Time management is not an easy skill to acquire. Everyone feels they need more time. My husband, no matter how much he does at work, always laments the one thing he didn’t get done. There are never enough hours for him.

i used to be terrible at managing my time but organising a teaching schedule everyday is a lesson in the value of prioritising. It’s a lesson you learn quickly if you don’t want to drown in a sea of lesson plans. The other lesson you learn pretty quickly is that you never get to the end of the to do list. The to do list is a process rather than a thing. It grows and changes but it never goes away. There are only so many hours in the day and only so many that should be devoted to work. Everything gets done eventually. Nothing is ever as urgent as it seems. No job is worth having no spare time for. Live to work or work to live has always seemed a fairly obvious choice.

It’s a little different with writing. I’d much rather write than do promotion. Making time for promotion is difficult because I almost never want to do it but I always want to write. I’d rather write than plan lessons or even worse, deal with some ridiculous piece of bureaucratic nonsense that teachers seem to spend far too much time having to do.

The real world will insist on interrupting and at the minute it is the world of working supply. This means that I don’t always know what I’m doing from one day to the next but it also means that I have no planning. Knowing that there are only certain times in the day when you can write is very focusing. It means I definitely have to do it and I have to do it now. I don’t spend three hours playing Sims because I think I have all day. I’m used to having to write when I can find the time. I still try to make sure I do it every day, even if that means writing on the train. That way, I feel I have achieved something, even if it is very small compared to wasting time days because I think I have all the time in the world.