11 Crucial Tips for Teacher Work-Life Balance

The official ‘school day’ hours tend to only make up 30-40 hours per week, but anyone who’s worked as a teacher knows that you can easily spend upwards of 80+ hours every week if you’re not intentional about putting limits on it.

Teaching is a meaningful and rewarding career, which is part of why it’s so hard for many of us to draw boundaries with it. We feel guilty when we draw lines, with worries about how it may take away from our students, or judgements we face from colleagues or admin if we put ourselves first.

But the truth is – the more you neglect yourself, the more risk you are of burnout in the near or distant future; which is just as harmful for you as it is to your students.

They say that the first few years of a teacher’s career are the hardest. But it’s also true that 46% of new teachers quit teaching within the first 5 years; universal across English-speaking countries. (See data here.)

What is the difference between teachers who quit early in their careers, versus those who went on to have fulfilling, lifelong careers as a teacher?

The teachers who make it through the first 5-10 years and stick with teaching long-term are either:

a) people who work ‘too hard’, and often neglect other areas of their life
b) just ‘getting by’ and not necessarily happy
b) have created systems of healthy work-life balance from the very start, and as a result, are able to experience more enjoyment in their careers

Both a and b will lead to areas in your personal life suffering, and possibly burnout, which

Ideally, you want your teaching career to be:

The advice below may sound harsh, especially if you’re the kind of person who feels guilty about not putting 110% into your job. But, I believe that they will make you a better teacher and a happier person in the long run.

So, let’s jump in – the best tips for achieving teacher work-life balance!

Ways to Achieve the Best Teacher Work-Life Balance

1. Treat your health as a necessity

Your health needs to be treated with the same necessity as refuelling your car, getting groceries or taking the garbage out.

If you don’t do the above things, it will be hard to move forward – but this goes the same if you aren’t getting adequate:

As a teacher, it’s so easy to get all consumed with work and give up one of the four things above. (For me, it was exercise I often neglected, and sometimes nutrition.)

Similar to how your car will break down if you don’t look after it, you will too without putting your health and wellbeing first.

2. Decide where you will draw the line with work

The best advice I ever received as a new teacher was from a mentor who told me “You could work 24 hours a day at this job if you wanted to. You need to decide where to draw the line.”

Teaching has the potential to be an all-consuming career, and for that reason, you need to make a concerted effort to limit the amount of time you spend on it.

If you don’t decide where to draw the line, then you’ll likely end up working much more than you intend to.

Sometimes it’s one thing to make a limit, but much harder to navigate this demanding career while sticking to it. Some of the advice below should help you set reasonable limits that you can commit to, for better work-life balance.

Pro Tip: I recommend using AI tools to streamline some of the tedious aspects of your job, such as generating rubrics, and quizzes, and even doing the base grading for student work.

3. Establish ‘Office Hours’ and stick to them

Decide on a schedule which will be your teacher ‘office hours’ These hours will be the time frame in which you will do your parent communication – reading and responding to emails, making phone calls, etc.

Outside of these hours, you don’t look at or respond to any kind of work emails.

Even if your typical school day runs from 9:00 am – 3:30 pm, you could make your office hours during the first half of the day only (something like 8:30am – 12:00pm.)

I have known many teachers who used a system like this, and it helped them stay focused and draw good boundaries with work.

Be sure to inform parents of your office hours through email, or class newsletter. You could even let colleagues know of these boundaries too; by sharing that you only read and respond to emails in the mornings.

This way, parents and colleagues don’t expect you to reply to emails right away or after school when you want to go home; they know that you will answer them the following morning at the start of your office hours.

Pro Tip: I let my parents know that depending on the email and my schedule, it may take 24+ hours to get a response from me through email. I said I would do my best to respond faster to anything urgent, but that this would be how long it would generally take me. They seem to understand this. I would recommend an approach like this so that parents don’t expect quick responses from you all the time.

