Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Are you feeling swamped by the demands of being a principal? From juggling emails, calls, and decisions to boosting test scores and wading through endless paperwork, the pressure is real.
But imagine a scenario where you no longer feel this overwhelming stress. Picture yourself as a more resilient leader, concentrating on enhancing your school rather than merely coping with the daily tasks that currently consume your time.
I‘m Barb Flowers. Drawing upon my eight-year experience as an elementary principal, with a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and certification as a life coach, Along the way, I've mentored and coached school leaders, guiding them to change their mindset, set boundaries and focus on their own well-being while navigating their roles.
Each episode offers practical insights on time management, communication, overcoming overwhelm, boosting confidence, and fostering a positive mindset. We'll also discuss topics like working with stakeholders, implementing new initiatives, and managing discipline. Let's set boundaries, focus on well-being, and reignite your passion for being a principal. Welcome to "The Principal's Handbook."
I firmly believe that to be an impactful educator, you must first become a confident and well-rounded individual. Join us in this journey to empower and enhance your confidence as a school leader.
# Stop Letting Other People’s Urgency Run Your Day
Today’s focus is simple: stop letting everyone else’s urgency run your day.
I’m sure, as a principal, you’ve walked into school with a clear plan for all the things you wanted to get done—and then none of it happened because urgency took over.
Maybe you planned to get into classrooms. You had meetings scheduled. You had a list of things you wanted to accomplish.
Then, first thing in the morning, there’s a parent waiting in the office. After that, a bus incident comes in. Teachers need you. Students have discipline issues. You get an email. The phone rings.
You’re constantly needed, and people keep asking, “Do you have a minute?”
And you really don’t.
But suddenly, your entire plan for the day is gone.
By the end of the day, you leave exhausted. You’ve been busy all day, but you didn’t get anything done that you had planned to do.
More importantly, you didn’t get anything proactive done.
This happens to principals all the time because we let other people’s urgency determine our priorities.
Someone needs something from us, and because it feels urgent to them, we immediately make it urgent to us.
But the problem is, everything cannot be urgent.
When I was a new principal, I learned this pretty quickly. I realized that everybody felt like everything was urgent.
The secretary.
The recess staff.
Teachers.
And from their perspective, it probably did feel urgent. They were thinking about the one situation happening right in front of them.
But as a principal, you have to think about the bigger picture.
You know your schedule. You know what else is happening in the building. You know what else needs your attention.
You cannot let everybody else’s urgency run your day.
Now, I want to be clear. That doesn’t mean we don’t support people.
I think people sometimes mistake urgency—and being immediately available for that urgency—for support.
It’s really important that we support teachers and all of the staff who work with kids. If they need something, we want to be there for them.
But that doesn’t mean we have to be there for them that exact second.
We don’t have to be available 24/7.
Today, I want to give you a very simple way to determine what is actually urgent.
I want you to think about your work in three categories, like a traffic light.
Red.
Yellow.
Green.
We’re going to talk about what is actually urgent, what is important but can wait, and what work actually moves your school forward.
This framework comes from my four-week program, From Reactive to Proactive. I’ll link that program in the show notes if you’re interested in going deeper.
Let’s start with red.
## Red: True Urgency
Red is true urgency.
These are the things that should interrupt your day.
My definition of a red issue is this:
If I don’t handle this right now, someone could get hurt, the day could break down, or there could be a serious legal or compliance risk.
This is a true emergency.
A student or staff safety issue is red.
A serious fight or major behavior incident is red.
A medical emergency is red.
An ambulance coming to the school is red.
An escalated parent standing in the office who you are genuinely concerned could create a safety issue is red.
A gap in supervision is red. If you don’t have someone to watch a class or supervise students outside at recess, you need to handle that immediately.
A serious legal or compliance issue can also be red.
These are all situations where you have to stop what you’re doing and respond.
But here’s what I want you to notice:
There probably aren’t as many true red issues in your day as you think.
I can think of plenty of red issues that happened throughout my years as a principal, but they didn’t all happen in one day.
Most of the things interrupting principals are not actually red.
They’re yellow.
## Yellow: Important, But Not an Interruption
Yellow work is important, but it doesn’t necessarily require an immediate interruption.
