Balance Being a Teacher, Teacherpreneur, and Your Family Life

5 strategies to develop work-life balance for the practicing teacher and teacherpreneur who also wants to spend time with family.

Being a teacher and caring for our families is hard enough, let alone being a teacherprenur as well. Teaching is physically and emotionally draining. There have been days when I’ve been too tired to drive home, let alone do anything else. It felt like my career was taking over my life. I decided that I needed something creative to excite me. When I realized that I could create teaching resources, make them beautiful and share them with other teachers, I could hardly contain my joy.

The problem though, was how do I find the time to develop my resources? Here’ are my top 5 tips for balancing being a teacher, teacherpreneur and taking care of my family.

Before we get started, you’ll need the following: a journal, planner and a pen. You can also use a virtual planner like Google Calendar. We’re going to create a plan for at least one week.

1. Teaching

Everyone’s job is different, but I teach from Monday tp Friday. I need to be at school by 8am at the latest. I typically leave at around 4pm but because I have a baby, I know that I need to spend more time in school planning instead of at home, so I need to add on another hour. You’ll also need to block out travel time, so in my planner, I’ll schedule 7:15am-6pm.

During that period of time, make a note of all of your lesson planning times. Block out the times when you have a prep, extra time in the morning and when your students leave your classroom at the end of the school day.

Let’s add one ore point in there, because if you really want to be a teacherpreneur, you may need to find some extra time to work on planning for your job at school, so that you can work on your business at home. Choose a couple of recesses and lunches where you can eat with your children but plan when they’re outside playing. I’m not telling you to give them all up because it’s important to connect with other teachers and you need to be flexible for IEP and parent meetings. So please don’t go overboard with this part.

2. Family

We started with teaching, because there’s a fairly consistent schedule to follow. With your family, block out all of the times when you share a meal together or when you need to attend events, and so forth. Be mindful of any chores, appointments or homework checks you may need to do if you have little ones.

3. Teacherpreneur

For this part, you need to figure out if you’re a morning or a night person. I prefer working in the night once my baby is asleep. I try to keep 10-11pm time for product creation. Slot it some time EVERY night. If this is too much, give yourself one or two days a week off but really put in the time on the other days. If you give yourself an hour, then spend 45 minutes on product creation and 15 on marketing ONCE you’ve uploaded your product. Advertising is important as no one will see your products if they don’t know it exists. Slot in your advertising and responding to messages time in your planner.

4. Personal Space

Between juggling your teaching career, being a teacherpreneur and spending time with your family and friends, it’s important that you find time for yourself. Even if you only manage 5 minutes a day, schedule some time when you get home from work to regroup. You may also want to do this after you finish working on your business so that you can rest. Indulge in something you enjoy, like reading, having tea, going out with friends, watching a show, and so much more. Keep this time sacred for yourself. It will help you focus better and be more creative.

5. Plan It

The final part to making sure you stay organized, is to make time to plan. At some point on the weekend or during the week, set aside some time to plan for the following week. Give yourself at least 1-2 hours. This can be broken up into segments so you don’t have to do it all in one sitting, but it works best if you can get as much done without any interruptions.

Final Thoughts

Now that you’ve put everything into your calendar AND set reminders for yourself, pick an area to start working on and add the rest in time so that you don’t feel overwhelmed. I hope this helps you find some joy and peace in your day, while being super productive.

Thank you so much for joining me. I would love to hear about your progress in the comments below. For now though, grab your FREE planning sheets for this post and enjoy dreaming big and gaining momentum.

While the above roadmap is a great starting point for goal-setting, the following, which is a more comprehensive guide, will go into more depth and will focus on my 6 step goal-setting plan for success.