Dianne White

Every so often I come back to reviewing my priorities and asking myself how I can put my waking hours to best use. Is there a way to wisely parse out time and energy to those areas I consider my first priorities? How can I balance teaching which, by it’s very nature, gets the lion’s share of time, with my before-and-after-day-job as a writer?

A recent post by Corey on Simple Mom, “How to Find More Time During the Day” got me thinking again. He asks the question:

photo credit: Michel Filion

” What if we replaced time focus with energy? Instead of looking at the day as a block of time, look at it as a finite amount of energy.

Then ask yourself, where do you spend your energy?

The answer to this question will tell you where your priorities lie.”

When I look at it this way, it’s clear that the bulk of both my time and energy goes into teaching.  And truth be told, most of *that* time and energy involves paperwork, district obligations, even things as mundane, but necessary, as cleaning up the mess I’ve left behind after a full day of teaching.

Very little time goes into actual lesson planning. A sad but true statement, which might be explained by the fact that I’ve been able to internalize so much of the “how-to’s” of teaching, that I’m now able to get by using the on-the-job-expertise I’ve acquired over the years.

I know I’m not alone in this.  Most of my colleagues are like me.  We all spend more time on the incidentals surrounding running a classroom than the actual hard-core lesson planning time that a new or pre-service teacher spends.

And yet… there’s always more that I *could* do (maybe *should* be doing??) that I choose not to do simply because of the amount of time required.

And while it’s true that I have an obligation to devote a huge and important chunk of each day to my students, it’s also true that a HUGE part of me wants to shift that energy to my writing.

Is there a way to do this?  Perhaps that’s the question so many of us who work full-time and try to write on the side will always struggle with.

The best I can come up with is to write first thing in the morning, early, before the sun has come up, before I must get ready for work.  And yet sometimes, like this past week when I’ve been working on report cards and putting in late hours, it seems those early hours are impossible to manage.

At these moments, I must be reminded, again, to extend myself a little grace.  Lower my expectations.  Remember that all weeks are not this week.  And once those report cards are truly finished and conferences are over, I’ll be back at the keyboard, working on the middle grade revision and that cat/mouse picture book I still need to puzzle out.