How to Find Time

Hello there, friend. Welcome to another episode of the Artworks for Teachers podcast. I’m your host, Susan Riley, and I’m so excited to be here with you today to talk about a subject that I think we’re all pretty passionate about, and that is, Time. Um, you know, time is one of those things that we’re constantly feeling like we’re running out of it, right?

Like, raise your hand wherever you are in your car, in your, in your house, wherever. Do you feel like you are running out of time? Right? Like that famous line in the Hamilton musical, Why do you write like you’re running out of time? The idea that we’re running out of time constantly, I think is this thing that follows us around no matter what we’re doing or what job we’re in or what season of life we’re in.

Right? Um, and this is definitely something that I have struggled with. I know that. Almost all of my teacher friends struggle with this. My administrator friends struggle with this. This idea that we just don’t have enough time to get done what we want to get done with both our students and in our life, if we’re being really honest about it.

Um, and that we’re constantly trying to cram more in, right, Or that we’re trying to take more out, right? Like we’re either trying to stuff more things into the time that we have and therefore we become. Overwhelmed, or we’re trying to take so much out, but we have no idea what to take out. We feel stuck and neither of those feelings is helpful for us.

Right? Being overwhelmed or being stuck. And so I think this leads to a lot of the issues that we’re running into. Both in schools and in our lives as teachers. You know, we’re in this weird evolutionary space in education where nothing is the same, and yet we’re trying to make it the, like it was right, the same as what it was.

And so the result of that is overwhelmed and burnt out educators, um, parents who don’t understand what it is that we’re dealing with or how we’re trying to cope and ensure that everybody is receiving the best education we can possibly give them. Um, we’re. We’re under this guise of quiet quitting that we’re hearing about a lot, um, which I have different feelings about quiet, quitting  that we’re gonna get into in a later episode.

But, um, also this idea of it’s not worth it, right? We’re not paid enough to deal with what we have to deal with in the amount of time that we have to deal with. And so I think that a large crux of what we’re dealing with right now in education is surrounding this idea of time. And I know for me, we’ve been dealing with this issue of time with the field of arts integration and steam since I began almost two decades ago.

Um, and so I wanted to kinda dig in today to this idea of time and how to find more of it. Specifically for people who wanna in integrate the arts or creativity into their classroom and feel like they can’t because they don’t have time. But also, um, a little bit more broadly with the idea surrounding time in our general lives.

And how do we manage that? Now, I’m also coming to you with, from a place where my own team talks to me constantly about my speed of work. Um, they call it Susan’s standard time. We call it SST for short. Um, and that. I have a lot of productivity tricks and hacks in my bag that I will use throughout the week to make sure that I get as much done as I possibly can within the time constraints that I’ve been given.

And over the last year, I’ve been playing around with the idea of a four day work week with our organization. And I always test stuff first before I lay it out to the rest of my team. I think that’s only fair. Um, and I’m coming down the pike of a year of trying to only work four days a week, and I’ve actually been able to manage to do it in a pretty consistent way.

And so when my team. Sst, they’re saying that it’s not reasonable for everybody else. And so I understand that when I come to you with some of these ideas, you might call out, Hey, that’s sst, that’s not gonna work for me because that’s, that’s not how I function. That’s okay. Um, what I’m gonna ask you to do though, is keep an open mind in today’s episode.

What are some of the ways that I share some of the tips, the strategies, the things that I use to run on sst, that  you might find beneficial? I’m not saying everybody has to run on sst, but what I am saying is that I managed to get a whole lot done, more so than the average person because of some of the ideas that I’m gonna share with you today.

So if you’re looking to pick up a little bit more time, right, these might be helpful for you as well. So I just needed to add that little disclaimer in there. Um, because you know, my team will ask me, When do you want this done? Do you wanna, is that sst if I say two weeks, they will qualify it and say, Is that SST two weeks or is that normal person two weeks?

Um, so I do know that I need to put that disclaimer in there. Okay. The, the first thing I wanna talk about though is this idea of time and feeling like it’s a constant, Right. And though we’re always running out of it. Right. The, This is kind of funny though because I think all of us feel like there’s only so much time in a day.

