The Work That Eats Every Principal's Summer

Most principals spend the one season built for real change just getting caught up.

She promised herself this summer would be different. This was the year she'd finally get ahead.

The building empties out in June. The hallways go quiet. For the first time since August, nobody needs an answer in the next ninety seconds. So she made a list. Interviews for the two open teaching slots. Re-enrollment to process. The family handbook, two years out of date. The filing she'd been pushing off since March. The inbox she was too embarrassed to look at.

She worked hard, and she worked well. Skeleton crew, no interruptions, long uninterrupted mornings. By the first week of August she was caught up for the first time in years, and a little proud of it.

Then the year started. And by October it was the same year. Same bottlenecks in the same offices. Same decisions routing back through her desk. Same fires in the same hallways.

She hadn't wasted her summer. She'd worked the whole thing. She just worked the wrong kind of work.

Here's what happened. She spent her entire summer working IN the school, when summer is the one stretch all year she could have spent working ON it.

Most organizations never get this. A business owner who wants a prolonged season to step back and rebuild how the operation runs has to manufacture it, and most never do. You get one handed to you every single year. Weeks where the students are gone, the daily emergencies pause, and the work that actually changes how your school runs is finally possible. That is a gift most leaders would trade almost anything for. And the quiet tragedy is how many principals spend it getting caught up instead.

Getting from chaos to a productive summer

The end of a school year doesn't hand you a productive summer automatically. It hands you exhaustion and a backlog. Getting from one to the other follows a sequence: Recover. Close. Evaluate. Work.

Recover first, and don't apologize for it. A depleted leader makes depleted decisions, and you can't do real improvement work running on fumes. But recovery is the on-ramp, not the destination. Rest all summer and you'll come back rested to the exact same school.

Close the year. Actually finish it. Tie off the loose ends so they don't follow you into July.

Evaluate it before you forget it. Name the wins, the losses, and the lessons while they're still fresh. Most principals skip the one question that matters most: not "what went wrong," but "what kept routing back to me, and why?"

Then Work. And the work is where the summer is won or lost.

The difference between IN and ON

The work is where almost every principal goes wrong, because it feels like exactly what she was already doing. So this is where it has to get clear.

IN work keeps the school you already have running. ON work changes how it runs.

Working IN the school is everything required to maintain it. The filings. Enrollment processing. Marketing. Hiring interviews. The backlog. All of it necessary, none of it optional, and all of it IN. You're running the systems you already have.

Working ON the school is improving or adding a system. You noticed something that needs to be significantly better, and you pushed it forward.

Here's what makes this so easy to miss: the same task lands in both categories depending on what you're actually doing with it.

Take hiring. Interviewing candidates is IN work. You're running the hiring process you already have. Working ON hiring looks completely different. It's redesigning where you post and who you reach so the quality of applicant goes up. It's rebuilding the interview itself so you stop hiring the wrong people. Same word on the calendar. Opposite kind of work.

So here's the test, and it's sharper than asking whether you're "improving" things, because every principal believes she's improving things. Ask instead: when this task is done, will anything about how the school operates be different? Or will it simply be done? If nothing operates differently afterward, you were working IN, no matter how hard it was or how much it felt like progress.

Which exposes the sneakiest work of all: clearing the backlog. Getting caught up feels like the purest progress there is, because you can watch the pile shrink. But a cleared backlog changes nothing about how your school runs. It's the most satisfying IN work in existence, and it's exactly what ate our principal's summer.

This is why summer is so deceptive. The building is empty, so any work you do in it feels strategic. It isn't. An empty building is the opportunity. It's not the same thing as working on what matters.

Spend the whole summer working IN, and next year will run smoothly. It will also run identically. Same bottlenecks, same dependence on you, same fires. Not a worse year than last year. The same one. That's the cost, and it stays invisible until October, which is why so few principals catch it in time.

How to make it a work-ON summer

So make this a work-ON summer on purpose. Three moves.

Put ON days and IN days on your summer calendar, and name them in advance. IN work has hard deadlines and a loud voice, and if you don't wall off the ON days, the IN work will eat every one of them. Protect them the way you'd protect anything that matters: an ON day stays an ON day unless somebody is bleeding or something is leaking. Almost nothing in July actually qualifies.

Name your ON list, and keep it short. Two or three systems, not fifteen. A summer realistically fixes a few things well, and a long list of improvements is just scattered IN-work wearing an ON costume. If your school has named strategic initiatives for the year, those go straight to the top.

Do the design work yourself, because it's yours to do. Your small summer team can help you carry out the work, but the thinking about what to change is the part only you can lead. The quiet building is the rare place you can actually do it.

The principal who works IN all summer comes back rested and caught up to a school that hasn't changed. The principal who works ON it comes back to a school that runs better than the one she left in June. One of them gets a head start. The other gets a do-over.

In the parable, the servant who buried his talent kept it perfectly safe, and he was the only one the master sent away with nothing.

You have weeks ahead of you that most leaders will never get. Don't spend them maintaining the school you have. Spend them building the one your mission is for.

Make it a work-ON summer, not a work-IN summer.