Episode 203: 4 Keys To Making Your Weeknights And Weekends More Restorative

0:00Welcome to the Private School Leader Podcast where private school leaders learn how to thrive and not just survive as they serve, believe their schools. I strongly believe that it is possible to have a long and happy and fulfilling career as a private school leader. And my passion is to help you figure out exactly how to do just that. Right here on the Private School Leader Podcast and I'm your host, Mark Micas. So I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that there's a pretty good chance that this has happened to you during the week, especially on Thursday, maybe even Friday morning, you're like, I just got to make it to the weekend. You're exhausted and you're telling yourself, I just got to get to the weekend. And then you have the weekend and then somehow it's Sunday evening and you're thinking to yourself, well, hold on a second, what happened to the weekend? And why am I still exhausted?

1:00And I got to get up and do this all over again tomorrow morning. And I remember thinking that, you know, as a private school leader, you know, all the days are 24 hours long, but it just seemed like the five week days were 50 hours long and Saturday and Sunday were five hours long. It just flew by so fast. And so, you know, so that's the weekend hanging in there for the weekend. And then here's another thing that maybe you felt this way. Let's say it's Tuesday and you did a good job and you're leaving at five o'clock. And what you need is a restorative evening to get you ready for Wednesday, but you never really leave school. You leave school, but you don't leave school. Like you don't check out mentally. You're checking your email during dinner. You're watching a Netflix movie or show with your family, but you're dipping in and out of your email on your phone.

2:02And you're right back at school. And here's the thing, being away from school is not the same as recovering from school. And you can physically leave campus without ever mentally leaving campus. And so when I at the top of every episode say that I believe that it's possible to have a long and happy and fulfilling career, the first word is long. And for you to have a long career doing this for you to want to do this for a while, then you need to have the time away from school to actually restore you. And I want you to be able to do this for a long time. So today, what I'm going to give to you, it's not complicated. It's not going to require you to completely restructure your life. I'm just going to give you four things. Okay, because on today's episode of the Private Scaluder Podcast, I'm going to give you

3:06the four keys to making your weeknights and weekends more restorative. So I want to give you a free gift to say thank you for listening to the podcast. And this one is called Five Strategies to Reduce Teacher Drama at your school. Now if you're listening to this in real time, it's early September and your school year has recently gotten underway. But maybe you're already dealing with gossip and triangulation. And you know, that's when the teacher has a teacher A has a problem with teacher B, but teacher A doesn't go talk to teacher B, teacher A wants to come talk to you about it, right? Well, even though it's early in the school year, you might already be experiencing some teacher drama. And so I want to give you this tool. It's called Five Strategies to Reduce Teacher Drama at your school. This is a nine page PDF that's got some really practical strategies that will actually help reduce the teacher drama at your school.

4:07And so if you go to the private school year dot com slash drama, you can grab that for free as a gift to you to say thanks for listening. Five strategies to reduce teacher drama at your school. Just go to the private school year dot com slash drama to download that. And then I want to just remind you that I recently launched on call consulting and you don't have to do it alone anymore. These big decisions, the sticky situations, stuff that you've never experienced before, stuff where there's no policy for that. There's no precedent for that at your school. It's an emergent need. And so let me break it down for you really quickly. How does on call consulting work? I'll step one, something messy, complex or stressful happens at school. Step two, you text me. Step three, in less than two hours, you and I are on the phone around zoom. And step four, we slow down, we talk it through.

5:08And then step five is is that you move forward with clarity and confidence and calm because you have a plan. And so if you go to the private school year dot com slash consulting, you can learn more about on call consulting. I'm only taking a few clients for this school year. And so again, on call consulting, I'd love to work with you and be always just be a text away. And you can check that out at the private school year dot com slash consulting. All right. So I said that I'm going to give you the four keys to making your week nights and weekends more restorative. And my premise for this episode is what you do is very hard work. It's exhausting work. It's emotional work. And you're not going to be able to do it well or do it for a long time if your week nights and your weekends are just more work in a different location. And I'm not trying to I'm not living in a fantasy world here.

