“Discipline and freedom feel like opposites. In reality they’re partners. Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it’s a harmonious relationship with time. 

Managing your schedule and daily habits well is a necessary component to free up the practical and creative capacity to create great work” 

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act.

How we spend our time is the single most important strategic decision we can make. Yet, quite often, this isn’t actually a conscious decision. We end up being reactive to whatever comes our way rather than proactive, and disciplined, in allocating time to tasks based on their importance. 

Schools can be chaotic and unpredictable, so a certain amount of reactivity is inevitable, but it’s all too easy to continually live in a world of reacting to urgent tasks whilst leaving the important ones to an unspecified ‘later’. 

If you get to the end of the day thinking “now that I’m away from the chaos of school I can get to work on my priorities” then, by definition, those things are actually not your priorities. Priority means “to come before other things”. Doing our strategic work at the end of the day, when we’re most-tired, and have the least focus, severely limits our chances of doing our best work.

An analogy: whilst we all wish we had infinite amounts of money, not many of us do. As a result, we need to constantly make difficult decisions about how to spend it. We determine what matters most to us, what’s essential for survival, what’s needed to bring us joy, and we try to create a balanced budget that meets those needs. If we’re saving up, we make cuts elsewhere because this is what we’re prioritising. If we don’t do this, we quickly run out of money as it’s spent on the things that appear in front of us (the takeaway, the pub, the shop) rather than on the things that might matter in the medium or longer term (a holiday, a car, a house). If we try to do it all, we end up in debt. 

Time is also finite. So time, like money, needs to be budgeted. 

If we don’t budget time, we either end up depriving ourselves of something important, or we end up in debt (usually to our family, friends, and our own well-being). 

One answer, then, is to get detailed on our calendar planning. This is our ‘time budget’. We anticipate ahead, allocate time according to priority, block key moments- then, because life happens, we need to gatekeep and triage with tenacity. 

And because the skills of gatekeeping & triaging are separate to those of learning the habit of mapping your calendar- as in, you can learn to map your calendar but that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily great at sticking to it- it’s nearly always better to think of calendar planning in terms of “target setting”. Your beautifully mapped out calendar is the target and the game is to see how close you can get.  

Think of your calendar in the way a marathon runner thinks of the target time for their next race. It’s perfectly possible to run the race without a goal in mind and ‘how I do is how I do’, but this clearly isn’t the best approach for anyone who is halfway serious about doing well, or improving. Secondly, the target time is better thought of as a goal not an imperative. There are good days and bad days; sometimes you’ll do better, sometimes worse. But with concerted effort and intentionality the goal setting supports an incremental process of improvement that happens over time.

Setting up our agendas as a target can be intimidating, confronting and infuriating. It can expose the impossibility of some of the things we’re trying to achieve and the chaos of the places we work. But taking ten minutes at the beginning and end of each week to set, and then review, your time use has the potential to be the highest leverage thing you do that week.

Many people feel that they are not ‘calendar people’- I wasn’t a calendar person at first and I’m still imperfect with it now- so, if you still have doubts- I do understand.  

Based on my own experiences, and that of the many leaders I’ve worked with, here’s a look at four of the most common concerns:

1/ A calendar is too restrictive and too limiting.

It’s normal to perceive a tightly managed calendar as a strait-jacket. To some extent this is true. The crucial difference is that this should be a self-imposed strait-jacket that restricts you only in as much as it helps you. It might not always feel comfortable, but it’s for your benefit. It’s restricting in the same way that pension payments are restricting to your weekly budget- it limits your options for the next shopping spree, but it’s a wise long-term move. 

On the flip side, because it’s self-imposed, it can be self-removed. Seeing the calendar as a guide rather than gospel is a helpful way to manage the fact that sometimes urgent things do come up. Having a detailed calendar doesn’t mean that things don’t change, but it does mean that you reflect on whether the change is the best use of time.

