You’ve been telling yourself for weeks that you’ll get to the strategic work this week. The plan for next term, the conversation about middle leadership, the actual review of how the new behaviour policy is landing. You haven’t.
What you’ve done instead is everything that walked through your door, the fires, the emails marked urgent, the thirty conversations that needed five minutes “just quickly.” By 4pm, you’re exhausted!
Here’s the part I keep seeing in the principals I work with. They want to do the strategic work. The problem is the reactive work feels like leadership in the moment, and the strategic work feels like indulgence. So they keep choosing the version that feels productive, even though the other one is what actually moves the school.
You’re not failing at time management. You’re caught in a job designed to reward the visible work and quietly bump the work that takes weeks to show.
So this week, instead of trying to find more time, name one piece of strategic work you’ve been bumping. Then ask yourself an honest question: “what am I telling myself this can wait for, and is that actually true.” Sit with the answer for a minute before you keep moving.
✨ Always in your corner,
Aimee