Worry Time: 1) Decide how long worry time is 2) Set a time in the day for your worrying 3) At the allotted time, sit down & worry 4) When your time is up, walk away 5) Any further worries that arise tell yourself “I’ll worry about that in Worry Time.” 6) Repeat each day

Your To Do list is showing you half the picture As a school senior leader staring at your To Do list, everything you haven't finished stares back at you. But what about what you did finish? The safeguarding issue you handled. The parent complaint you resolved. The 117 emails you answered. The impromptu crisis you managed. When you're drowning in tasks, you only see what's left, not what you've done. There’s no sense of perspective. You can't see you're making progress. You just see the unmanageable workload stretching ahead. So how about an experiment? This week, keep a 'Ta-Da' list alongside your To Do list. Every time you finish something, add it to your Ta-Da list. At the end of the week, look at both lists. What do you notice? It’s not just how it is, and it’s not just how you are. You really can do it differently. Get in touch if you're ready to work in a way that's not at your own expense.

I love a picnic, and most of all I love tomato soup and a cheese sandwich for a picnic. My mum used to make it when we were kids🍅🍅🍅. What do you have in your picnic?

An email arrives. As a school leader it’s important to you to be efficient, so you reply immediately. You've just trained the sender to expect an instant response. The immediacy of emails drives us to expect quick replies. But most emails don't need one. Especially when the urgency is driven by someone else's late or kneejerk request. The unmanageable number of urgent emails - that's not on you. But replying instantly to everything – that is on you. Here's an experiment to dial down the urgency: Set up an auto-response: 'I check emails at set times. You'll hear from me within X hours.' 'I’m teaching all day, please expect a delayed response.' If something genuinely needs acknowledgement, send a holding email: 'I'm on it. Full response by Friday.' You're training people to expect realistic response times, not instant ones. Be intentional about how you manage your emails. Try it for two weeks and see what happens.

In case you haven't met me yet, I'm Vanessa. I work with school senior leaders to help them manage an unmanageable workload so that they can do more than survive in work and life. Is it time to do more than survive?

As a school leader, if a colleague said they hadn't eaten all day, you'd tell them to go and have lunch. If a member of staff said they hadn't stopped since 7am, you'd tell them to take five minutes. You'd give them permission without hesitating. But you won't give yourself that same permission. Ten minutes for lunch. A 90-second breather between meetings. A door closed for a minute of quiet. The permission has to come from you. Not when the workload eases, not next term...now. Recuperating is an essential part of working hard. Give yourself permission - you'd do it for anyone else. If you want to talk about what working differently could look like, get in touch.

As a school senior leader, how many emails are you copied into a day? There’s a good chance it feels like it’s keeping you in the loop, keeping you in control. But in reality, it’s making your email impossible to manage. How many of these emails do you really need to see? How many of them are a passive-aggressive way of telling the recipient that “the Deputy Head knows you’ve been sent this”? How about an experiment in not being copied in? Could you ask colleagues not to copy you in? Explain that you won’t be responding to anything that you’re cc-d into. And then don’t respond! What happens? It's not irreversible. What have you got to lose?

How did it get so late so soon? Gosh, where's the day gone? The week? The half term? The term? How is the end of January already? Time is flying partly because of the pace you're working at. Is this pace sustainable?

As a school senior leader, your laptop is in front of you a lot of the time. Which means so are your email notifications. And with each notification, your body reacts. You look. It can wait. But now you've lost your train of thought. Or you don’t look and it starts niggling away at you. What do they want now? Turn off your email notifications. Take back control. CHOOSE when to check your Inbox. Be intentional about how you manage your emails. What arrives in your Inbox, that’s not on you. How you deal with it when it gets there, that is on you. Experiment with it for a couple of weeks. See what you notice.

