Creating Time – What Might We Be Doing That Is Holding Us Back?

Have you ever wondered why, on a school day, it can sometimes take until 3.45pm to finally get around to eating your lunch?

This blog sets out an approach to help you reclaim (create) valuable time by stepping back from firefighting mode to identify the elements of your work that genuinely have the greatest impact. This can help you decide what to stop doing, creating more time and space to enhance everyone’s wellbeing.

In leadership, we all have busy days when unexpected events crop up and everything moves at a hundred miles an hour. Time can be tight on a daily basis, but it’s worth protecting some of that precious time to step back, look at the bigger picture and ask some soul-searching questions:

• What is driving such demands on our time?
• Is this demand actually helping us get to where we’re aiming for?
• Could these demands undermine our efforts to improve?
• How sustainable are they, and what impact are they having on wellbeing?
• Can we move from a firefighting approach to one that is more strategic?
• How could we use / not use any time that we reclaim?

There are many techniques for promoting the efficient use of time, ranging from blocking out slots to focus on specific tasks to overhauling meeting agendas so they focus only upon matters that genuinely require people to come together.

For the purposes of this blog, though, we’ll focus on one question in particular –

What are we spending our time on that is holding us back?

This question is designed to raise awareness of the things we do, often unconsciously, that don’t actually move us any closer to our overall aims. Over the course of a school day, week, term and year, countless activities take place that go unquestioned. Some will have been inherited but never properly examined to see whether they’re still relevant to the task at hand. All of these activities demand time and energy that might be better used elsewhere or, just as importantly, used to maintain wellbeing through a sensibly paced rhythm of work.

Some activities are regarded as traditions, often cherished by members of the school community, yet may still add little value to the school’s overall aims. Questioning the place of such activities takes genuine curiosity and, quite often, a fair amount of courage. What looks like a waste of time to one person might be the highlight of the school year to another. Leaders need to be bold but caring when exploring these areas.

To support leaders in identifying such activities, and weighing up their benefit against their aims, I recommend undertaking an Impact / Demand Mapping exercise.

Impact / Demand Mapping plots activities against two axes:

Impact – how much value or benefit something delivers towards desired objectives

Demand – how much time, cost, resource or emotional energy something requires

Why carry out an Impact / Demand Mapping exercise?

• It allows for the identification of priorities and provides clarity on what actually matters.
• It supports strategic planning, identifying high-impact opportunities worth investing in and ideas that may need rethinking.
• It helps teams decide where to invest effort and allocate resources, and what to delay or disregard.
• It enhances alignment through the creation of a shared visual framework to focus on the vision, explore opportunities as a group and encourage structured discussion.
• It can prevent teams from pursuing exciting but impractical ideas, while recognising the often unnoticed activities that deliver real value.
• It can foster improvement mindsets and a culture of professional curiosity.

How to use it effectively in a team setting

• Start with clear criteria. Before plotting anything, clarify your shared vision and targets. Then define what “impact” and “demand” mean for your team. Ensure everyone understands that this exercise is intended to support organisational effectiveness and that some of what surfaces may be uncomfortable for individuals to explore or have challenged.
• Identify daily, weekly or termly activities or events as a team and record each one as a word or short phrase on a sticky note. Create a ‘map’ on a floor or large table space, using tape for a y (vertical) axis for Impact and an x (horizontal) axis for Demand.
• Work through the activities one by one to determine where they would sit against the impact axis and where they would sit against the demand axis. Ensure this is done through open, shared and honest discussion. Place each activity on the map to reflect the decisions made. Seek evidence to back up any claims made. Be prepared for a level of disagreement and a need for compromise. A leader may have to make a final decision.
• Once all activities are plotted, seek thoughts on what people are noticing. Are there any surprises? What might be missing? Ensure all members of the team have the opportunity to contribute. Psychological safety is a key factor in such an activity.
• Identify possible opportunities to enhance organisational effectiveness, therefore supporting the school’s vision and goals.
• Run a BRAIN (Benefits, Risks, Alternatives, Intuition, Nothing) analysis for each opportunity identified and clarify potential actions.
• Explore alignment across the team to support buy-in for forthcoming changes. Develop an implementation plan for the agreed actions.
• Take action and review developments to ensure efficiencies are actually being made and that any unintended consequences are surfaced.

Summary

This process needn’t take long to complete yet could save hours of time and significant sums of money, whilst also supporting wellbeing in the long run. Can you really afford not to undertake a Demand / Impact Mapping exercise with your team? You might be able to step out of firefighting mode and even get to eat your lunch at a more reasonable time if you do!

If you’d be interested in a no obligation conversation about ways in which I can work alongside you to unlock your full potential as a leader, please get in touch anytime.