These are still things you need to handle, but you might not need to handle them right now.
This is where most principals get tripped up.
Yellow feels urgent.
Someone else may feel like it’s urgent.
They might even tell you it’s urgent.
But it doesn’t actually require you to stop what you’re doing.
Yellow means:
This needs my attention, but I can schedule it intentionally.
Most student discipline is yellow.
Most student discipline needs to be handled within the school day, but it doesn’t necessarily need to stop what you’re doing.
Take a bus issue, for example.
You want to handle it, but you might not need to handle it immediately.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called out to a bus to pull a student off because something was supposedly happening.
I never minded going if I was available, but so often, by the time I got there, the situation wasn’t nearly as serious as it had sounded.
So most discipline can be yellow.
A parent email can be yellow.
We often feel like we need to answer right away, especially if the parent is upset or wants an answer immediately.
But if you set the precedent that you respond to everything right away, that becomes the expectation.
Most upset parents are yellow.
That could be an email, a phone call, or even a parent who comes into the school demanding to meet with you.
If you’re available to hear their concern, great.
But if you’re not, your secretary can let them know that they need to schedule a meeting with you.
I’ll never forget having a parent tell my secretary that if I didn’t call back immediately, they were going to call the Ohio Department of Education.
And I said, “Okay, that’s fine. It takes forever to get through to them anyway.”
What were they going to do about me not responding to the parent within the 10 minutes they wanted?
I did need to respond to the parent.
But I was handling another situation, and I knew I would call when I was done.
The parent thought it was urgent.
My secretary was worried because of the comment the parent made.
But I knew I could finish handling the situation in front of me and then call the parent back.
A teacher concern can also be yellow.
Sometimes teachers bring concerns that truly are emergencies.
But sometimes, they’re simply things the teacher wants to get off their plate.
And I completely understand that.
But it still might not be something you need to stop what you’re doing to handle.
Staff conflict can be yellow too.
If two staff members are upset with each other and you need to talk with them, you can probably schedule that conversation.
Now, I have seen a situation when I was an assistant principal where two teachers were actually yelling at each other in the hallway.
The principal had to quickly pull them into the office and de-escalate the situation because they were creating a disruption.
That was red.
But a staff conflict where someone is upset and you need to talk to both people?
That’s yellow.
Follow-up is usually yellow too.
Whether it’s with a staff member, a student, or a parent, it might feel urgent because you want to get it off your plate.
But that doesn’t mean it requires an immediate interruption.
Being aware of your yellow work is important because these are the things that often take you away from the instructional leadership work you want to do.
These are the things that keep you from being proactive.
I’m not saying yellow work isn’t important.
I’m not saying it doesn’t matter.
I’m saying you don’t have to handle it the second it arrives.
You still need to be timely.
If something happens at 9:00 in the morning, that doesn’t mean you have to handle it at 9:01.
If something happens at 2:30 in the afternoon, maybe you handle it the next morning.
There’s a big difference between red work, which requires you to stop what you’re doing right now, and yellow work, which needs your attention but can be scheduled intentionally.
For example, a teacher walks into your office and says, “I need to talk to you.”
Instead of immediately stopping what you’re doing, you can say:
“I absolutely want to talk to you. I want to hear what’s going on. Can we meet at 1:30?”
Or:
“Can we meet during your planning time?”
Or:
“Can we meet right after school?”
The same thing applies when a parent sends an email with the subject line “URGENT.”
Is it actually urgent?
What I found with a lot of parent emails was that they would write immediately after school when they were upset.
Because I didn’t check my email at home, by the time I called the next morning, everything had cooled down.
They had figured out the situation.
Usually, the response was:
“Thank you for calling and following up, but it’s been handled.”
Sometimes giving a situation time actually removes the urgency.
Think about the things you can respond to without immediately reacting.
When you start treating yellow work like yellow work, you begin to take control of your day.
You can create specific times to follow up on emails, have staff conversations, or call students down for discipline.
Sometimes, if I heard about a discipline situation and knew I needed to talk to a student, I would handle it while I was already walking around the building.
I’d pull the student into the hallway and have the conversation.
If the situation required something more serious, then the student would come to my office.
But if you can build some of this work into your day instead of making every issue a separate interruption, it can save you a lot of time.
So think about what is hijacking your time.
Is it truly red?
Or is it yellow?
## Green: The Work That Moves Your School Forward
The last category is green work.
This is the work that actually moves your school forward.
Unfortunately, when we spend all of our time in red and yellow, green is the work that gets pushed aside.
Green work includes instructional walkthroughs.
Coaching teachers.
Doing a thorough job with classroom observations.
When you’re constantly reacting to urgent situations, you might still complete your observations, but are you giving enough time and attention to your pre-conferences and post-conferences?
When you schedule and protect time for green work, you can have meaningful conversations with teachers where you’re fully present and actually coaching them.
You can talk about data.
You can be part of professional learning communities and data meetings.
You can actually sit in your office and analyze data.
That’s something I did at every benchmark.
First, I analyzed the data on my own.
Then, I talked with the reading coaches.
Then, I talked with the teachers.
I was constantly having conversations about data, but I first had to give myself time to think and analyze it.
Green work also includes setting the vision for your school.
It’s figuring out what systems need to be built and creating the structures to support them.
Maybe it’s your PBIS system.
Maybe it’s creating systems to make observations run more smoothly.
Maybe it’s delegation.
Maybe it’s your building leadership team.
Green work could be creating meaningful professional development.
It could be proactive communication.
I send a Friday newsletter to families and weekly notes to staff. Having time to do that at school is important.
Green work can also include activities that build a positive culture in your school.
This is the work most principals want to do.
It’s often the reason you became a principal.
But it’s also the work that gets sacrificed first.
Why?
Because green work isn’t screaming at you.
It isn’t demanding that you do it right now.
Your green work will quietly wait for you.
It will sit there all year if you let it.
You have to protect time for it.
I see so many principals stuck in a cycle of responding to yellow work as if it’s red.
Then they come back the next day and respond to more yellow work as if it’s red.
And they never get to the green work.
They never have time to build better systems because they spend all of their time reacting.
The only way to break the reaction cycle is to stop letting yellow work take over your entire day.
The next time someone brings you a situation, think about the stoplight analogy.
What color is this situation?
Is it red?
Does it truly require me right now because there’s a safety, operational, legal, or compliance risk?
Is it yellow?
Does it need my attention, but not at this exact moment?
Or is it green?
Is it work that I need to time-block and protect so I can actually move my school forward?
Now, I want to be clear.
I’m not suggesting that principals sit in their offices all day doing green work while everyone else is handling emergencies around them.
That’s not realistic.
That’s not what I’m saying.
Even when I had an assistant principal, I still helped with behavior.
Things happen.
Kids need you.
Teachers need you.
Families need you.
The goal is simply to become aware of when you’re making everything red.
You want to be responsive without being constantly reactive.
If you have an assistant principal or a team you work with, this matters for them too.
When I worked with an assistant principal, we talked about having time blocks to work in our offices.
But I didn’t expect him to handle every emergency while I sat in my office doing proactive work.
Sometimes I would say:
“You stay in your office and get those observations written up. I’m going to handle the discipline that comes in during this time.”
I scheduled that into my day.
Think about how you can create space for everyone on your team to get green work done.
It shouldn’t be one person reacting all day while everyone else gets protected time.
You have to work together to create that space.
## Your Challenge This Week
For just one day, notice every interruption.
Every time you’re about to stop doing what you planned, ask yourself:
Is this red, yellow, or green?
If it’s red, respond.
If it’s yellow, schedule it for later in the day or, when appropriate, the next day.
And if it’s green, protect it.
That simple question can change how you lead your day.
It can help you become more proactive.
Remember:
Not everything is red.
The more you learn to manage the yellow in your day, the more time you create for the green work that moves your school forward.
Because that’s what Leadership by Subtraction is.
You’re subtracting unnecessary distractions.
You’re subtracting noise.
You’re subtracting constant interruptions.
And you’re subtracting the belief that everything needs you right now.
When you subtract those things, you finally create the space you need to lead.
Remember, the best principals aren’t the ones who do the most.
They’re the ones who know what to subtract.