Beyond Time Management: Why Educators Need to Manage Their Energy

What educators can learn from athletes—and from yoga—about creating a more sustainable way to teach

Teachers are very good at managing time. They live by the school calendar, dividing their year into semesters, quarters, and days while scheduling lesson planning, grading, email, extra duties, professional development, and family responsibilities. For many teachers, the bells signaling passing periods ring whether they're in school or not.

As demands increase, teachers do what they've always done: find ways to become more organized, efficient, and productive.

But there's a limit to what better time management can accomplish.

For too long, we've confused professional excellence with unlimited capacity.

Why Time Management Isn't Enough for Teachers

Time management helps us decide when we're going to do something. But it doesn't account for whether we have the physical, mental, or emotional capacity to do it well.

That's where energy management comes in.

Energy management is the practice of recognizing the physical, mental, and emotional capacity we have available—and making intentional decisions about when to expend, conserve, and restore that energy.

For educators, this means organizing work not only around the hours available in the day, but also around the varying demands that teaching places on the body and mind.

Athletes understand this intuitively. Sustaining performance requires balancing effort with recovery.

Educators can learn something from them.

What Educators Can Learn From Athletes About Energy Management

In her article, “Beyond the Burnout: Realigning Instructional Models for Teacher Sustainability,” published in All Things PLC, educator Kendra Miller shares how she learned this lesson the hard way.

An avid runner, Miller developed a stress fracture after increasing both her mileage and speed too quickly. What she overlooked was something experienced athletes understand: they don't train at maximum intensity every day. They balance harder efforts with easier ones and incorporate intentional recovery to maximize performance while reducing the risk of injury.

Miller discovered a lesson she could apply to teaching.

She examined her personal and professional schedule to identify activities that required more energy and those that required less. Using the gradual release of responsibility instructional model, she organized her week around more energy-intensive, teacher-directed lessons early in the week, followed by collaborative and independent student activities that required less of her energy toward the end of the week.

She also adjusted her schedule around family commitments and made time for recovery.

Miller demonstrated that teachers can maintain rigorous learning goals while being intentional about how and when they expend their energy.

Her experience offers an important reminder: sustainable performance isn't simply about how much we accomplish. It's also about recognizing the energy we have available and making thoughtful choices about how we use it.

When we organize based on time management principles, we ask, “How do I fit everything in?”

When we organize based on energy management principles, we ask, “What energy do I realistically have available for the tasks on my calendar?”

Yoga invites us to go a step further by asking:

“What is happening within me right now?”

How Yoga Builds Awareness of Our Energy

Teaching demands more than our time. It requires physical stamina, sustained attention, emotional presence, and the ability to respond thoughtfully to others.

And our capacity isn't static.

It changes from day to day, and even hour to hour.

Perhaps you slept poorly. Perhaps your first-period class required enormous emotional energy. Perhaps you're carrying something difficult in your personal life.

Yoga invites us to notice how these experiences show up in our bodies.

We might become aware of tension in our shoulders, changes in our breathing, a racing heart, or a sense of fatigue.

In modern science, the ability to perceive signals originating within the body is called interoception.

The yogic principle of Svadhyaya, or self-study, similarly invites us to observe ourselves with curiosity rather than judgment.

As we develop this awareness, we begin to recognize what depletes our energy, what restores it, and how we can respond more intentionally to our changing needs.

Awareness gives us an opportunity to make more intentional choices.

Small Ways Educators Can Manage Their Energy During the School Day

We may not be able to change our schedules, but we can sometimes change how we approach what's on them.

That might look like:

• Pausing to take a few conscious breaths before responding to a challenging email

• Taking a brief walk without our phones

• Noticing where we're holding unnecessary tension in the body

• Sharing how we're feeling with a trusted colleague

• Creating a moment of quiet between demanding parts of the day

• Consciously transitioning out of the school day rather than carrying its demands directly into the evening

These are small choices, but they reflect an important shift: from simply managing our time to recognizing and responding to our energy needs.

They also help us practice a skill that can be difficult in a profession built around caring for others: noticing our own internal state before we reach complete depletion.

Individual Practices Can't Fix Systemic Problems

None of these practices eliminates the systemic pressures educators face.

Yoga should never be used to suggest that teachers can breathe their way out of understaffing, excessive workloads, inadequate resources, unrealistic expectations, or unhealthy workplace cultures.

Teacher well-being is not solely an individual responsibility.

Schools and systems have a responsibility to create working conditions in which educators can thrive.

What yoga can provide within that larger picture is a valuable set of skills: the ability to notice when we are approaching our limits, recognize when to expend or conserve energy, and develop practices that help us recover.

Sustainable Teaching Requires Both Effort and Recovery

Educators deserve permission to think about their work in the same way athletes approach training.

Continually working at maximum intensity doesn't produce peak performance.

Eventually, it produces exhaustion and increases the risk of burnout.

Sustainable excellence requires periods of effort and recovery.

At SteadyMind Institute, we believe yoga can help educators develop the awareness and skills needed to sustain themselves and their careers—not simply through the physical postures most people associate with yoga, but through breathwork, meditation, attention, nervous-system regulation, and the deeper philosophy of the practice.

Because the goal isn't to become better at tolerating exhaustion.

It's to create a more sustainable way of pursuing excellence.

Frequently Asked Questions About Energy Management for Teachers

What is energy management for teachers?

Energy management is the practice of recognizing the physical, mental, and emotional capacity you have available and making intentional decisions about when to expend, conserve, and restore that energy. For teachers, it means considering not just what fits into the school day, but what different responsibilities require from you.

How is energy management different from time management?

Time management focuses on fitting tasks into available hours. Energy management considers the amount and type of capacity those tasks require. While everyone has the same number of hours in a day, our physical, cognitive, and emotional energy can change throughout the day and week.

How can yoga help teachers manage stress and energy?

Yoga develops awareness of the body, breath, thoughts, and emotions. Practices including movement, breathwork, meditation, attention, and self-study can help educators notice signs of stress or depletion and respond more intentionally rather than simply pushing through them.

Can yoga prevent teacher burnout?

Yoga can support self-awareness, stress management, nervous-system regulation, and well-being, but teacher burnout is also influenced by factors such as workload, staffing, resources, leadership, workplace culture, and unrealistic expectations. Individual practices should complement—not replace—organizational efforts to create sustainable working conditions for educators.

Help Your Educators Find Their Steady

Interested in helping your educators manage their energy, sustain their well-being, and thrive professionally? Contact Us.

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This article was inspired in part by Kendra Miller, “Beyond the Burnout: Realigning Instructional Models for Teacher Sustainability,” All Things PLC, Volume 10, Issue 2. (Print version)