In many ways, September feels like the REAL new year. The habits and routines we establish now can often influence how successful we feel throughout the school year. In this episode, Devon & Leah share three practices that have made a big difference for them, why they work, and how you can customize them to work for you.
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3 Ways to Set Yourself Up for Success this School Year
1: Develop a Morning Routine
We both have developed morning routines over the last few years. Rather than sleeping until the last minute and rushing around to get ready, we now wake up a little earlier to start our day with a routine of practices we enjoy.
We include things like meditation, journalling, movement and essential oils. Two books that helped us establish our routines are The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod and Atomic Habits by James Clear.
2: Set up a Scheduling System
We both feel more successful when we’ve got an organized schedule. We are big fans of the beautiful planners from passionplanner.com and their free printables as well. Use code DEVONnLEAH10 to save on your passion planner. For some tasks, we prefer digital scheduling for efficiently taking bookings. Calendly is our favourite scheduling tool for these situations. Read more here about how we use Calendly to schedule meetings or parent-teacher conferences.
3: Establish Your Boundaries
Teaching is a demanding field and there is ALWAYS more we could do. Learning to establish (and stick to) boundaries has been key to our success as teachers. We really only learned this through facing exhaustion and near burnout, but we hope you will establish your boundaries before you get to that point.
One boundary to consider include your ideal working hours: What’s a good work day schedule for you that allows you to be productive at school but also have time for family and friends?
Another boundary to consider is when you’ll be communicating with colleagues, administration and families. We suggest turning off email notifications on your phone and having your work email separated from your personal email, so you can set boundaries around returning messages.
We talked a lot about boundaries in our book club this summer when we read Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes. It’s a great book with much wisdom on this topic and others!
In our episode with Spencer Cotter, she shares so much wisdom around boundaries for teachers. Listen to it here!
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