As a Deputy Head, your days are packed with back-to-back meetings, lessons, duties, covering someone else’s duties… That’s just how it is. There’s no space for the things that come up - and wow, do they come up. You don’t know WHAT'S going to come up, but you know something will. And when it does, this has a domino rally effect on rest of the day and week, pushing back one thing after another. But what if this isn’t just how it is? What if you could take back some control? Putting in some buffer time to absorb whatever it is that comes up puts a stop to the domino rally. Then you can spend less time and energy re-jigging your days, less time worrying about where you’re going to move that thing to, and spend more time doing what you’d planned to do in the first place.

Does it feel like you're hanging on by your fingernails? As a Deputy Head, the pace of your day can feel relentless. No pause or breathing space. Just keeping going until you stop…or drop. How about weaving yourself a safety rope instead? Short breaks in the day help you take a breath, recharge, and keep yourself healthy so you can keep doing all the good that you're doing. You don't need to practice working hard, you’re already really good at that. But perhaps it might help to practice resting and recovering? You could start small: A 90-second breather. A 10-minute lunch. A meeting cut short by 5 minutes so you can get a drink or go to the loo. What one small thing could you do every day? If you want to talk more about working differently, get in touch.

Leading a school is made harder by your unmanageable Inbox. In your position as Deputy Head, what strategies could you put in place to reduce email traffic? Limiting access to whole school email lists? Encouraging staff to email the person directly rather than cc-ing their Line Manager? Weekly newsletter instead of individual emails? And is email always the best method? Could it be a briefing instead? A notice board update? A phone call? A face-to-face conversation? What strategies is your school using to reduce email traffic? And what's actually working?

Hi, I'm Vanessa Wears, and I work with school senior leaders to help them manage an unmanageable workload so that they can do more than survive in work and life. What would doing more than surviving look like for you? If it’s time for you and your team to do more than survive, get in touch.

As a school senior leader, it might feel like responding to emails is your main job. It's not. Checking your emails feels like it keeps you in control, so you know what’s going on, what’s waiting for you. But relentless checking fuels more checking, leaving your brain scattered, heightening your stress levels. To get control over your Inbox requires intentional action. It’s not going to happen by accident. Staff won’t stop emailing. Parents won’t stop emailing. The rest of SLT won’t stop emailing. Putting some structure around your emails contains the intrusion on your time and your focus, freeing up your time and energy for other tasks. Here’s an experiment to change how you manage your Inbox: - Set some specific email times – try different times, see what works for you - Deal with whatever’s in there if you’ve time - If you don’t have time, decide when you'll deal with it This will feel uncomfortable. Wrong even. That’s OK; doing things differently usually does. Will it be any more uncomfortable than how it is now?

A sunflower is growing from the bits the birds drop...weird to see it flowering in October. One of the things I love about my garden is the constant movement, birds, needs, insects, flowers blowing in the breeze. Started my autumn plant moves today...not all the moves I want to make, just a couple. I'm practicing doing part of a task and then leaving it. Dialling down the urgency to "Get it finished".

My favourite tree is the cherry blossom. I’ve loved them ever since I "first" saw them when I lived in Japan. Strangely I don’t have any memories of seeing a cherry blossom before Japan, but that can’t possibly be true! I just mustn’t have noticed them. Now I see them everywhere, even if they don’t have flowers on. It’s amazing what we see, once we’ve really seen it.

School senior leaders often speak to themselves as though they're their own really harsh boss. They don't speak to or treat anyone else that way. Senior leaders I work with start to speak to themselves differently. They stop being so hard on themselves. The internal voice that says "you should be doing more" gets quieter. They start valuing what they do, not just what's left on the list. They learn to be in charge of themselves and their day, rather than being controlled by themselves and their day. They're kinder to themselves. Not softer or less driven. But kinder. They still care deeply about their school and workreally hard. But they stop treating themselves like the harshest of bosses. That shift changes things; not just at work, but at home. In how they feel about themselves. If this resonates, get in touch. I help school senior leaders manage an unmanageable workload so that they can do more than survive in work and life.