If you read this blog, you will know Tom, at least from the pages I have written here, who runs knows our Academy. Tom is my wife’s cousin but who’s Dad is Shaun and he will speak on the last module of our business course this year. Shaun was a extremely successful head teacher in a challenging secondary school in Hertfordshire, before he went into industry to become a chief executive. But years ago Shaun taught me a skill through a story that I have kept with me to this day and I thought it was worth sharing at this point.
When he was a secondary head teacher, he worked extremely hard, long days, early starts, late finishes but had all of the school holidays off (Tom, his son is one of four children). He had the whole of the summer holidays off every year, 6 weeks. They would go on a camping holiday for a huge part of that to Cornwall. I have since been to that place and it is paradise. He would go in on two occasions during the schools holidays. One for the GCSE’s (old O Level’s) results day and one for the A levels results day. When he would go in on the first day his secretary would be purple in the face with the amount of tasks that he had to do when he was there. And he always ignored the tasks as “not required to be done at this time”. He was only in to support the students and pupils through their results. He would return back a week later to do the A level results and his secretary would be an even deeper shade of purple and apoplectic at the jobs that were lining to be done…
But the funny thing was, they were different jobs to the ones to the week before. The urgent ones from the week before were not urgent anymore. There were new urgent jobs to be done. This has become apparable to me. In the middle of the overwhelm, almost everything will sort its self out and having the ability to know instinctively which things wont, which things actually need me to do something about it, is a skill which gives you more time in your life.
Blog Post Number - 1287
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