You Already Have a Routine. You Just Did Not Choose It.
By October your open and close are set either way. Decide them now.
It is 7:12 on a Tuesday in the third week of school. You planned to be at your desk by 7:00 with twenty quiet minutes before the building woke up. Then a parent caught you in the lot about a parent lane change, the front office needed an answer about a sub, and a fourth grade teacher was waiting outside your door with a look you recognized. You sat down at 7:40 with cold coffee and a day already in motion.
You got home at 5:50. Dinner, a practice pickup, a conversation with your spouse you were half in. At 9:40, lying in bed, you remembered the parent meeting at 8:00 tomorrow that you had not prepped. You got up and emailed yourself.
Nothing about that day was a failure. It was a day. But it is the third week it has run this way, and by October it will stop feeling like a string of interruptions. It will feel like the job.
You are already building habits
Most principals treat the first month as too unsettled for routines. Nothing has a rhythm yet, so the plan is to survive September and build the habits once the year finds its feet.
That plan has the order backward. Rhythm is what habits produce. So by the time the year feels settled, the routines are already set, and they were set by whoever reached you first each morning and whatever you were still carrying each night.
You do not get to choose between having habits and not having them. You choose between deciding them and slidinginto them. The first thirty days are when the sliding happens, which is exactly why they are the days to decide. Schools that keep starting over are usually led by people who keep starting over, one unchosen September at a time.
Two routines carry more weight than the rest: how you open the school day and how you close it.
Find the win before you pick the habit
Most habit advice starts with the activity. Pray. Plan. Exercise. Inbox to zero. Do these things and you will lead better.
Start somewhere else. Before you choose a single habit, define the win. When your open routine is finished and the first student walks through the door, how do you want to feel? What do you want to be ready for? When your close routine is finished and you walk into your house, what has to be true?
Answer those questions and the habits nearly pick themselves. Skip them and you will collect other people’s habits and wonder why they do not hold.
The open
Take mine as one example. On my heaviest relational days, the ones stacked with conversations, my open is simple: chat, email, and the task list for the day. Before I talk to anyone.
The win is that nobody who walks up to me today catches me unprepared about something they already sent. I read the email so the conversation can start where the email left off. Without that, I spend the first two minutes asking someone to explain what they already wrote, and then I have an email to file after the fact. Neither is a good use of anyone’s morning.
Notice what the win did to the habit. On a day full of people, that is the open. On a quieter day it still serves me well. I am prepared and the day is planned before anyone reaches me.
So define yours. When the doors open, do you want to be the calmest person in the building? Do you want every staff member you pass to get a real hello instead of a distracted one? Do you want to already know the three things that could go sideways today? Name the win. Then ask what fifteen minutes would have to contain to produce it.
The close
My close has two moves. I check off the tasks for the day, then I read tomorrow’s schedule.
The second move does the real work. Looking at tomorrow pulls everything floating in my head onto paper, where it belongs. The parent meeting I have not prepped. The follow-up I promised. The question I meant to ask the business manager. Each one gets written next to tomorrow’s date, and I walk out knowing what I have committed to and when. My mind is not reminding me of tasks and appointments all evening, because something else is holding them.
The win is that nothing about the school is still riding in my head when I walk through the door at home. The 9:40 thought about the parent meeting gets caught at 4:30 instead.
A principal who never closes the day does not stop working. The work moves to the dinner table, where it shows up as distraction, a shorter fuse, and a spouse who has learned to wait until the school finally leaves the room. Nobody decided that. It was slid into, one unclosed day at a time. The pattern of work and rest was written into creation before anyone had a school to run, and your family is living inside whichever pattern you choose.
This week
Do not wait for October. Take fifteen minutes and answer four questions.
When the first student walks in, how do you want to feel, and what do you want to be ready for? One sentence.
What two or three things, done before anyone reaches you, would produce that? That is your open.
When you walk into your house tonight, what has to be true about the school in your head? One sentence.
What two or three things, done before you leave, would make it true? That is your close.
Run both for ten school days before you judge them. Change the habits as often as you need to. Hold the win.
Somebody is going to write your open and your close this month. Make sure it is you.
