How to Take a Break (Challenge #85)

At the end of the day, self care as a leader all comes down to budgeting your empty cups, not pouring from an empty oxygen mask, and putting on your spoons before assisting others.

Ok, I may have jumbled that. It’s week three of the fall semester, ok? I’m tired and need to take a break!

ANYWAY, this week’s episode is all about ensuring you can take a break before you get so tired you jumble your self care cliches. Let’s get started, shall we?

~~~

Welcome to the Kind Leadership Challenge, where every Monday morning I teach you to heal your school or library in the next ten minutes! I’m Dr. Sarah Clark, founder of the Kind Leadership Guild, where I use my PhD in Higher ed leadership and nearly 2 decades of experience in academic libraries to advise a growing community of educational and library leaders who want to build a better world without burning out. 

Kind leaders make the tough decisions without becoming jerks. We plan effective systems that help us get the job done with less money and effort. And we’ve learned that once we stop controlling and start collaborating, any vision becomes possible. To be clear, Kind Leadership’s pretty simple, but it’s rarely easy. So if you’re up for a challenge, stick around to learn how to create a legacy that will strengthen your community long after you’re gone.

~~~

Let’s get this out of the way right up front. Since at least the Clinton administration if not earlier, every president of the US has been criticized by somebody or another for taking too many vacations. And yet, whether or not you agree with the various things each administration did, they still got plenty of stuff done while taking time for self care.

Ergo, if the leader of the free world has the ability to take a break and recharge a bit, you do too. It may just take some changes in mindset, routines, and structures. And before you laugh at my use of the word “just”, bear with me. No, I can’t send your toddler away to bermuda for a week while you chill at home, or vice versa. But there are always elements of how we use our time that are within our control, so let’s identify and optimize them. 

First off, resting is one of the few elements of our life that can actually generate more time than it takes. For instance, I normally write these episodes on Monday night and record them on Tuesday. However, yesterday I was BEAT when I got home from work. I had more or less non-stop meetings after the usual first week lull, and after spending an hour staring at an irritatingly blank word doc, I gave it up as a bad job and just cracked open a book for the rest of the evening. That actually worked out well, because while letting my brain rest I actually got an idea for this week’s episode, banged out an outline before bed, and roughed out the script over lunch today. And now I’m recording at my usual time, only with more energy and less obvious circles under my eyes for the social media clip. Had I not come back to it with a fresh brain, it would have taken twice as long. 

Which is why you need to listen to your body and mind. If you’re paying attention, they can serve as an early warning system that you need to rest. By yesterday evening, I was struggling to focus, but because I was also a bit anxious, I was pushing myself through that struggle longer than I should have. We all know that when we are tired, we do struggle to understand what our emotions are telling us, and are more likely to make poor decisions because our brains aren’t working as they should. And since a leader is first and foremost a decision maker, we need our brains to be operating at a high level as much as possible.

And that is why you need to take breaks before you need them. Schedule them if you can! During the summer term I take off most Fridays, and am going to do more 3-day weekends on a limited basis this fall now that crunch time is past. Yes the emails pile up a bit. Yes, sometimes people need to wait for a response. And yes, it’s worth it for all concerned, especially the people ho have to work and live with me. Of course, I can hear some of you replying that you are running an understaffed organization, have too many mandates with too little time, are barely holding your head above water, have family commitments to juggle, etc. And for the record I absolutely believe you. However, I suspect you signed an employment contract when you started your job, not a vow of martyrdom. You will be better off for a break, and your team will be better off, both because you are modeling healthy balance, and because they get a break from you! And as for your boss and other stakeholders? Well, perhaps it’s a good idea for them to occasionally get something a bit later than they’d like. Decisions to keep staffing or funding low have consequences, and although those administrators may not have had much very good options themselves, experiencing the consequences of their actions will help leadership understand what is happening lower on the org chart, and may even give them more ammunition to use with their stakeholders when it comes to funding.

OK, that sounds great. HOW do I do this when my task list is stretching onto page 4, and I have post-its on top of my post-its?

Well, it comes down to practicing what I call the four Ds of task management, which is a slightly tweaked version of David Allen’s Getting things Done model, which I lived by for the first half of my library career before I discovered bullet journaling. Put your tasks into one of four stacks—Do, Delegate, Defer, and Delete. Do is obvious. This is the stuff that has to be don, can only be done by you, and can’t wait. Delete is equally obvious—it’s unnecessary for you or anyone else to do this, now or down the road. Cross it off with joy. Defer anything where the world will not end if it’s not done in the next week or so. You can either schedule it if you know for sure you’ll need to do it later, or it can go onto a lower priority list for when you have spare time. Feel free to hit pause if you need to laugh hysterically for a few moments. Now, for the most beautiful stack of all, the stuff that needs to be done but doesn’t have to be done by you? Delegate. Got a task that you can do in your sleep but someone else could stand some practice with? Delegate.  Got a team member itching for a challenge? Delegate. Alternately, do you have a team member who seems to have a little too much time on your hands? Delegate. You’ll be surprised how much you can get off your plate, and as long as you spread things around rather than loading down your hardest workers, you may actually end up strengthening your team’s culture and effectiveness by letting go so they can step up.

So, here’s my challenge to you this week. Go find a quiet day sometime in the next few weeks and schedule a day off. This is a hectic time of the year for those of us governed by the academic calendar, but the adrenaline that carried us through the first couple of weeks is probably wearing off. Once you’ve booked that day off, ensure you won’t just come back to an even longer list by practicing the 4 Ds of task management to pare your to-dos down to the bare minimum. Now it you’ll excuse me, I need to add a to-do to my list for tomorrow. I need to tell my boss’s assistant I’m taking next Monday off.

~~~

Thanks as always for listening to the kind leadership challenge, and for growing humanely, managing effectively, and creating collaboratively in your own organization. And if you know someone who might find this episode helpful, hit share in your podcast app or send them over to kindleadershipchallenge.com/81. Never doubt that day by day, you’re building a better world, even if you can't see it yet. So until next time, stay kind now.