Managing Stress and Your Time and Energy

        It's no secret that teaching is one of the most stressful jobs one can have and it only seems to get worse with time.  Every year, more and more required tasks seem to be added to our plates on top of everything else.  If you don't know how to manage your stress, it can be detrimental to your teaching abilities, relationships, and even your health.  One of the biggest factors of stress can be improper management of our time and energy.  Below, you will find a few suggestions to help manage the stress and time in your teaching career.
        Let go of what you cannot control.  A big factor in many teacher's lives is control.  Personally, I am a control freak (to an extent), and love to plan things out a certain way.  I used to stress when that would change - so much that I would get headaches.  Over time, I learned to let it go because I got nothing from stressing.  If I had a big lesson planned, but half my students were absent or pulled for remediation, I had to learn to let it go.  These are things that are out of my control, so why worry about it?  Another big ticket of stress is sick days.  I know so many teachers who would refuse to use their sick days because they stressed about what would happen if they weren't there for their students or if the office could get them a sub that day.  In turn, they would get sicker from overworking themselves when they should be sleeping, and be out longer.  Not to mention, many times, their germs began being passed around the school.  A wise coworker reminded me early in my teaching career that we are absolutely replaceable in our work.  If we were to die tomorrow, our jobs would be posted (and probably filled), before our obituaries.  What we do is important, but not nearly as important as our health and wellness.
        Use your time wisely to eliminate unneeded stress.  Some days, I am guilty of using my panning period (when I actually have one) to sit around, snack on popcorn, and play on my phone.  Some days I have to allow for that downtime when teaching takes everything out of me.  Most days however, I try to manage my time during breaks and plan how to complete each task on my to do list.  If I need to lesson plan during my planning, I put my phone on the other side of the room or turn it on silent, close my email, and plan away.  Generally I am able to accomplish a lot more planning in 15 minutes than I would in an hour if I had my phone and email out to pull me away every few minutes.  Set aside specific times that you are going to take a mental break and browse social media, or sit down and respond to the millions of emails that pile up.  When you are more efficient with your time, you are able to significantly cut the load of stress on your plate.
         Decide what tasks are most important.  Any given day of the week, I could name fifty things on my to-do list.  Obviously, it is not rational that I would complete everything on my to-do list every single day.  Reorganize your to-do list. Pick your priority items: 3 - 5 things that MUST be completed that day.  Decide which are moderately important (a.k.a. items with approaching deadlines), and list those next.  Lastly, list your items of low importance.  These are things you need to get done, but if it takes longer than a few days to finish them, that's alright too.  Once you know where your priorities lie, your list seems a lot more manageable and you can focus on the task at hand.