It’s constant and I’m running out of it like greens in an hour glass. Right? But it’s actually, that idea that time is constant, is false. It’s fake news from my friends . It was actually disproven. This idea of of time as a constant was disproven by Einstein. It’s, it’s true. So I love this story from the American Museum of Natural History, and I’m just gonna read it for you because I don’t wanna mess up the details cause they’re really important.

So in 19, at age 21, Einstein had his university to diploma and was eager to begin his career as a physicist. He struggled to find work however, but after two years of searching, he took on a relatively low level job at the patent office in burn Switzerland. He was glad for the income and steady work in reviewing patent applications and still have time and a ability to think about physics.

After hours, Einstein settled into a comfortable. Each day he walked to work through the streets of burn a city, famous for its medieval architecture and beautiful clock towers. Now, Einstein passed by the clock towers consistently on his way home, a route he often took with his closest friend, Michelle Beso.

The two men, uh, regularly discussed science and philosophy, including the nature of. And after one such discussion, Einstein came to a sudden realization, time is not absolute. In other words, despite our common perception that a second is always a second everywhere in the universe, the rate at which time flows depends upon where you are and how fast you are traveling.

And this was the beginning of his very popular theory of relat. So, um, Einstein brings to us this idea that time is not constant time. Um, it flows, the rate of time flows differently depending on where you are and how fast you’re traveling. So this is gonna bleed into a little bit later in our conversation, the idea of, of flow in current science that they’re studying.

But, and I’m sure you’ve already rec recognized this a little bit when you are in activities that bring you joy, right? Or that are just challenging enough to keep your interest, but not too hard, that it makes it difficult. You get into this state of flow and when you’re in this state of flow, time is relative.

For sure. You could be in flow for what feels like five minutes and you’ve spent five hours on a project. Raise your hand or nod your head if you’re feeling that right, like. That you’ve had that experience, you could also be in a room for five minutes and have it feel like it’s been five hours. , anybody have that kind experience?

Yes. Right. Um, And so time is not constant. It does, um, kind of flex depending on the experience that you’re having. So the ideal, the way that we can maximize our time is by making sure that we’re in flow as much as we can, and by eliminating or. Or, um, condensing the things that we don’t love that take a, that feel like they take a lot of time into as shorter period of time as we can.

We’re gonna try to manipulate time a little bit with some of the resources we’re gonna talk about today. The, i, the one thing is that what is constant about time is that while the rate of time may change, there is only a finite amount of time to work with, right? So, Money or resources. Time is the one thing that you cannot get back.

Um, my daughter and I always have this conversation. She’s at an age, she’s like 13 where she’s working around budgets, right? She has her own debit card now. She’s very excited for that. This feeling of independence, right? And so, She was going homecoming shopping last weekend and she wanted to go by herself with her friends.

And I said, that was okay as long as you took pictures of what you were gonna buy beforehand. So that mama got last approval. Right? Um, and she was, she was very concerned about costs, Like how much is the dress gonna cost? How much are the shoes gonna cost? How much is in the budget? And so we had a great discussion about budget.

Um, she’s also been working part-time, um, just for me, for my mom who has a farm store, um, just to kind of get into the idea of what working means and, and what the value of a dollar is. And, and so she was constantly doing the calculation of, if I spent this much money on a dress, How many hours am I gonna have to work at N’S Farm Store in order to make up the money that I’m, I’m sending out?

Right. This is a, this is an adult thing that we constantly are working on, but we have this conversation a lot of the time where I say, You can always make more money. You cannot make more. So while time is fluid, you can’t make any more of it. And so yes, there are times for her and I like you have to be cognizant of how much you’re spending.

But on the other hand, you can always make more money. You know, we can always go get a second job or we can always go find a job that pays better or we can always, you know, find ways to supplement what we’re getting. Um, but you can’t make more time. And so when people give me their time, it is the most precious resource.