4. Have a strict limit on ‘work’ outside of school

The amount of work that teachers ‘take home’ with them varies. Many teachers struggle to draw a line on how much work they take home, and how much of their personal time they spend on it.

There were periods when I was doing around 3 hours of work in the evenings.

I recommend that you do no more than 2-3 hours per week of school work outside of school.

You need the time outside of school to recharge and connect with other areas of life besides teaching.

I recommend setting aside one hour one evening per week, plus an hour on the weekend. Whatever you decide, commit to stick to it – and don’t go overtime!

Bonus: Create a schedule for work outside work, and stick to it!

I recommend having a schedule that determines the amount of time that you’ll be spending on work outside of school.

If you get into the habit of multitasking (ie: marking papers during your son’s hockey game, or in front of the TV) then it becomes harder and harder to turn your teacher brain ‘off’ and fully engage with your personal life.

You could agree for example, that you work on ‘school’ work every Monday and Wednesday nights from 7:00-8:00pm, and on Sundays from 10:00 am-11:00 am. (This would give you 3 hours during the week outside of school to get extra things done.)

Make a deal with yourself that outside of this schedule that you create, you don’t do anything school-related. You read a book, listen to a podcast, exercise, or text a friend.

You need and deserve that personal time, so make sure that you’re getting it.

5. Never check work email outside of work

Although you may do some school-related work outside of work, I would be very careful about when and how often you look at your work email.

I know this is hard, but trust me on this – opening your staff email outside of work will only make it harder to disengage with work when you’re at home.

Getting into the habit of not checking it will allow you to keep your work and personal life separate.

Be sure to turn off the work email notifications on your phone, and if possible, don’t even get into the habit of accessing your work email from your phone.

6. Maintain parent communication boundaries

I live in a small town where it wouldn’t be super uncommon for you to already be Facebook friends with some of the parents of kids in your class, because of knowing them from before.

If this is the case for you, I would draw a clear boundary on people reaching out to you as the ‘teacher’ through text, or social media if they already know how to get ahold of you through those means.

This includes dealing with difficult parents who insist on being on your case – draw boundaries.

If you know any of your student’s parents personally, tell them that any school-related questions should be sent to your work email so that you can keep track of it better, and keep your personal and work life separate.

Pro Tip: Never give parents your personal cellphone number, or add them as friends on socials.

7. Stay connected to your hobbies and interests

I went to a few stress management workshops that were aimed at teachers and run by a former physician who specialized in mental health.

One of the activities we were asked to do was to make a list of things we enjoy doing, outside of our responsibilities.

Even if you enjoy some of your responsibilities, such as teaching, being a parent or walking the dog, try to dig deeper to what things you do purely for enjoyment.

Some of the things I wrote down were:

• reading
• hiking
• painting
• swimming
• yoga
• travel

They say that you can lose yourself in being a parent, but this can also be true of teaching (if you let it!)

Similar to tip # 1 about making your physical health a priority, you should also make sure you are making time for your hobbies.

Depending on what kinds of commitments you have outside of work, this is harder for some than others. If you have dependents, it will of course be harder to have time for them, and teaching, and your hobbies and interests. (I know this from being a single parent teacher for several years.)

But, whatever you do – don’t neglect your hobbies completely. Spend anywhere from 1-2 hours a week on one of the things that you enjoy. (Ideally, not the doom scrolling on social media.) Something that brings you real joy, and makes you feel like you.

Committing to your hobby is an important way of taking care of yourself, destressing, and maintaining a work-life balance in a demanding job.

6. Be a minimalist teacher

I have seen some teachers with so many teaching supplies and resources that it occupies quite a bit of their personal space at home.

Some of them have entire shelves and endless bins in their homes and garages – space that they could be using for other things.

I recommend cutting down on this, because it’s important to keep your work and personal life as separate as possible.

• Digitize your resources. Have a Google Drive folder where you store everything by subject or grade. That way, if you teach it again, you already have those resources to pull from.
• Don’t go overboard on decorations or items for your classroom. Some of them may look nice, and yes you can reuse them. But try to draw a line so that you aren’t spending a full paycheque and monopolizing an entire section of your house with stuff

7. Limit personal spending on your classroom

You’re not a bad teacher if you try to spend as little as possible. Other professionals are never expected to spend their own money.

