🛑 Stop Doing Everything: Task Prioritization for School Leaders #239

0:00Leaders have you ever sat down at your desk with a very full-to-do list, and then somehow, at the very end of the day, you've done 100 million things you're exhausted, but the most important things on your list have still not been touched. And if you're like me, that leader with ADHD, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Your brain is going from task to task, and you see everything that needs to be done. You have 100 tabs open on your computer, on that person, and I literally had that experience where I couldn't figure out where the music was coming from one day. But prioritizing what matters right now, it can feel like you're trying to organize something like a tornado or a cyclone or a hurricane. Leadership is not about doing everything on your own. It's about deciding what deserves your attention first and what deserves your attention most.

1:01And if you don't build a system for that, your day will be just like mine some days. It's going to get hijacked by all of those things that you think are urgent instead of being impactful. Hi, friend. Are you ready to move into a leadership position? Do you have interests and ambitions that you want to pursue? But feel like you don't know how to take that next step. Maybe you want to start your own coaching or consulting agency. I'm Mel, and I help educators define their career path through correct mindset, knowing your options, and getting prepared for your career transition. I will show you how to level up your leadership skills, share your expertise in a new way, create impact on a larger scale, and put your leadership in motion.

2:02As an educator for over 20 years, I started to feel underused and like I had more to give. Now, when the time had come for me to leave the classroom and affect change on a larger level, now I'm ready to help you determine where your talents and skills mesh with your passions and interests, put your leadership in motion and move into that next phase of your educational career journey. Let me help you define your career path by having the right mindset, knowing your options and getting prepared for that next leadership position. So power up and put your leadership in motion. Welcome back to the Empowered Educator Show. I'm your host, Dr. Mel. This is the podcast for school leaders who want professional development on the go. Those real strategies and those leadership insights designed to strengthen your leader systems, your learning systems, and your logic systems so that you can lead with clarity, confidence, and purpose.

3:05As you know that my brain goes 90 miles an hour all the time. I have self-diagnosed ADHD and it's bad some days and some days I don't get a lot done because I just can't focus. So I have to have some strategies in place. So today I'm going to talk about this. It's very personal for me and I'm going to be talking about prioritizing your time as a leader who has ADHD. If your brain works like mine you probably have a thousand ideas and a hundred responsibilities and about 10 or 20 people asking for something from you at one single time during your day. Your leadership already demands some strong decision making but when you have ADHD it can make prioritizing all of those tasks feel overwhelming. So over time I've built a few systems that helped me to stay focused on what actually moves the work forward and doesn't drain me throughout the day.

4:07So today I want to talk to you about a few of them. Now I have a lot but they're all used for different things. So I have five, the Eisenhower Matrix, my own personal flavor of delay, delete, or delegate, also how I organize my calendar visually, the big, the middle, and the small rock system and then how I think about tier one, two, and three priorities over the course of a year. None of these systems are complicated and they kind of together create some clarity around some issues of not being able to manage your time well or not knowing what is important, what you need to do, what somebody else needs to do, etc. So remember these are all things that I use but you don't have to use all of these. I have added these over time, start with one. So you've already heard or you may have heard that if everything is urgent then nothing

5:08is urgent. And that's kind of a rule that I've really started to embrace because in my mind everything is urgent, especially at certain times during the school year. And that's kind of the basis for the framework of the Eisenhower Matrix. So this was popularized by Stephen Covey, which most of you probably know if you don't, you need to find out who Stephen Covey is, and it's based on that concept from President Dwight D. Eisenhower who stated, I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important and the important are never urgent. And the matrix is just his way of dealing with all of those things that were coming at him and prioritizing. So there are four quadrants, it's a two by two. So quadrant one is the things that are important and urgent. So they require your immediate attention and you're going to do these things.

6:11These are going to be things like crisis situations, student safety issues, and some critical deadlines. Quadrant two, they're important but they're not as urgent. These are going to be your tasks or responsibilities that you plan for and you schedule. This will be things like real time feedback and your coaching rounds. It's also going to be those weekly meetings like the ones you have with your superintendent or my principal has a weekly meeting because he is our facilities director. He meets with the custodial director and the maintenance director along with myself. To do a quick check in with them each week and to make sure everybody's on the same page and in the know about what's happening on campus. Quadrant three is not important but urgent. These are the things you're going to delegate. At least delegate for the most part anyway. These are things like emails.

7:12Now you can't really delegate that for the most part because you need to answer your own emails. But other things like small requests or paperwork that someone else could handle. I'm just going to tell you, principals, you are not the person who needs to be creating pretty printouts, bulletins, awards, certificates. That is not your job. You need someone else to do that or if you don't want to delegate them, you can push them off and do them later. And then there's Quadrant four, they're not important and they're not urgent. So you probably just need to kick those out and not waste any time on those. So your goal is to spend most of your time in Quadrant two. If you're actually planning and you're scheduling your day, then those other three quadrants, they're going to become way smaller and they're going to take up much less of your time. And remember Quadrant four, you probably just need to kick that out anyway because if it's not urgent, if it's not important, why are you even wasting time on that?