You have no idea how grateful I am right now that you are spending your time listening to me in this particular episode. Um, and the same is true. Every time I run a workshop, a webinar, a course, a speaking engagement, it doesn’t matter. People are giving me their most precious resource, which is. And I never wanna take advantage of that.

One thing that I know to be true from many teachers though, is that because time is the most precious resource and you have so much to cover, you’re concerned about how do I add in creative approaches like arts integration or steam or project based learning when I have all of this other stuff that I have to.

Right. Um, it’s also the reason why so many teachers spend so much money on t p t, right, On teacher pay, teacher resources or membership programs or whatever it is to get resources cuz they’re, you’re trying to buy back some of your time, right? So when we’re thinking about, uh, How do we embed creative approaches?

Um, I’m cognizant always that you only have so much time. So what we’re gonna do in today’s episode in the six tips that I’m gonna give you is show you how to kind of manipulate the time so that you’re not adding one more thing, but then instead we’re mixing it. Lots of my team members use the example of the difference between a cupcake and a muffin.

What we’re doing today is baking a muffin, not a cupcake. So on a cupcake you have the regular cupcake and then the icing on top, right? It’s the add on. Whereas like in a blueberry muffin, the blueberries don’t sit on top. They’re mixed into the muffin itself. Right? So what we’re trying to do with our time is actually mix in and into a blueberry muffin instead of to a cupcake.

Makes sense. Okay, so there are six tips that I have for you for finding time, specifically for arts integration and STEAM and other creative approaches in your classroom with the caveat that some of these tips can also work in productivity in just your regular teaching and life. Okay, so the first one is the perfect example of this.

It’s called Batch Your Work. I live by batching , and I cannot recommend it enough. The idea of batching your work means that you take all of the work surrounding, um, one project or one idea, and you work on all of it at the same. Lots of times what I’ll see teachers do in planning is that they’ll start planning an arts integration lesson.

They’ll get to the point where they need to look up the standards, and then they’ll move on to something else because they either get distracted or they don’t have enough time to look at that, so they’re gonna come back to it, right? The problem with that is you end up spending more time planning the lesson.

Rather than just batching all of the work and doing it at one time. So when you’re scheduling your planning time, you wanna schedule it in batches, so you’re gonna wanna dedicate, if you’re gonna, for example, Look at, um, implementing an arts integration lesson, Let’s say you’re not even planning it. Let’s say you’ve purchased it or you’ve, um, you’ve gone on, you’ve gotten our, our membership of the accelerator membership and you’ve downloaded one of the arts integration lessons and all of the resources, right?

So now you have this lesson in the resources. You now have to figure out where am I gonna put it in my curriculum? What time or where, what space am I gonna do it in? What do I need other than these resources? There’s a list of materials. What do I need to gather? Um, how am I gonna implement this? What day or what time?

And then how am I gonna assess it? All of those other things that go into lesson planning that we don’t really think about, right? All of that gets done in one period of time. So you’re gonna set aside 20 minutes on Monday to go through all of your arts integration lesson idea. That you’ve got for the week, you’re gonna do it all in 20 minutes on Monday, and you set yourself that timer and get all of it done within those 20 minutes.

Here’s the beautiful thing that always happens. If you give yourself a time limit and a very specific task within that time limit, 99 out of a hundred times, you’re going to finish it within that period of time. What we don’t do very often is actually set a time. And know that we’re on the clock or batch our.

So when you employ this idea of batching and you put it with a very specific set of, of time commitment that you’ve got, you’re gonna get more done in that 20 minutes than you would have with a regular 20 minutes that you just had setting aside for planning period. , right? Let’s assume that your planning period is 30 minutes long, so now you have 10 minutes at the end of your planning period to address any other details that you need to pull together.

So what I like to do in my batching. It’s decide by day, like Monday’s planning period, 20 minutes going to work on that arts integration lesson. The final 10 minutes is cleaning up emails, checking out whatever it is that I gotta clean up before I’ve gotta go to my next class, right? Tuesdays I’m gonna focus on my literacy block and I’m gonna plan out everything that I need for my literacy block for the rest of the week.