The quote at the top of this piece from Rick Rubin (the highly successful music producer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lady Gaga & Ed Sheeran amongst many others), recognises the temptation to reject structure in favour of something that seems more freeing and flexible. But four decades of experience in the music industry, working with some of the world’s most successful artists, have shown him that, contrary to popular belief, discipline and structure are vital components to creativity. The discipline to manage your time well creates the space for your best work.

2/ My job is too varied and unpredictable 

There are plenty of roles where the list of responsibilities is large and fragmented. 

This makes the task of allocating time to each thing feel complex, overwhelming and perhaps a bit obsessive. 

I’m reasonably confident that it’ll be entirely possible to map out your time at some level- I’ve mapped out many complex roles. The trick here is to find a sweet spot between being too granular and too high-level. Usually smaller jobs can be bucketed into a larger category that serves as a ‘rough enough’ guide to your time use; and sometimes just writing down the many varied aspects of your role is a powerful and revealing exercise in and of itself.

A related but separate issue is the frustration that can come with listing things which you’re doing which “aren’t supposed to be my job”. This can be confronting but, as is the common theme in this post, naming the issue is the first step towards tackling it. 

3/ I’ll never stick to it

What’s the point spending time mapping out your time use only to find that you’re ‘off-calendar’ before your first Monday morning coffee?

I think the important thing here is to understand calendar planning as a skill to be developed and refined over time. It requires habit building, discipline, and you’ll be less skilled at things like predicting the amount time you actually need for certain tasks, or at how to gatekeep the time you’ve held for one thing when someone is putting pressure on you to do another. 

Your calendar needs to be seen as a target to aim for- but a target that has flex. Being off target doesn’t mean throwing it out the window. Monday can be wildly disrupted whilst Tuesday to Thursday flow smoothly.

But not getting through a week exactly as planned  (and most people don’t) doesn’t negate the value of the planning. A well-managed calendar is a tool for both gauging how you intend and hope to use your time as well as a tool for reflecting how you actually use your time. It serves as a helpful forward-looking planning exercise (‘how do I want to use my time?’) as well as an equally helpful backwards-looking reflection exercise (‘how did I use my time?’, ‘what stopped me?’ ‘did I choose the highest leverage things to do this week?’).

4/ I don’t want to confront the gap between the time I have and what I’m expected to do

I suspect that this is actually one of the most common, and biggest, reasons that calendar planning is neglected. In the same way that it’s easier to leave a bill unopened and the bank-balance unlooked at, fear of the calendar can derive from fear that the maths won’t add up.  But, as might be clear by now, this exercise is about confronting those concerns in order that something can be done about them. 

If this concern applies to you and you’re in charge of your own time- then it’s only yourself that you’re trying to fool by avoiding the issue, so it makes no sense to do so. 

If you’re not in charge of your own time, then whoever is needs to know. It may be that they already know and are wilfully ignoring the demands they place on you; but more likely is that they have no idea how long certain things are taking or how you’ve chosen to spend your time. 

Either way, if the maths doesn’t add up and there’s not much you can do about it 

then the bit you do have control over is how to triage and prioritise. Addressing the issue allows you to make sensible strategic choices and to work smarter. 

No one has the time, they make the time.

The calendar is your tool for budgeting your time. If you don’t set that budget deliberately, it gets set for you: by whatever happens to land in front of you, by the loudest voice in the corridor, by the steady drip of small urgencies that fill any school day. The time still gets spent either way; the only question is whether you had any say in how.

Which brings us back to where we started: discipline and freedom can feel like opposites, but the freedom to do your most important and best work rarely appears in the gaps left once everything else is done. It has to be made, and holding time in a calendar is one of the few practical ways to make it.

You won’t get this right immediately, and you won’t get it right every week; I still don’t. But treated as a target rather than a rule, and revisited for ten minutes at each end of the week, calendar planning has a fair claim to being the highest leverage habit available to a busy leader.