6:09I'm not trying to say that you're never going to engage with school on week nights or weekends. What you're saying is is that if you implement these keys that you can make your week nights and weekends more restorative, which will give you more energy and enthusiasm and optimism in the morning. And it'll help you to do your job. To do it better to do it longer to feel happier to feel more fulfilled to feel more energized. So key number one. Is to decide when you're going to leave. And I think one of the biggest problems that school private school leaders face is is that you will always have one more thing to do. Always. Always, always, always. You will always have something more to do. And so if you stay at school until the work is done, you will never leave school. And so you've probably heard of Parkinson's law and that is the idea that work will always

7:13expand to fill the amount of time allotted for the work. And so if you have, when you were in college, if you had an essay that was assigned to in two weeks, that's when the paper was due. Most of us took two weeks to do the paper. And so the work will always expand to fill the amount of time for the task. So here's the problem with that. I just said a minute ago and you nodded your head that there's always more to do. And you would never, ever leave school if you didn't leave until the work was done. And so Parkinson's law, the work is going to expand and expand and expand. And in your head, you're like, well, I want to leave it five. And then you look up and it's seven p.m. And then it's happening all the time. And so I just want you to suspend your disbelief.

8:16And I'll help you figure out, I'll help you with strategies of how to actually do this. But just hear me out. You're going to decide what time you're going to leave and you're going to put it in your calendar. And that's different for everybody, okay? But let's just say five o'clock. If you're leaving earlier than that, congratulations. Like pat yourself on the back and put a star on the fridge. But let's just say for the sake of conversation, five o'clock, you're going to put that into your calendar, leave. And then it's important that you don't treat your departure time as a suggestion. It's an appointment that you're going to keep with yourself. It's essential that you keep this appointment with yourself now. You can't leave if you don't start to have a shutdown routine. And so let's say that five p.m. is when you're going to leave.

9:19You're going to at four p.m. 45, let's say. That's when you're going to start your shutdown routine. And so whether that is checking email one last time, marking it as on red, looking at tomorrow's calendar, maybe your person who does your index card before you leave more on that in a minute. But here's the thing. Open a complicated, stressful parent email at four 47. And you've decided you're going to leave at five. First of all, that's going to feel urgent. And it's going to feel like you can't leave until you do that. And I get it. Sometimes you feel better if you can just respond to that email. But then later in the evening, you're also going to be looking at the parents come back from that email. Sometimes they feel urgent, but it could wait until the morning for you to respond to that. And so it's about timing. That's why it's not always the best thing to look at your email as part of your shutdown

10:21ritual. Sometimes it's better to check email 30 minutes before you're going to leave so that you've built in some extra time to respond to an email if you have to. And so this shutdown ritual, whatever it is, you're getting your bag together, you're getting your top-aware container out of the fridge, you're getting your bag squared away, whatever your shutdown ritual is. It's sort of like your nighttime routine. If you know you want to go to bed at 11 o'clock and you know that it takes you 20 minutes to do all the things that you're going to do, then you have to start that at 10.40 p.m. if you're going to go to bed at 11 o'clock. So we start our shutdown ritual. And I want to just remind you about the point of diminishing returns. Staying later does not automatically mean you're accomplishing more.

11:24We all have a point in the day where we hit the wall. And our productivity and how much we're going to get accomplished. Let's say if you decide to stay a half an hour later and you're going to leave at 5.30 to 5.30 minutes, not all 30 minute blocks are created equal. If you compare that to the 8 a.m. to 8.30 a.m. block, it's not even close. And so my point is that your brain, we're at the point of diminishing returns at that time of day anyways. And so staying later doesn't mean that you're getting more done. So one thing to try and that is before you begin your next school day, you know whenever you're listening to this, many of you listen on the weekend, before you begin your next school day, today I'm going to leave at blank. You're going to say that to yourself. Today I'm going to leave at blank and you're going to put it in your calendar. And then you're going to protect that time. You're going to treat it like it's a meeting with your school's biggest donor or your

12:29school's most prickly parent or with your board chair or with it's a doctor's appointment that you know, if you reschedule, it's going to take seven months to get back on the schedule. You're going to treat it with that kind of respect. And even if, even if three out of five days you're successful, okay. Three out of five days is 60% of your week. On your grading scale, 60% is probably a D minus. For some of you at my P and F. But if three out of five days, you left at the time you said you were going to leave, it's going to change your life. So I'm not saying you have to be perfect. I'm not saying you have to do this every day. I'm just encouraging you to start. And I want to do a quick sidebar before I give you key number two. And that is that a way to create more margin during your day so that you're not so exhausted

