Managing Workload and Wellbeing

Double booked at 11:00 AM.  Triple booked at 3:00 PM.  A quick glance of an International School Head’s calendar highlights the heavy workload that the role demands. Pair the volume of work with the everpresent reach of technology and the work can easily dominate your life if unchecked. As leaders, we value protecting our staff members’ time and encourage staff to have a meaningful and healthy life outside of work because we recognize that burnout and low job satisfaction can occur when someone’s life is way out of balance. The same holds true for us, yet we often fail to manage our own workload in a healthy way, sometimes neglecting our personal life.

For years, we have heard that the antidote to burnout is developing a healthy work life balance.  Balance implies that you are dedicating equal time to your personal life as you are to your professional life.  Achieving this balance requires setting clear parameters that designate when you are working and when you are not.  Advocates of this approach set firm boundaries within their daily or weekly schedule, such as not sending work emails on the weekend or walking out the door of school at a certain time each day. The catch is that once you establish parameters for yourself, you must have the discipline to follow them consistently. Do you take a work phone call while driving your daughter to her soccer game on the weekend? Do you walk away from work at 5:00 PM even if you are not finished preparing for the upcoming board meeting?  Those who are successful in achieving work life balance maintain a strong commitment to their time boundaries and plan ahead.

If you are seeking a more flexible approach, work life integration may be worth consideration. In this model, you do not attempt to fully separate your personal and professional lives to achieve balance each day or week. Instead, you adopt the mindset that both aspects of your life are integrated, and therefore, the time and attention you give to each area of your life shifts flexibly back and forth or overlaps as needed. For me, this approach fits my lifestyle and leadership styles better. Have I stepped on a hotel room balcony to get away from my family to participate in an online recruiting interview while on vacation? Yes, I have.  Have I taken a call from my daughter at university during normal work hours? Yes, I have. While I do not calculate out the minutes I spend on work versus the minutes I spend on my personal life each week, I attempt to dedicate the right amount of time to all parts of my life, but it is usually not evenly distributed if reviewed over a week or even a month. The danger to this approach is that you could overemphasize one aspect of your life and neglect the other, without necessarily noticing. Work life integration requires you to periodically reflect on how you are allocating your time and whether you are achieving your personal and professional goals with your approach.

Regardless of your approach to managing your workload, recruiting others to help you is also beneficial. Having an assistant understand and monitor your calendar can help protect your time. Trusting and delegating tasks to your senior leadership team also reduces your workload. Additionally, if you have a spouse or partner, they may be able to pick up tasks within your personal life. I may not know where my dog gets groomed, but I appreciate my husband taking care of it without me having to block out time for it.  By recruiting help for some of the more mundane tasks in your personal life, you can prioritize your personal time for more meaningful interactions.  

As we are mid-way through the school year, it is a good time to pause and reflect on how effectively you are managing your workload. If you find yourself overemphasizing one aspect of your life, make the needed changes to ensure that you are healthy, productive, and regularly finding moments of joy in both your professional and personal life.

Read more about The Complexities of Head of School Leadership, Shaping Lives and Building Legacy, The 200 Percent Dilemma, The Headship Paradox, Leadership at the Intersection of Complexity and Vision, and The Joys of Leading a School.