And I put that in for the, the. For 20 minutes and then I’ve got 10 minutes to clean up everything else. You see how I’m doing this? So that rather than trying to plan all of the different things that you’ve got coming up in one 30 minute segment, you are batching them so that it, you know, week every week, this is how it’s gonna go.

Right. Um, that’s really helpful. It’s also helpful because if something gets thrown into your planning period that you are not aware of, if you build in those extra 10 minute blocks where it’s just clean up, right? You can then sh shift some things around here or there so that you can make up the time that you had for those original 20 minutes.

Again, use the timer because the timer is actually gonna trigger something in your brain. This is using neuroscience. When the brain knows that it is on a clock, you are gonna be able to work in a flow state faster than if you just had it out there as a random abstract. 20 minutes. Okay, So batching and a timer is my first tip.

Second for arts integration, SP and STEAM specifically as well as project based learning. Um, one of the ways that you can save time is to find lessons in your current curriculum that are not working and simply replace them with an arts integration lesson that addresses the same, um, concept. So, for example, if you are working on a lesson on acute, obtuse, um, angles and you’re, you’re students are getting them confused, right?

The difference between acute and obtuse and in your, uh, curriculum, you have three days set aside to teach and review and really solidify this idea of acute Neptune angles and, you know, That those three days are not going to cut it like you’re gonna need an extra day or two because students just are not picking it up.

Instead of having four days wasted on this idea, teach the concept directly on day one. And then on day two, have an arts integration lesson or a STEAM lesson that’s specific to applying what those students learned in day one through their arts integration or steam lesson on day two. And you will see students suddenly start to pick it up much, much faster, so that you may need to use day three as a review, but oftentimes you won’t.

They’ll just, it’ll click on day two because they’re applying. What they learned from you on day one in a different, meaningful way to them. That makes sense. So what that does is that means you’re actually saving time. So rather than three, maybe four days in your curriculum spent on acute and obtuse angles, now you’re spending two or at the most three.

Okay. So that’s how arts integration can save you time. You don’t wanna add an arts integration lesson into your curriculum on top of everything else you’re teaching unless you take something else away, right? Other if you don’t, then it becomes the icing on the cupcake, right? And that’s what throws us over the edge.

So you wanna look for things that are not working. Right. Find the, the lessons that are just not working or that, uh, you need to do so many reviews because the students are just not picking it up fast enough and substitute those lessons that are not working for an arts integration or esteem lesson.

Okay? Tip number three is to use many lessons of 10 minutes each to work through a larger integrated project. So let’s say that your team has decided to do a large. Steam design challenge. Right. Um, but it’s, it’s massive. There are lots of different moving pieces. It’s gonna take a while rather than trying to cut out time.

Large swaths of time from your schedule for students to work on these, this large project. 10 minutes and do mini lessons, um, at specific spots throughout the week. So if you’re working on the design challenges, right, you’re gonna teach the first component in 10, in a 10 minute mini lesson at the end of math, and the second component in a 10 minute mini lesson at the beginning of science and the third part, right?

So you see how I’m weaving this in so that it doesn’t have to. All of the time of one subject. It can be interwoven where it’s appropriate throughout your day or throughout your week in these smaller 10 minute mini lesson periods of time. This is going to do two things. One, It’s gonna spread out the lesson in a more meaningful way so that students can start to see the connections in multiple content areas.

And two, because you only have 10 minutes, you are going to maximize the time that you’re working with students. In that 10 minutes, there’s gonna be no time available for fluff. Right. You’re gonna get straight to the point. You’re gonna maximize those 10 minutes. It’s going to be an intensive 10 minutes of learning.

But that’s gonna be great because then students will get a little bit of a break and then in the next content area, they’ll get the next piece of it, right? So I like the idea of mini lessons. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you need a longer period of time in order to work with those students on a project.

And that comes for tip number four, which is to consolidate lessons. This is where integration really, really shines. So if you’re doing that, steam challenges, uh, project, right? And not all, in fact, most arts integration and steam, uh, lessons are not large projects, but take weeks and weeks and weeks, right?

