Your Ideal Week Gives You an Edge

Picture your first day back with staff.

The agenda is tight: you’ve got your welcome remarks, a quick icebreaker, and a walk-through of the new schedule. You've got sticky notes and color-coding. For once, you’re feeling ahead of the game.

Then the parking lot fills up.

Three staff members are circling, looking for an empty spot. The new custodian repainted the visitor spots over the staff spots, and now there's a pickup truck parked diagonally across two spaces. You go out to direct traffic in your new first-day-back shoes.

Finally, parking is sorted, you're twelve minutes into the meeting, when a six-year-old who was absolutely not supposed to be in the building yet finds the shiny red switch by the gym doors and decides to see what it does.

It does exactly what it's designed to do. Loudly.

So now it's 9:37am, you're standing in the parking lot — again — this time with three hundred kids and forty adults are counting off.

And your agenda is somewhere, back inside, and it’s “up in smoke.”

This is not a hypothetical for most of you.

It's a typical Tuesday.

And it's exactly the moment several of you brought to our last Mastermind session: One part "how do I get more hours," but two parts "how do I stop every single one of my hours from being negotiated away?"

Here's a strange fact: the word priority didn't have a plural for about 500 years.

It first entered English in the 1400s from the Latin prioritas, meaning first in rank, first in order. For five centuries, if something was your priority, that was understood to mean the thing.

Singular.

It wasn't until the 1900s, and especially after 1940, that "priorities" started showing up in print. And it caught on fast because it let us keep the feeling of focus while multiplying the list.

Author Greg McKeown makes this same point in Essentialism (a great book, by the way, and one of our recent Mastermind reads). Somewhere along the way, we started treating "priorities" as a category instead of a ranking. It’s worth knowing for the next time someone hands you a list titled "Top 5 Priorities" and asks you to treat all five like they're first.

Seneca said it best: "If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable." Elite performers decide on the port first, then let the wind do what it's going to do.

This is where time blocking comes in handy. Use it as a filter for the one-priority question before the week gets filled up.

When we say "I don't have time," what we usually mean is "it's not a priority." We find time for what actually matters to us. The problem is we haven't decided, in advance, what that is.

An Ideal Week is how you decide in advance.

You block the recurring, non-negotiable hours, like classroom walkthroughs, your one uninterrupted planning block, family dinners, etc., before the parking lot and the fire alarm and the eleven-reply email chain get plastered on your calendar.

The goal of time blocking is to walk into the day with an intentional plan, so that when the plan gets derailed, you're rebuilding from a structure you’ve chosen instead of falling into.

A few specific, actionable places to start this week:

No week is actually ideal.

When the plan gets derailed, don’t be tempted to scrap the whole day.

Reset: take a breath, and ask yourself, how can I still win the rest of today?

Then treat yourself the way you'd treat a teacher after a rough observation. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Progress, not perfection, could be the difference between a bad hour and a bad week.

If you're heading into budget conversations this fall, protecting your own time deserves a line item too. That's a lot of what we work through inside the Mastermind, with a room full of people who will ask you what your one priority is this month and hold you to it.

Join the Mastermind here 👉 https://betterleadersbetterschools.com/mastermind

Before you build a single time block, do this first.

It's called a Past Year Review, and it takes as little as 20 minutes.

Grab your calendar from the last twelve months and scroll through it month by month. For each month jot down two short lists:

That's it. That's the whole exercise.

Why this comes before you fill the calendar

You can't time-block your way to a better year if you're just protecting hours for the wrong things faster.

The Past Year Review gives you the raw data on what your actual priority should be, grounded in your own twelve months of evidence.

Most school leaders find the same thing when they do this: the drain list is longer than they expected, and a lot of it is stuff they didn’t choose.

The energize list is usually shorter and more specific than expected. That specificity makes it easier to protect one clear thing than to defend a vague sense that "I should have more balance."

This week, try this: