If you’ve been teaching for quite some time or you’ve worked within the education sector, you may be familiar with back-to-school burn-out. This occurs when you’re particularly stressed, overworked or tired – and you’ve started to notice a toll on your physical or mental health when returning to an education environment. Some key symptoms of back-to-school burnout are:

• Feeling exhausted, regardless of how long you rest or sleep
• Low motivation
• Increased irritability
• Heightened frustration
• Lack of inspiration or creativity
• Loss of confidence
• Work related aches and pains
• Struggling to maintain conversations or thoughts
• Lack of self-care or self-awareness

Here at Lyreco our Education Specialists have supported the education sector for decades with classroom and workplace supplies. We wanted to further share our expertise with you with our top tips to avoid back to school burn-out.

Prioritise what’s important

When returning to the education environment, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with the amount of work you’ve come back to after school holidays. With a new curriculum, new set of students and potentially a new classroom – there’s lots of new practices that need to be put in place, and this can often feel a little stressful. By prioritising what’s important, you’ll be able to spend your time on what matters most – and you won’t feel like you’ve got a mountain of tasks to work through.

Top Tip: Create a list of all of your tasks, along with any deadlines – and then break down your list into more actionable, granular tasks. This will help spread the workload into more achievable activities.

Automation is key

Now that you’ve spent some time collating your tasks and breaking them down, you’re already one step closer to the glorious world of automation. By using platforms such as Monday.com, Trello or Asana, you’re able to organise your tasks into a manageable format, and review deadlines through calendars and gantt charts. Think of these platforms as an extension to your diary: you’re also able to communicate with team members, track activity, and run reports based on your tasks with little effort required – this gives you the flexibility to focus on work, and less on organisation.

Stop wasting time creating presentations and documents

There’s a bountiful selection of free tools available online such as Canva, TED-Ed and Stencil, which will help you produce effective, eye-catchy documents with ease. Gone are the days where you are constantly creating presentations and documents from scratch. As an example, Canva has 2,245 presentation templates, and over 350 classroom décor templates to help aid your needs in the education environment.

Top Tip: If you don’t want to stray away from core programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Word, and would prefer to create documents with these, you can set up a template and use this when creating documents to increase speed and efficiency.

Celebrate the small victories

One of the most rewarding aspects of teaching is seeing students retain knowledge and progress academically – there’s no denying that every teacher does a silent ‘inner cheer’ of success when this happens. It’s important to relish in these moments, and celebrate the small wins, rather than focusing on the bigger challenges. As they say, enjoy the process as much as the results. Praise, reward and share success with students, colleagues and the people around you.

To find out more about how Lyreco can support your education needs, click here.

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