Part of having a good teacher work-life balance is having the money for things you enjoy outside of work.

Some teachers spend over $1,000 per year on their classrooms and resources for their students. I won’t get into a political debate about lack of government, I’ll just say – you can do a lot with little.

8. Plan lunches

Our schools were located far from any food establishment, so 90% of teachers brought packed lunches.

It can be easy to neglect the time it takes to plan and prepare lunches that are nourishing and satisfying, and end up getting stuck with low-quality lunches that aren’t very filling or healthy.

Part of this falls under the category of prioritizing your physical health. I recommend planning out a few different lunch variations so that you always have the ingredients available.

Here are some great ideas of teacher lunches (that don’t need to be reheated.)

Have non-perishable nourishing snacks, such as protein bars and dried fruit as a part of your teacher survival kit at work

9. Let go of being a perfectionist

The teaching career seems to attract a lot of perfectionists, but perfectionism likely isn’t doing any favours for your work-life balance.

In the book Hidden Potential, psychologist Adam Grant teaches us that perfection actually does not correlate with better work performance.

This is because perfectionists over-work themselves to get every detail perfect but sometimes don’t see the big picture.

People who achieve greater things tend to be people who know which things are important, and which are not.

So, if you want to be a great teacher (while still having a healthy work-life balance) then don’t overwork yourself trying to get every detail about your work perfect.

Instead:

• focus on a few main things that need to be top-notch, rather than expecting everything to be
• foster a growth mindset with yourself as a teacher, just like you would with your students
• do as much as possible (within your office hours) for everything else, without going overboard.

Side note: I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Hidden Potential (or listening to it on Audible, like I did.) There are some fascinating details about teaching and education, plus advice that would help teachers who struggle with imposter syndrome, and perfectionism.

10. Normalize taking breaks from work

Share with your colleagues your plans for taking breaks from work and focusing on your well-being and personal life. Be a part of making this more normal.

I remember a colleague at the school I used to work at; she shared that she wasn’t doing any work during the winter break or the March break. It seemed like almost a bold statement, since people rarely shared that they would refuse to do work on a weekend or holiday.

“Those are the breaks that I’ve earned, and I’m not going to be doing any schoolwork during them,” I remember her boldly declaring.

This is an example of a boundary that my colleague was drawing with work, and prioritizing her health and personal life – and there’s nothing wrong with it. If anything, it should be more normal.

Share with your teacher friends what boundaries you are putting in place to ensure your health and work-life balance. This helps you be apart of normalizing the need for teachers to draw boundaries with work and have a life outside of school.

11. Establish a clear hierarchy of priorities

Know what things are most important, and keep that at the forefront of your mind. This way, if school is starting to overtake your life, you can remind yourself where it falls on your list of priorities in life. (Hint – it’s not at the top!)

Think of your priorities as a solar system, with the sun in the middle, and other mental health and well-being as the sun. Without the sun, the other priorities will not thrive.

Your priorities should ideally look something like this:

1. Your wellbeing – mental and physical health
2. Loved ones (whether you have a partner, kids, or your parents – they come next, after you)
3. Career

You need to put yourself and your well-being (the sun) first if you want your other priorities to get the care and attention they need.

Neglecting yourself will only dim the efforts you can put into anything else.

Final Thoughts on Teacher Work-Life Balance

I hope that the tips above help you implement systems in your life to make sure that your well-being is coming first, and your career second; that it reduces your stress levels and gives you more time for what gives your life meaning.

As a teacher who struggled with overwhelm and burnout, I believe that the only way to make a teaching career sustainable for the long term is to establish a healthy work-life balance. The sooner you start drawing boundaries with work, the sooner other areas of your life will fall into place too; making you more efficient at your job and feeling more fulfilled in your career and outside of it too.