The Summer You Finally Stopped

A Personal Reflection

You take the first real week off you’ve had in three years. No laptop. No district emails forwarded to your phone. Your family drives to a cabin four hours away. On the second day, you realize you don’t know what to do with yourself. On the third day, you start to understand why.

School leadership is a relentless job. The year doesn’t stop at 3:30 and it doesn’t stop in June. Superintendents send emails in July. Parents call in August. Facilities issues don’t respect the academic calendar. And most school leaders never fully step away, which means most of them never fully recover.

Burnout in school leadership is not a character flaw. It’s a structural outcome of a job that was designed to consume. The principal who is exhausted by October is not weak. She’s responding rationally to an irrational demand load.

But exhaustion is not inevitable if you protect against it deliberately.

Take the time off. Really take it! Set an auto-reply. Identify who covers urgent situations and tell your district who that is. Give yourself at least one week, ideally two, where you are genuinely unavailable. Not guilt-available. Not one-email-a-day-available. Unavailable.

What you find in that space is not laziness. It’s perspective. The problem you’ve been spinning on for six weeks often resolves itself in three days of distance. The decision you’ve been avoiding becomes clear when you’re not surrounded by the noise that obscures it.

You are the instrument of your school’s leadership. If the instrument is worn down, nothing you do with it is at full capacity. Rest is professional preparation, not an absence from the job.

TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE

Rest is not a reward for finishing. It’s a requirement for leading.

School leaders who don’t protect genuine recovery time diminish their own capacity over the course of a career. Build at least one true week of disconnection into your summer. Tell your district in advance. Set up coverage. Then step away without apology. The leader who comes back rested makes better decisions, reads people more accurately, and sustains the work longer. That is a professional responsibility, not a personal luxury.

Until next time — the chair is yours.