you truly do want to get done because of the results that they create for you.

You also want to weed out the tasks that you don’t really want to do and you want to leverage your emotions to generate the enthusiasm and the energy and the focus that it will take to get the tasks done that will give you the most benefit. So I highlight, there are three types of tasks.

There are tasks that you feel you want to do. There are tasks you feel you need to do and there are tasks you feel you should do. The want to do tasks are tasks you feel excited to take on and you have no problem doing them. You want to jump in and do them right away. They’re usually pretty simple and they’re easy and they’re fun or they have an immediate gratification effect. They have an immediate result.

And you might have to be careful about this because these tasks also may or may not be tasks that get you the result you want. So it’s really important to stop yourself and understand why you want to accomplish that task. Is it because it’s just a quick and easy task and it’s going to feel good to check it off the list? Like you look through your thing and you’re like, oh, I’m going to do that because that’s easy and fun and it takes me no time at all and it’s not a lot of effort, boom, I can check off and say I did something.

Or is that want task something you love to do even though it takes you away from accomplishing another task that has high impact? I know, for me, it can be like playing a game on my phone. Like, sometimes my brain just needs a break and I give into like, okay, I’m going to play a game of cards or I do a word search or whatever it is. It’s giving into that, like, this feels good in the moment so I’m going to do it even though it really has no benefit and it’s taking me away from the task that I truly want to accomplish.

Or, is it a task that in the end is going to create a massive result that you’ve been craving, and even though it’s hard, you crave it, you want it so badly, you deeply desire doing the work, like I want to get busy doing this hard work because I know that on the other side is going to be a massive payout?

Just be aware why your want tasks feel good, and when you put it on the list, you think about why you want to accomplish that task. Then there is the need to-do list or the tasks that aren’t particularly exciting or sexy, but you feel that they’re important. And these things might be filing your taxes, meeting with an upset parent right away, presenting to the school board, scheduling your eye exam.

These are things that you don’t have like a super strong desire to do, like washing dishes, but you do want to do them because of the result it creates. So you do want to file your taxes so you don’t get in trouble with the IRS and you’re being a responsible law-abiding citizen. You do want to wash the dishes because you don’t want them to get crusty and stinky and pile up and be an eyesore and a stink-sore, you do want to get your eyes examined so that you get the glasses you need to see clearly and avoid having headaches, right?

You might not love having to go and do the need list, but you decide on purpose to schedule them and follow through with them because you want the result that taking that action provides you. And finally, there are going to be things on the list that you put down because you believe you should do them.

And these may be things you don’t really want to do but you feel like you have to or you should do it, things like volunteering for the PTA at your son’s school when you don’t really want to. This was the story of my life. I felt guilty as a mom, I was a single mom. I’m running a school and I’m never at my kid’s own school so I felt like I had to go and volunteer even though I didn’t want to. The last place I wanted to be was at another volunteering more of my time, but I did it because I felt guilty.

So you want to stop and think about why you’ve placed the should tasks on the list, and if the answer to when you ask yourself why is something along the lines of, well I should or a good mom or dad does, or people will think – that’s a big one, right – then you need to stop and ask yourself if this is truly a priority for you and why it is that you should do them.

If it’s something you decide, yes I do actually really want to do that and you’re shoulding yourself, kind of shaming myself into I should do this, I should do that, but you actually do want to do it, you have to change the word to want; I want to do this. It becomes a need or a choice.

And there are things that we tell ourselves we should do but we never seem to get to them. One of my favorite examples is I should go to the gym or I should read that book. If you find yourself listing tasks over and over and over again but you’re never actually getting to them and you’re not acting on them, you need to ask yourself why. Be curious. Why am I not doing this? What’s holding you back from actually getting to that book and do you like the reason for that?

So if, in fact, you like the reason and it feels good to not be super motivated to do that action, then just take it off the list and stop fibbing to yourself and telling yourself that you should be doing it when clearly you don’t really want to because, honestly, if you wanted to do it, you’d be doing it.

So don’t torture your brain by continuing to put something on the list that you have no real intention of taking any action towards completing. Just admit to yourself that, at this current time, I’m consciously deciding not to take action towards that task and it’s okay. But if you don’t like your answer, if you ask yourself what’s holding you back and you don’t like the reason, find a way to make it a priority.

Plan a reward for taking action towards it. Break the task down into smaller steps so that it feels super easy and comfortable and just, like, over the top easy to accomplish it. It’s something super small and super simple that you can’t even give an excuse as to why you didn’t do it. It’s a fun game to play with your brain.

For example, let’s say that you keep telling yourself that you want to read the Empowered Principal book – shameless plug, but any professional book for that matter. I know I had a pile of books that I intended to read at the end of the night every single school year and never go to all of them. You never just quite pick that book up and you don’t get to reading it.

So, if you decide that, wait a minute, what’s holding me back from reading this book, and if you decide that no, I don’t want to read this book, I really just don’t want to read it, then let it go. Put the book away, give it to somebody else, get it out of sight, end of story. Close that cycle.

But if you decide that you actually do really want to read the book, you do want it to be a priority, then what you need to do is get that book on the calendar and you’re going to schedule something so ridiculous that it’s too easy to mess up. You’re going to schedule one minute of reading.

You’re going to pick up the book for one minute, read a page or however long a minute is for you and then put it down, nothing more. Anybody can do anything for 60 seconds. So I want you to put in on the calendar, pencil it in from 8pm to 8:01pm, I’m going to read one page of this book, and then do it and see what happens. Notice, did you do it, did you not?

How interesting, I wouldn’t even read for 60 seconds, do I really want to read this book? Or, I read for 60 seconds and that wasn’t so hard. Check, I’m not going to read any more tonight, but I accomplished my goal of one minute. Or, oh my god, I love this book so much, which of course you’ll love the book when you read The Empowered Principal, but what happens is you cross over that threshold of not having read any pages at all to having read a page.