13:29at the end of the day when you do leave for that weeknight that we want to be more restorative or for that Friday afternoon to go into that weekend that we want to be more restorative. You need margin. And so in the show notes, I'm going to link episode seven, the four productivity hacks for busy private school leaders. I mentioned the index card. I know many of you use it. Episode seven is where you can learn about it. And I'll link that in the show notes private school leader calm slash episode two, zero, three, or you can just go to episode seven on wherever you're listening Apple Spotify wherever. And that will give you the four productivity hacks that can create margin in your day to make you feel less exhausted at the end of the day. All right. So key number one was to decide when you're going to leave for the day. Key number two is to be aware of the electronic leash.

14:35Key number two be where the electronic leash. But 25 years ago, 20 years ago, when a private school leader left the building, there was a natural geographic barrier between working home. I mean, you know, someone could still call a landline, you know, 25 years ago, we did have cell phones, but they were mostly for just phone calls. My point that I'm trying to make is that it used to be that there was a barrier between you and school. We know that our smart funds have created a portal instead of a barrier because your entire school is in your pocket. Your entire school is in your pocket. Your Google Docs, your calendar, your emails, budget.

15:39There's so much stuff. Your school is in your pocket. And our cell phones, we use them all the time. They've become an extension of our hand, our arm. I'm raising my hand. It's true for me. I'm not saying they're a bad thing. It's a modern technological miracle that we have smartphones. But most of the time our smartphone is not doing us any favors when it comes to having restorative weeknight or weekend because every time your phone buzzes or dings or there's a notification, it's kind of like saying, hey, come here. Come back to work for just a minute. Just throw on your clothes that you had on today, right? Just hop in your car. Just come back for just a minute or two minutes.

16:41But it's not even that much friction. If we had to get in our car and get dressed again and go back to school, we probably wouldn't do it. And because it's so easy, we engage with our entire school that's in our pocket. And okay, the problem isn't necessarily the amount of time that you spend checking your phone. Sometimes it's the amount of time that it takes to reengage with your evening, with your family, with your spouse or partner, with your kids, with your making dinner, with fill in the blank. So there's that interruption of the thing or the buzz that is tapping you on the shoulder and saying, hey, just come back to work for a minute, just a minute. So how do we, how do we fix this? How do we make this better? Okay.

17:41I said this before, I will say it a million times again in the future. I beg you to please turn off your school email notifications. I beg you to turn off all notifications except for text or a phone call. Because every time someone posts a photo of their dessert on Instagram, you don't need to know about it. You really don't. Every time there's breaking news, you don't need to know about it. But if your kid needs a ride because their ride fell through after soccer practice and you have a 14 year old, then yeah, you need to know about that. They're going to text you. So turning off all email notifications is a place to start. If you've decided that on an evening, you're going to try not to think about school, but you have your email notifications turned on, you're going to be thinking about school all evening. You're letting your phone decide for you.

18:45You need, I want you to decide when you work, when you access school. Don't let your phone decide for you. Now, you've heard me say this before, some of you are skeptical. I can't turn off email notifications. You don't understand. That's how teachers call off. Well, then what I would say is to change the way that you have teachers call off. Because if there's something that happens, this is what I hear from coaching clients. If there's something that happens, I need to know about it and I'm not going to know if I don't have, if I'm not checking email all evening, okay, that's a problem. You need to make sure that in your organization, that the way that things are set up is not through email and that it's through a text or a phone call. If it's Wednesday evening and you're at home and you're sitting there on the couch with your partner, your spouse, your kid, whoever, if someone really, really needs to get in touch

19:50with you, if it's something urgent, if it's an emergency with the campus, with the facility, with God forbid, with one of the students or the teachers, someone is going to call you or someone is going to text you, they are not going to email you. Now, maybe on Sunday evening, you genuinely need to monitor the time. All right, well then what I'm encouraging you to do is to say, okay, I'm going to check school email from 6.30 to 7.15, 45 minutes. I don't want all that stuff waiting for me. Well, then get your laptop out. Don't do it on your phone. Go to a designated workspace, the less comfortable, the chair, the better, and set a timer. Timers are great. We use them with the students when we were in the classroom. Go through your email, start at 6.30 and 1.17.15 hits that timer goes off and you close

20:52your laptop. The problem is that with that electronic leash, is that we're dipping in and out of our email inbox all evening and all weekend and we don't really get an evening or a weekend. And so our boundaries are written lightly in pencil and I want you to write them in Sharpie. And one way to do that is to turn off notifications to stay out of your email inbox because you can still go and look at your email inbox. You've heard me talk about asking you when your home screen lights up, how many swipes does you have to go to get to your icon for your email inbox? Most people the answer is zero or one. You move that icon to swipes. What my coaching clients tell me is that in less than two weeks, they're checking at 80% less often. And then you have a little bit of friction between you and your school on your smartphone and it will change your week nights and your weekends.