They’re, they’re like a 45 minute lesson, right? But in this example, if we’re using a larger project, Um, sometimes it’s a great idea to consolidate your lessons into, um, two lessons that work together in tandem. So, for example, if you’re working on that steam design challenge, you might take your math and your science block and consolidate them together to make one larger block where you’re teaching the direct skills up front and then having students have that time to create.

Their actual challenge, right? To move through the actual challenge. So you’re gonna wanna look at a period of time in your, um, in your schedule where your math and your science block could come together. It, they require rearranging a couple of other things, but if you can make that work, It’s some, it’s beautiful.

I see teachers do this a lot with, with, um, their literacy block and their social studies block, um, where they’re focusing on the content from social studies, but embedding the literacy tools and resources and skills that they’re trying to teach. Into the content of social studies. It works really, really well this way as, um, as well.

So I wanted to be able to provide you a couple of examples of if you can’t do the mini lessons, you could consolidate two larger blocks into one. Number five is to use a time tracker. And on this one, um, I’m getting, this is gonna be your free resource today, so make sure you go to the episode page and you download it, um, because you’ll be able to download a copy of it directly to your Google Drive as a spreadsheet and you’ll be able to use it.

But I wanna walk you through how to use this tracker, um, because it’s gonna change your. But before it changes your life, you’re gonna get mad at it, , um, because it’s gonna be such a tedious process to do . Um, when I first did this exercise, I hated every minute of it. Cause I was like, Really? I have to write down every single thing that I did.

Yes. Because what happens is, is that as you write it down, you begin to find where your time traps are, right? Where your time leaks are. So let me share my screen with you. Um, if you’re watching the video, Um, we share this tab, and if you’re not, I’m gonna walk through it, um, so that you can, can understand what we mean.

So I have a set of time tracking sheets for you. The first one is a 60 minute time block. So you would put in today’s date, which, um, if you double click the top, it’ll just give you today’s date. You can enter it and then, It’ll go Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and the time starts at 5:00 AM and it goes all the way to 4:00 AM the next day.

And you can fill in each of these blocks with what you’re doing in each of those hours. So we have one set up for 60 minutes. We have, um, at the bottom of the page, you have a tab for 30 minute time blocks. So if you really wanna get in depth, like from six to six 30, I’m sitting down and journaling. And then six 30 to seven I grab my breakfast and a cup of coffee, and from seven to seven 30 I’ve got a shower and I’m out the door.

Right. So you’re, you’re putting all of that. Um, into each their, either one of these, um, blocks that we’ve got. Now, the one that I really like though is the third tab, which is the blank canvas for blank canvas. Um, we’re gonna assume eight hours of sleep now. I know a lot of you don’t get eight hours of sleep, but we’re, we’ve got it blocked off for eight hours cuz that’s healthy for you.

So from 10:00 PM to 5:00 AM we have blocks already filled in with sleep so that all you’re filling in is what’s happening between 6:00 AM and 9:00 PM Monday through Sunday. Um, and so you would. For an entire week, you would go through this time tracking canvas and enter, What did you do during that time period from six to 7:00 AM what you and just list every single.

And so, like I said, this is gonna feel tedious, but here’s what I learned, so let me come back to you. Here’s what I learned in completing that exercise. I found about six hours a week in time that was just escaping. Okay. It was like a leak in your tire. That’s why I call them time leaks. I found six hours a week of time leaks and I am a very productive person.

I am. Somebody, like I said, sst, right? Where people are like, How did you get all that done? And I still found six hours a week of time leaks. And this is where I was literally just doing nothing where I was watching Netflix or I was scrolling on social media or just literally nothing. And I think there’s a time and a place for our brains to relax, right?

Certainly, I love my periods of time on the weekends where I can just snuggle in on a under a blanket and watch a Netflix show, right? And if I’m doing it with purpose, like I’ve set that aside for myself because I want that. That’s one thing. I think that’s totally fine. What I was finding is that I was filling in gaps of time with just, you know, fluff because I didn’t have anything else to do, or I wasn’t purposeful with the rest of what I could do.