It’s a win. It’s a check. The brain loves it. It loves getting the win, the gold star. So our brains will tell us before we start a task, before you cross over the threshold, that it’s going to take so much time and you’re going to be so tired reading at night or it’s going to be so much energy to complete this task.

It tells the story that it’s going to be so much worse than it really is. So starting with the little tiny mini bite is often all it takes to get the momentum to accomplish something bigger that we do actually want to get done.

Okay, once you’ve identified what is a want, what’s a need, and what’s a should on your to-do list and you’ve weeded out any of the tasks that aren’t in alignment with your goals or any of your whys, then you have to do something that’s going to feel very hard and very challenging.

Okay, are you ready? You have to choose one task to get done for the day. If there was one thing, and I mean one, one thing that you had to get done for this day, what would it be from that list? Your brain is going to want to fight with you and tell you there is no way you can choose just one thing. You can’t prioritize just one thing. That’s okay. Let your brain whine, it’s being a teenager, that’s okay.

You, my friend, are an adult. You are the boss of your brain. You are the leader of a school. You are going to choose one priority no matter what your brain tells you and put it at the top of your list for the day. And priority means one. You cannot have three or four or 10 or 20 priorities. That is not prioritizing.

A priority means one. This priority task means that you’re going to do it no matter what, and if you don’t get to it until nine o’clock, then guess what, you’re working at nine o’clock at night. This is a practice of self-discipline.

And once I determine my priority, I try to tend to schedule it the first thing so that I don’t spend the whole day worrying about getting it done, I just get it done. If it’s a task scheduled for a particular time, like you have a meeting or an appointment or a client call, then you put it on the calendar and everything else has to fit around it.

Now, the one priority doesn’t mean that you won’t get other things done in your day. It means that you will commit to that one task no matter what, and if it’s the only thing that got done that day, the day will have been a success. Some tasks take a lot of time and you have to break them into smaller tasks. Other tasks are small in time but large in return on your results.

So, look at that list. And if one thing has to get done today, by golly, you’re going to do it. Put that as the priority, schedule the time and the duration of that priority task. And then you can go back, look at your list. You can rank them in terms of priority, the rest of the priorities for you, right, how you want to attack those tasks. You assign a time and a duration to the list.

Now, here’s what I’ve learned; that I have way more on my to-do list than is physically or time-space capable. I’ll be like, there’s no way I can get these 10 things done, but I can get three or four things and I’m going to honor that, I’m going to give it the time it needs, I’m going to do what it says I’m going to do on my calendar at that time.

If it’s taking longer, I cut it off. I go to the next thing and I have to adjust and reschedule for the next day. Be sure to accommodate interruptions and unexpected events. Just know that they happen. Don’t be surprised that you get interrupted as a school leader. And don’t be surprised that things come up that are unexpected. That is the job; interruptions and unexpected events.

So, you do this, practice it, and at the end of the workday, guys, just notice what didn’t get done. Why didn’t it get done? Be curious. Don’t judge yourself harshly or tell yourself you’re a loser or you’re slow or you’re a failure. Don’t be harsh. Just notice and be honest. Was it simply a misjudgment of how long something had planned to take, it took much longer than you thought? Were there more unexpected interruptions than you had planned for? Did you just simply plan too much for one day?

Just notice and lovingly adjust for tomorrow. And this practice over and over again is how you get more refined in your time, how you get to figure out what you value, what gets you the best bang for your buck, what gets you the results you want and what doesn’t. So move the tasks to the next day that need to go onto tomorrow.

And at the end of the week, look for patterns. What did you actually spend your time on? Are there things you consistently did not get to? Are there things you’re always putting off that you say you want? Are there things that are taking less time that you were planning too much time around? Are there things you can delegate?

So make those decisions and stick with them. So, in summary, you have to make a decision. What’s the priority? Stick to that decision for the day. Honor the plan. Take the action you said you were going to take. Be willing to fail. And I like to add, make it a game. Observe, reflect, notice, be curious, adjust your schedule and try again. Practice constraining, which means limiting your yeses. Practice delegating and practice prioritizing.

And one last little tip here, things to avoid. Avoid trying to multitask. It doesn’t work. Avoid trying to be busy just for the sake of being busy or looking busy or looking important, just scratch it. Do not tell yourself you’re in overwhelm. That is a mindset. You are not overwhelmed. You are in control of your calendar; you have what it takes to be the boss of your time.

Do not allow for distractions and buffering, unintentional buffering. If you need a break, take the break, but get back to it. And please do not say you’re going to try to get something done or you’re going to plan on getting something done. No, I am getting this done, I’m putting it on my calendar, I’m going to hold tight to it.

So there you have it, folks. That’s what I do.  And as a treat and a bonus for you, I’m offering a free Empowered Planning Packet. I’m going to put it on the website.  It’s a free download for you just for being a loyal listener.

I’m going to put this process down onto paper in a PDF format. You can download it, you can use it, you can adjust it if you want to, however it works for you. But let me know what you think and thank you for being an Empowered Principal. I love you guys, I’ll talk to you next week. Take care, bye-bye.

Hey there, my fellow educator. Are you yearning to go a little further with these concepts and learn how to apply them in your everyday work situations? Do you want to feel understood and more connected with likeminded school leaders? If so, I’m super excited to offer you, for the very first time ever, the Empowered Principal Mastermind.

It’s a safe space where we can talk about the real issues that you face on a daily basis and support you in evolving your leadership and your life to the next level. For more information, simply go to angelakellycoahcing.com and click on, “EP Mastermind.” We start this January. I can’t wait to see you on the inside.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit www.angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.