How to Leave Work at 3:30 Every Day as an Elementary Teacher

Take my Free Quiz: How Can YOU Be More Productive During Your Prep?

Are you wondering how to leave work at 3:30 every day as an elementary teacher?? Seriously - what are the best time management secrets for getting your planning done at school and leaving work on time??

Maybe you're ready to stop being the last car in the parking lot, or the last teacher to shut down her computer for the day.

If you're ready to stop feeling like there's absolutely no way to get all of your prep tasks done, you're not alone. This has become a serious norm in the teaching profession.

Let's talk about 4 essential areas that will allow you to leave work at a decent hour, feeling like you made strides toward getting your prep tasks done.

The Best-Kept Time Management Secrets for Elementary Teachers: The Pillars of Productivity

There are 4 secrets to effective teacher time management. I refer to them as the pillars of productivity. I cover each of these in depth inside my teacher productivity program, Teacher Time University. Today I'm going to share key overviews of how these categories of teacher productivity can help you. The pillars are:

• Planning
• Scheduling
• Mindset
• Systems

Getting clear on these four areas makes all the difference in being able to shut your teacher brain off at the end of the workday.

Teacher Productivity Secret #1: Planning Strategy

Lesson planning used to take me FOREVER. There are several ways to maximize your lesson planning efficiency, but perhaps the most important is starting early in the week.

I literally used to dread lesson planning, so I always put it off. But here's the thing: lesson planning really needs to be the first step in getting prepared for the following week. If you don't have a plan, you don't know what to prep.

In short, waiting to lesson plan perpetuates the cycle of teacher overwhelm. It causes you to constantly playing catch up every day and not getting ahead.

If you're waiting to lesson plan until later in the week or the weekend, I'm going to challenge you right now to find time earlier on.

Teacher Productivity Secret #2: Schedule Your Tasks

Did you know you need a schedule for your prep tasks?? Scheduling out when I would complete each prep task was the aha moment I needed to stay on top of allllll of those important teacher to-dos.

Scheduling what prep tasks you'll get done when will allow you to maximize your planning time. You won't waste any time figuring out what task on your enormous to-do list that you should be working on.

Instead, that to-do list will be broken down into manageable chunks throughout the week and planned out.

You can leave work at the end of the school day, feeling confident that you've scheduled time to work on all of your to-dos!

Teacher Productivity Secret #3: Shift Your Mindset

Wait, so .. mindset affects teacher productivity? Yep! It sure does.

We cover all of the components of mindset for productivity inside TTU, but one of the most important mindset shifts you can make to help yourself leave work at a decent hour every day is that it's ok to set boundaries around you teacher time.

Teacher Productivity Secret #4: Set Up Classroom Systems

Systems truly simplify prep tasks. The main thing taught inside Teacher Time University is to create workflows for your major prep tasks. In other words, the tasks you repeat over and over again.

Workflows are just the steps you follow to complete a task.

It sounds silly to identify these at first, but here's why it's important:

Using workflows for your teacher tasks takes the thought out of it. Ultimately, it makes those tasks feel more like a habit, therefore taking less brain power so you can maximize your productivity.

Teacher Time Management Takeaways

Ok so I know there was a lot of info in this blog post - but these are seriously game-changing tricks. These are the 4 areas that make all the difference in being able to leave work at the time you choose every day.