So, I ended up changing that into, if I have these blocks of time, I’m gonna read, I’m gonna read and, and from people that I admire or books that I want to, um, kind of learn new, new ideas or strategies or tools or whatever to better myself, to better the profession, whatever that may be. Um, so that I’m not working, but I am doing something that I feel is more valuable for my time.

Right. So completing. Um, this time tracker sheet is going to be tedious, of course, but it’s also gonna be illuminating because you’re gonna find. Almost every single person that I know that’s done this, we all say we don’t have any more time to give. We don’t have any more time for this thing that we want to do.

That’s the thing. I want to do this right. I want to integrate the arts in my classroom. I don’t have time to do it. I want to take that yoga class. I don’t have time to do it. I want to, Right? We want to do these things and. We feel like we can’t because our schedules are already packed. When we complete this time tracker, you’re gonna find we do have the time.

It’s just that we’re not always being purposeful with it. So that’s where the time Tracker is really, really helpful. Um, and I think that will help you determine where are your time leaks. Now, if you wanna use this just for, um, your classroom, I would suggest using that blank canvas time tracker. Um, and then identifying, you know, exactly what is happening at each section of your lesson.

This is where recording your lessons is really helpful because you’re gonna identify at least five to 10 minutes of wasted. I, any time I do that exercise with teachers, they’re, and they’re shocked. They’re, they’re like, No, I didn’t have that extra time. But then when they watch it back, they realize there’s this, this time leak that’s happening, right?

And so once you find it, then you can fix it. Then you can, It’s like fix a plat, right? . You can plug that leak with an intentional activity or a transition or something that you want to integrate into your classroom, but you feel like you don’t have time for. Um, so, and uh, tip number six is to work with the flow instead of against the current.

So I talked about this at the beginning of this episode, the idea of flow, right? Um, and science has proven this idea of flow. In fact, um, a good friend of mine, Dr. Julia Anglo, is a research scientist from Columbia University whose entire research. Focused on flow. Um, and she is right now working on a study about when you channel creativity, when you work and channel creativity into your work, you integrate flow, uh, states in your brain, which activate your optimal joy and success.

And so when we are doing things we love and we’re doing them in novel and creative ways, we enter into the naturally into this state of flow where time expands. We’re ti where we have time for the things that we wanna do because we’re in this state of joy and success. And so wouldn’t it be amazing if we can bring that state into our classroom and we can, we can.

We have to find the segments of time, time tracker, right? We have to look at some of our productivity, uh, tools and utilize the ones that are gonna make the most sense for us, and then, Put it into practice and you will find those flow states where time expands for your class and you can integrate with joy and success, which I, I think is amazing.

Now, last thing that I wanna share, this is kinda like a bonus tip. Get your students in on it, right? Like, help them to become time in. Specs who notice when they’re in flow, like when they’re in this idea of flow or feels like time expands or they can help identify where the time leaks are. Like, Oh, we aren’t really doing anything here and I’m noticing that.

Um, and they can learn how to batch their time when they’re studying or with their homework, right? These are life skills that they should learn. And so if we do this as a project together, Like, let’s be time inspectors and find where our, our leaks are and see if we can batch some things together to be more productive.

Let’s see if we can do this as an experiment for a week. Make science experiment. Get them in on it. Um, everybody has a chance to grow here and you will find time to integrate creativity and arts integration and steam and pbl and all the other things that you wanna integrate, um, with your students. So if you enjoy to this episode, please do me a favor and help us to reach even more educator.

By sharing this episode with a colleague or a friend who might be struggling with, with time themselves, um, and also by giving us a rating or a review on your favorite podcast platform that helps us to reach even more educators with tools and tips like the one that you heard today. I see. So appreciate your support, and next week I will chatting with fifth grade teacher Col Sharp and his work in the Creativity project.

That’s something that you’re not gonna wanna miss to see next week. Same time. Sing Until a wonderful week ahead.