The routines you set up do not survive a normal school week
You know which routines would help and have set them up more than once. They hold for a fortnight, and then the term takes them.
This is not a question of knowing what to do. You have set up the weekly review, the protected planning time, the walk round at the start of break. Each of them worked for a while and then went, usually during a week that contained a crisis, a run of cover or something nobody could have scheduled. The difficulty is durability rather than design.
Presenting symptoms
- Routines you set up in September are no longer running by the October half term.
- The first thing dropped when a week goes wrong is always the same thing.
- You have restarted the same routine more than once this year.
Possible causes
- The routine may be attached to a part of the week the job regularly takes.
- It may depend on a run of ordinary weeks, which a school term does not reliably provide.
- Nothing may register when it stops, so it lapses without anybody deciding to end it.
- It may not be attached to anything that matters, so it loses every contest with work that is.
It is the first thing given up, because nothing else can move.
Your most useful next step: Look back over recent weeks and identify the part of the week that has historically been least vulnerable to interruption in your role. Move the routine there, fix it to that point, and be explicit about what it produces and where that goes.
Lead behaviours
It survives ordinary weeks and not the hard ones.
Your most useful next step: Design the reduced version now, while things are calm: the ten-minute form that still counts. A routine with no smaller version has only two states, full and abandoned.
Lead behaviours
It stops quietly and nobody notices, including you.
Your most useful next step: Give it one visible marker or accountability point: a recurring diary entry you tick off, a line in a weekly note, or a colleague who expects what it produces. Something has to register the absence.
Lead behaviours
It is not attached to anything that matters.
Your most useful next step: Write down what each routine is actually protecting. Stop deliberately any routine you cannot finish that sentence for, rather than letting it fail again and taking the failure personally.
Lead behaviours
Core behaviours
This scenario is precisely this behaviour failing. What makes a routine last is design rather than willpower: the moment it hangs on, the size it starts at, and whether a shortened version exists.
A routine survives where it is attached to a reliable point in your actual week and the system around it is unambiguous: what it produces, where that goes, and what happens to it when the slot is taken. Vagueness about any of those is what makes a routine easy to lose without noticing.
A routine only wins contests with urgent work when it is visibly connected to something that matters later. Without that connection it is a preference, and preferences lose to crises every time.
A routine with no reduced version has only two states, full and abandoned. Designing the short form while the week is calm is what carries it through the week that is not.
A leader running five routines badly is usually better served by two that hold. Deciding which of them genuinely deserve protecting is what stops the whole set failing together in the first difficult week.
Secondary behaviours
Use this to stop a routine deliberately rather than letting it fail. Leaders carry a surprising amount of guilt about abandoned systems, and a decision to stop costs nothing while a repeated failure costs belief.
Use this where the routine can be attached to something other people rely on. Routines rarely end in a decision; they lapse, and nobody notices for six weeks. A commitment somebody else is expecting survives a bad week considerably better than a private intention does.
A useful first action
Take the routine you have restarted most often this year and work out which week it died in. Whatever was happening that week is the design brief for the version that survives.
Suggested approach
- Identify the routine you have restarted most often, and establish which week it stopped in and what was happening then.
- Look back over recent weeks, identify the part of the week that has historically been least vulnerable to interruption in your role, and move the routine there.
- Design the reduced version now, while things are calm, so that a bad week shortens it rather than ending it.
- Give it one visible marker, so that its absence registers with you or with somebody else.
- Write down what each of your routines protects, and stop deliberately the ones you cannot finish that sentence for.