21:54Okay, that brings us to key number three, schedule your energizers, schedule your energizers. What are the things that make you feel restored or energized or more hopeful or more happy or more fulfilled or more joyful? It's one thing the first step, leave it a decent time. Second step, don't be using the portal on our electronic leash to engage with school in and out all evening long. But then the third thing is, okay, well, what are we going to do on the week nights and weekends and you're like, Mark, you're joking, right? Like I've got two kids that are ones between ones, a teen and they're involved in every sport, every activity, the spring musical and everything else. And I'm a professional Uber driver. Okay, that's a season in life.

22:55Not everyone listening is in that same season. And I would say that if you're in that season, then what are you doing in between those times? Are you waiting at practice? And if so, are you socializing with people that you really don't want to be talking to? And that if you went and sat in your car, you could read a book or you could take a walk around the walking path at the park where the practice is taking place. I'm just trying to get you to think about how with your current schedule, with your current responsibilities to your kids, your spouse, your church, whatever, how you could inject energizers into that. And so, what are those things? What are your energizers? Is it dinner with your spouse? Is it going for a walk? Maybe it's like working in your yard or doing something with like the flowers in your yard for a lot of people it's reading. For some people it is going to your kids practice or to your kids game. For some people it's church on Wednesday night or maybe it's coffee with a friend on a Saturday

23:59morning or maybe, and you're going to have to suspend your disbelief for this one. Maybe it's reviving something like a hobby that you haven't done in years. And so, when I ask you to finish this sentence, it's been so long since I blank or I really wish I had more time to blank, the thing that comes to mind is something usually that brings you joy and makes you feel restored. And I'm not saying you can do all of those things all the time every weeknight, every weekend, whatever, but I am saying that you can take a step in that direction. And I know you have a busy calendar. Good intentions never survive a busy calendar. Good intentions never survive a busy calendar. And so, just like we schedule things and we claim white space on our calendars during the school day and the school week, we could claim a little pocket of time, because 30

25:02minutes of you doing something you really want to do on a weekend goes a really long way. It's a disproportionate amount of restoration and joy and fulfillment because you're putting a stake in the ground and saying, you matter and you're saying that your identity is not completely tied up in the school. Too many private school leaders are sacrificing their identity on the altar of their schools, because there's a part of you that's a painter, an artist, a runner, a reader, a baker, a chef. There's part of you that's a photographer or someone who does yoga. There's a part of you that is a bicyclist. There's a part of you and part of your identity that because of you being a private school leader that you haven't done in a while and if you did it, it would bring you joy. And I'm not saying that it's going to miraculously happen, but I am saying that the more intentional

26:04that you are and start small, one 30 minutes on a weekend, you're worth that. You're worth way more than that, but that's a possible place to start. It's a reasonable place to start. And then the last thing I want to say under key number three is we have to try and avoid making our entire weekend about recovering from the exhaustion of the week. And I understand, like I always used to say there's no kind of tired like private school Friday afternoon tired. Friday afternoon private school tired is its own thing where we just kind of collapse. But if we spend Saturday, and I know we can't because you know Saturday is when we get our life together and we do laundry and try and do meal prep and run some errands and do all the things that we didn't do during the week because we didn't have time.

27:04But if what we're doing is crawling, doing an army crawl across broken glass every Friday afternoon just to get to the finish line and then spend the next two days trying to become a functional human again. Or something extremely wrong with this picture. And so I'm going to mention the sidebar again. It starts with margin at work so that you aren't so exhausted at the end of the day or on Friday afternoon because you're going to create margin and then you're going to fill that margin at school with doing some joyful things like going and hanging out with interesting with happy kids doing interesting things. But right now that sounds like a fantasy fairy tale. But a way to get there is episode seven, the four productivity hacks for busy private school leaders. All right, key number one, decide when you're going to leave for the day. Key number two, be where the electronic leash.