8:14Does it fit within your mission and vision or your goals for your building? And you may not want to think matrix. So you could use my rule, which is delay, delete or delegate. And once I identify a task, I will run it through my own personal filter of delay, delete or delegate. Sometimes something just needs to wait, not everything is a today problem. Sometimes something needs to be removed completely. That would be spending time on Canva creating all of those things that I just told you to kick off because sometimes leaders carry work that doesn't actually belong to them. So one important thing that you need to do is you need to sit down with all of your staff and decide who owns what jobs and write it down so everybody's clear on it. Sometimes your best leadership move is delegation. You empower someone else to own that task and use their skills to do something.

9:15This simple rule keeps me from becoming the bottleneck in my own leadership because sometimes I do. I'll get too many things in my way and I can't get things completed and then people are waiting on me and they can't do their own job. Another thing that helps my ADHD brain is visual organization. My Google calendar is color coded so I can see my week at a glance and I know what colors mean what. For example, I have like 11.7, yes, and that's my number, 11.7, calendars that feed into my other calendar. So my school calendar gets my personal calendar on it because there are things that I schedule sometimes that I don't want to miss that are personal, but I don't want something to get scheduled on my school calendar so I connect them all so nothing gets overlooked and nothing gets scheduled over.

10:16The things that feed in from my personal calendar are one color. Everything is that one color and then I have my leadership tasks that are another color. My personal tasks are purple. My leadership tasks are like a teal color. Choose your own colors, guys, whatever makes sense to you. Then I have our leadership or our admin team colors. It's like a pinkish color. That way it's easy to see at a glance what is what. We also have like the school calendar, just those things that pop up for us to see as an admin team so we know what to talk about during our admin meetings and what things are scheduled like field trips and we just did something called one book one school where everybody dropped everything at the same time every day. This is pre K through high school and they read a chapter of a book. When you color code and then you look at your calendar visually those patterns jump out

11:19real quickly. If everything is meetings, you know something needs to shift. If there's no time for instructional leadership, that's a signal too. I have even scheduled my own personal time for professional development and devotional time or time with God. For leaders with ADHD, that visual structure, those visual cues can help reduce all of that mental overload. Then I have my big middle and small rock strategy. In my notebook, I have my three priority levels. I have big rocks, middle rocks, small rocks. The big rocks are those one or two things that absolutely must move forward today. They have to be crossed off your list by the end of the day and they're non-negotiable. Then you have your middle rocks. They're important and they support the bigger priorities. But if you don't get them done today, they become the priority tomorrow.

12:21Then you have your small rocks. Those are those quick little tasks. Your emails, your follow-ups, your smaller responsibilities. Those things can wait. This comes from that classic leadership lesson that if you fill the jar with sand first, your big rocks are not going to fit. You start with the big rocks. Then you fill the gaps with the middle rocks and then you pour those tiny little sand rocks in that completes everything you need to possibly do in a week's time. My last strategy is the Tier 1, 2 and 3 priorities across a year. This is where I zoom out and I actually have in my rocket book, I love my rocket book because you can put permanent marker in there or I use stickers and decorate it up. If you don't have a rocket book, you should look into it. Then I create a Tier 1, 2 and 3 in my rocket book and then I zoom out and think about those

13:21priorities across the entire year. So my Tier 1, it's mission-critical work. These are the things that must happen for this school year to be successful. Then I have my Tier 2, they're important for growth. Then I have Tier 3, they're the nice to have, but they can wait. One of my things on my Tier 3 is painting my office. It's hideous. Not very appealing when I have a parent come in and I want it to look nice, but guess what? It is not happening right now. That is something that will happen much later, probably this summer. Not everything can be at the highest level at the same time. So this system helps me focus my energies where it matters most right now and then where it matters later. Guys, you're not going to fix your ADHD more than likely, but if you're leading with ADHD,

14:23the goal isn't to do that and you can lean into that because it's probably your creativity and your vision and your ability to see those connections quickly because of your ADHD. Those are your leadership strengths. The goal is simply to build systems that help you focus and do the things that matter the most in the right order. Here's your action step. Take 10 minutes and write down everything that's currently on your mind. Then I want you to sort those tasks into three categories. Urgent and important. Delay, deleter, delegate, and then your big rocks for the week. You don't need a perfect system, guys. You just need something that works well for you. So whatever that is, that's what you need to focus on for a little bit. There's one, maybe two. And as you learn that system and you get it down pat, then you can add another system. Leaders, you just need some clarity over what's important and what order to do them in.

15:25Clarity reduces overwhelm. You know that I am all about systems. If you need help creating systems, reach out. Remember, you can click that link in the show notes at the very top and you can send me a text. If this episode helped you think about leadership systems in a new way, make sure that you subscribe to the empowered educator show so you don't miss any future episodes. And if you know a new principal or an aspiring principal or a leader of any kind who feels overwhelmed trying to manage everything on their plate, share this episode with them. Because leadership is hard enough, you shouldn't have to figure everything out alone. When you know the best leaders beg, steal, and borrow from other good leaders anyway, and I'm okay with that, I hope you are too. Remember leaders, you don't have to do everything to lead well. You just have to focus on the work that moves people, instruction, and your culture forward.

16:27And when your priorities are clear, your leadership becomes clearer also. And remember to keep going that extra mile to motivate, inspire, lead, and empower. Have a great weekend, bye-bye.