Each year I provide several days of time management training for school districts and state education associations.  In providing inservice training for a school district this week, I was once again struck by how difficult it is for our educators.  Every business has its unique challenges as well as struggles with managing time and information.  However in education, especially with teachers, there is so little “discretionary” time. 

The very nature of their work demands that they are responsive to students and parents.  They spend their days controlling distractions in the form of their students.  On their “planning” periods, they return phone calls and email messages from parent. 

Therefore “planning” time, which is often only a 25-minute block during the day, is spent on everything but planning.  Teachers either have to stay late or take work home.   When else can they write their lesson plans for the coming week, grade papers, prepare weekly progress reports, and modify daily lessons to meet the needs of diverse levels of learning?

With such a minimal amount of time that they have available to work on projects, it is imperative that they have the strongest time management skills and organized classrooms.  The basic ingredients needed are systems for:

• Organizing and paper (that’s not going away in our schools)
• Organizing and managing email (ever increasing)
• Efficiently dealing with telephone calls and drop-in visitors
• Filing (finding source information quickly, both electronic and paper)

I was a teacher myself for several years and I see it becoming an increasing difficult field in which to remain.  Yet we want the very best for our students.  Therefore we need great teachers, and we need to equip them with the best skills.  I’m very pleased to be a part of this endeavor with our time management seminars.