Brain Ninjas

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productivity

Are You an Overachieving Teacher? Read This Now

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Is your need to be an overachieving teacher hurting you overall mental health and productivity? Is being busy more important than your own happiness? It's hard for us people pleasers to balance our need to please with healthy boundaries, but come see some of the ways we've learned to let it go and live happier.

Even writing this post, I recognize that my overachieving personality is going to make sure it’s perfect and it will never be as perfect as it needs to because I am an overachieving teacher.

It’s just who I am and I know this, so I actively try to not be me (and sometimes I even overachieve at that). Some people call it being uptight. Others think I’m a perfectionist. I just feel like I like things done right. And to be honest, it hasn’t served me well.

If this resonates with you at all, then read on.

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Teacher Tired Habits to Break

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If you're tagging #teachertired all the time it's time for you to start changing some habits. We've got some ideas for your wake up call to get your productivity in check and save your personal time.

If you are often tagging #teachertired on your social media posts, then maybe it’s time you stopped joking about it and did something to change. Being tired is part of life, but if you are so tired that you cry in your car on a daily basis, then it’s time to break some bad teacher-tired habits.

This is not about judgment. This comes from love-because we have been there. We have cried in the car. We’ve stress-eaten crappy food. Sometimes we’ve taken out our tiredness in our family relationships. We’ve felt guilty for not being a good enough teacher, not being a good enough spouse, not being a good enough parent and not being a good enough cook (no one said it was rational). We often used humour to joke about how tired we were, but the real problem was that we kept letting it continue.

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How to Save Your Time and Be a Productive Teacher

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Teachers have so much to do every day and there doesn't seem to be enough time to do it all. Use these practical tips to be more productive with your teaching duties so you can reclaim your personal time!

Do you have boundaries when it comes to using your personal time for teaching-related activities, but want to be a productive teacher? Is “no” a difficult word for you? Do you always find people add to your to-do list because you’re just so darn good at everything? Are you struggling with time management? Need a boost to your productivity?

This was us, but we managed to start carving out time by doing a few simple things. We reclaimed our personal lives to spend the time we wanted to spend on our life priorities. You can learn to do this, too.

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Ways to Plan That Work for You

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Are you looking for ways to plan your lessons? Do you use paper or digital? Come learn all the different ways we've tried to create our lesson plans over the years to save you some time. There are even free planning pages for you to use.

You’ve seen those beautiful planners all over Pinterest and on everyone’s social media. They are masterpieces that we wish could emulate, but alas, us ninjas have a lot going on and so our plan books have been an evolution. We realized early on that our plans aren’t pretty and we needed a way to share a classroom and thus, share our plans with each other.

Finding the planning style for you takes time. Here are some of our best tips for figuring out your planning style.

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Less is More: Teacher Wellness Strategies That Work

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If you're looking for some practical teacher wellness strategies, look no further. These ones DON'T require more work and will have you feeling less overwhelmed. In fact, this is all about doing less. Check it out!

Sometimes it feels like teachers are stretched so thin. Teacher wellness strategies are buzzwords, but what does it mean to you?

It’s impossible to do it all. That is when the guilt sets in. It feels like we should be able to do more, but maybe the trick is to do less? Of course, in a perfect world teachers would have input into making these decisions, but a girl can dream, right?

So, what are some ways we do less so that we can experience more? Check out these teacher wellness strategies to balance your mental health with the career you love.

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