28:06Key number three, schedule your energizers and key number four is to create a Sunday shutdown routine. So for many of us as private school leaders, Sunday isn't really a day off. It's more like a giant countdown clock to going to bed and trying to fall asleep to get up and do this all over again. You know, maybe Sunday morning feels pretty good. But by Sunday afternoon, school starts creeping back into your mind and by Sunday evening, you might as well be like sitting at your desk or sitting in your first meeting on Monday morning, right? I want you to think about this and then I'll give you a strategy. Don't let Monday start on Sunday. Don't let Monday start on Sunday. Now the answer is not to pretend that Monday isn't coming. I think hear me out. Listen, lean in here.

29:07I think the answer is to give Monday a designated spot and keep it there. Okay. So we I'm telling you, don't let Monday start on Sunday. How are we going to do that? We're going to give Monday a designated place and keep it there. Now we're actually going to give Monday a designated place on Sunday evening. And I know that I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth because I said, don't let Monday start on Sunday. Monday is probably going to start on Sunday a little bit, but if we can give it a specific time. So let's say it's 30 minutes. Maybe it's after dinner on Sunday, but early evening, we're not getting close to bedtime. 30 minutes. Take your laptop, go to your designated workspace, set a timer, look at Monday's calendar, dip into your email. What are my priorities? No surprises. Okay. Beeper goes off. You stop.

30:07You close your laptop. That 30 minutes was you giving space for Monday. And if you try this, I think what you're going to find is that putting Monday in that bucket, that you're going to feel better about Monday morning and you're also going to be able to fall asleep better on Sunday evening. I did a whole episode on how to overcome the Sunday's carries. I'll link that in the show notes as well at the private school leader dot com slash episode two, zero, three. But if you have a bucket that's your Sunday bucket, but it's only 30 minutes long, that's your excuse me, that's your Monday bucket and it's only 30 minutes long on Sunday after dinner time, you can kind of keep Monday on Monday. And then the last thing that's helpful is to just get Monday out of your head and onto paper. And this is true like any time bearing today.

31:08If it's a Sunday morning at church, this happens to me all the time. I have more notes like I take, we take turns speaking at my church. And so I have like notes on paper that are for speaking. Well, in my Bible case, like there are a lot of of those notes for speaking. If you flip it over, it's like a brain dump about stuff that is just occupying my brain on Sunday morning when I'm trying to pay attention at church. And so my point is, is that if at some point on Sunday, Monday shows up, just do a brain dump onto a piece of paper and then pull out that piece of paper during your designated 30 minutes on Sunday evening. Just try this, just try it. I know a lot of you, a lot of my coaching clients deal with this Sunday being a countdown. And so there's just a couple of things here that I've encouraged you to try so that Monday doesn't start on Sunday, that you give it a designated time.

32:10And if you need to get Monday out of your head and onto paper, just do a brain dump and then pull that piece of paper out when you have your 30 minutes scheduled. So the big takeaways from today's episode, I'm just trying to be really, really practical. I want your weeknights and weekends to be more restorative so that you can do this hard emotional work every day without being a tiny palisodist at the end of the day. And especially on Friday afternoon. And so the four keys to having more restorative weeknights and weekends, key number one, decide when you're going to leave. Key number two, beware the electronic leash. Number three, schedule your energizers and number four, create a Sunday night shutdown routine. And your call to action for today's episode is to just take one of these keys and apply it this week. And a second call to action, I don't usually give two. But if you're feeling like this is hopeless, why would I even start with the weeknights and weekends because my day is such a hot mess every week day, then listen to episode

33:13seven. That's your call to action. And then a quick reminder, five strategies to reduce teacher drama at your school. Go to the private school year dot com slash drama. And if you would like for me to be just a text away to help you talk through a very sticky difficult situation. Uncall consulting. You can find out more about that at the private school year dot com slash consulting. So if you get value from the podcast, please share the link to the podcast with another leader in your life or a rising leader at your school. And I've been your host, Mark Minkus. I just want to say how much I appreciate you and all the hard work you do for the lucky kids and teachers at your school. Thank you for taking some of that precious time to join me here today. And I'll see you next time right here on the private school year podcast. And until then, always remember to serve first, lead second, and make a difference.