There is too much going on and you need to decide what to stop
The school has more priorities running than it has the capacity to deliver, and something has to be stopped.
The school has more initiatives, projects and priorities running than it can properly resource. Staff are stretched, and work that everyone agrees matters is progressing slowly because attention is spread across too many things. Deciding what to stop is proving harder than deciding what to start.
Presenting symptoms
- Leaders cannot list the school’s current priorities without checking a document.
- Work that was agreed as important is progressing slowly or has quietly stalled.
- Staff describe being busy while being unclear about which task matters most.
Possible causes
- Priorities may have accumulated over time because nothing has ever been formally closed.
- Everything on the list may be genuinely worthwhile, which makes stopping feel like a loss rather than a decision.
- New work may be arriving from outside the school faster than existing work completes.
- There may be no agreed test for what counts as a priority, so nothing can be ruled out.
Nothing has ever been formally closed, so old work is still notionally live.
Your most useful next step: Go through the list and formally close what has already effectively ended, so the real number becomes visible before any new decision is taken.
Lead behaviours
Everything on the list is genuinely worthwhile.
Your most useful next step: Agree the two or three outcomes the school must deliver this year, then judge each item by whether it advances one of them.
Lead behaviours
New demands keep arriving and the school absorbs them.
Your most useful next step: Agree what the school will decline or delay, and apply it to the next request that arrives rather than to the existing list.
Lead behaviours
There is not yet enough evidence to say.
Your most useful next step: List everything currently running alongside its owner and an honest estimate of the time it needs, then take that list to the leadership team.
Lead behaviours
Core behaviours
The work here is subtraction rather than ranking. Naming the main thing is only useful if it licenses removing what is not it.
Without goals the school has genuinely agreed, every item on the list can be defended by someone, and nothing can be stopped.
A lead measure is the practical test of whether a piece of work is moving anything, which turns "this is important" into a question that can actually be answered.
Work that is dropped rather than closed leaves obligations hanging and teaches staff that things here simply fade. Stopping properly protects the credibility of what you keep.
Staff judge the new focus by what appears in the leader’s diary, not by what was announced in briefing.
Secondary behaviours
Where the overload is caused by new demands arriving from outside, declining one is only defensible if the school can say what it is protecting. Values turn a refusal into a principled decision rather than an act of resistance, and they give the leader something to say to the person making the request.
Once the decision is made it needs repeating more often than feels necessary, because people assume the old work is still expected until told otherwise.
Use this where leaders cannot yet agree on what is genuinely running or what it is costing.
A useful first action
List everything currently running alongside who is accountable for it and roughly how much of their week it needs. The total is usually the argument.
Suggested approach
- Build the real list: every initiative, its owner, its honest status and its time cost.
- Agree the two or three outcomes the school must deliver this year, before looking at the list again.
- Decide what stops, what pauses and what is protected, and record the decision.
- Close the stopped work properly. Tell people, cancel the meetings, and remove it from documents and agendas.
- Repeat the new focus regularly, and check after a term whether the protected work has actually moved.