10 Tips for Managing Time as a School Counselor

As school counselors, we know there are SO many things that are constantly pulling us in different directions – juggling lessons, groups, admin tasks, supporting parents and teachers, special events during the even-busier times of the year, the list goes on and on! This often leads to us feeling behind all the time, completely exhausted, and like we aren’t making the difference we want to be making.

This is why we want to talk about managing time as a school counselor. Not because we want to give you “hacks” or “tricks” (I don’t think those truly exist), but because I want you to have proactive and reactive strategies that will help you feel better and work efficiently. When we employ these actionable time management strategies, we are more able and available to provide direct services to our students, which means we are better able to meet their needs.

Proactive Strategies

These strategies are all about avoiding that overwhelm and stress that comes from falling behind (or feeling like we are falling behind). By employing these strategies and organizing our days ahead of time (as much as possible), we reduce last-minute stress, stay more focused, and create a more balanced approach to our roles, ultimately benefiting both ourselves and the students we support.

Templates

For things you do regularly, like group recap emails, you can create a template. This way, you are not writing from scratch each day or week. You just have to update the details! This is especially helpful if you are running a few different groups and need to email families and/or teachers regularly.

For example: “This week in our ___________ group, we focused on __________________. The students practiced this by doing _____________ and ______________. To reinforce this learning, ask your child __________________ or try _________________!”

An email template might just be text you have saved that you copy and paste, but some email programs like Outlook have this feature built in.

Templates are also helpful for things like needs assessments. If you send them out more than once a year or even once per year, it’s much easier to have a template than it is to have to recreate it each time!

In addition to emails and needs assessments, you might also make templates for:

• Behavior Plans and Behavior Tracking Data (like the one in our Behavior Intervention Guide)
• Referral Forms
• 504 Meeting Checklists
• Meeting Agendas/Notes
• Referral Letters (for those of you who may have students applying to their next schools)

Create Your Schedule

Your schedule is the foundation for managing time as a school counselor (and overall organization). One way to help manage it is to include everything, including task time, in your calendar/planner. Having time set aside for all of your tasks will save you the stress of having to find time to do it because it has to get done one way or another. Here are a few things you might want to include:

• Prep lessons/groups
• Write emails or making non-emergent phone calls,
• Planning for any special upcoming events (career week, holiday assistance programs, etc.)
• Check In/Check Out mentee meetings

Things like class lessons and recurring meetings are a big part of our schedule so, at the beginning of the year, decide when these will occur and try your best to keep it consistent. This cuts down on back and forth communication with teachers trying to find a time to come in once the busyness of the school year kicks in.

Set Appropriate Boundaries

Not only does your schedule help you stay organized and efficient, but it is also a really helpful tool when it comes to setting boundaries. When our calendars are full, it’s easier to say, “I can’t, I have __________.” or “If I take that on, I’ll have to cancel __________. Is that how you want me to prioritize my time tomorrow morning?”

When you are able to decide ahead of time where those lines are for you, you aren’t stuck making the tough decision in the moment or saying “yes” when in reality, you don’t have the time. That being said, boundaries will be different for everyone and may be impacted by your administration and their expectations and your relationship with them. Your ability to maintain them may not always be in your control, but there are some things that are!

Your boundaries might be something you have to set out-right with others (in a respectful way), or they might look like behaviors you engage in more personally.

Some examples of setting boundaries with your time might look like:

• A parent asking you to provide long-term, individual counseling → “At school, we provide short-term counseling, but if after that we feel that your child needs more let’s discuss some of the awesome outside counselors in our area!” 
• Leaving your work computer at home (maybe for you, this is every day, or it could even just be on Fridays!) and/or not having your work email connected to your phone.
• Teacher calling you every time a child in their classroom is getting upset → “I have worked with this student on using the tools in the calm corner in your classroom. They really enjoy using the sequin pillow and the breathing mazes. Can you guide them towards those tools? If they aren’t ready to join the class after about 15 minutes, you can give me a call back, and I’ll come help.”
• You are frequently getting asked to do tasks that are outside your scope → Consider talking to your faculty/staff at the beginning of the year and outline the role of the school counselor. You can use our editable meet the school counselor presentation!
• Admin calls to tell you about a problem with one of your students that is currently under control, but requires your follow up → “I have teachers and students are counting on me for a lesson right now, but I will call you when I’m done to get caught up and see how I can help.”

Use Consistent Structures

When you are preparing for lessons or groups, instead of reinventing the wheel (or telling ourselves we need to reinvent the wheel), save yourself some precious time by keeping your structure consistent.

It can hugely cut down on our planning time when we already have the basics ready to go. When we take less time to plan, it helps us stay on top of the million and five other things we are responsible for! Want to read more about the structures for groups and lessons we recommend and what they look like? We have a post about group structure and a post about lesson structure!

At TRC, our resources usually follow a structure like the ones below, and maybe it is helpful for you, too. The structure that you choose should work for your group/class and for you!

Create a Curriculum Map

Batch Tasks

It can be really challenging for our brains to move from one task to another, and that means we will spend time trying to switch gears and (re)focus on whatever we are trying to attend to. To minimize that, you can try batching your tasks. This means purposefully scheduling similar tasks at the same time. Maybe you try having all of your classroom lessons on the same day, or groups or individual sessions on the same day. Doing this means you are “in the zone” and have all of your supplies at the ready to rock those tasks back to back (to back to back because we are BUSY people).

There will certainly be times when crises come up and those have to take precedence, but when you are managing time as a school counselor, being proactive and batching your tasks can truly help on those “normal” days!

Have A Go-To

As school counselors, we are often looking for our own resources and trainings, and that can mean a hundred tabs open on your computer and lots of time wasted. So instead of endlessly Googling or scouring sites like Pinterest, it can be really helpful (and time-saving) to have one place that you go to and trust to provide you with what you need to feel successful.

If you don’t have that yet, consider checking out Your Counseling Compass! We offer ready-made lessons, tools and templates, professional development materials, and a supportive community to lean on. Whether you’re a new counselor or a seasoned professional, Your Counseling Compass aims to make your work more effective and manageable, allowing you to focus on what truly matters—helping students thrive.

Reactive Strategies

Sometimes, no matter how many proactive strategies we try, our jobs and lives get full. That is when you might consider trying some of these more responsive strategies!

Get Creative

Usually when a student is referred or self-refers, we pull them into our office and use all of our structure and our tools and games, and it can be great, but time-consuming. So, while these conversations are a necessary task for us to take on, we can get creative with the “how” to help with managing time as a school counselor.

Not all conversations have to happen in your office so to cut down on travel time (especially if you are on a larger campus), what are some other spots you can use that are closer to wherever the student is? Is there a cozy hallway spot or an empty lunch table, or maybe a nook in the library or a quiet place on the playground? This might require that you carry some small tools with you, but it can be totally worth it to buy yourself some extra time!

Another way to accomplish this time-saving strategy is to do whatever opener or check-in that you planned while you walk. A “walk and talk”, some may say. It may only save you a few minutes, but those minutes are precious when things get busy!

Use a Priority Matrix

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of tasks that demand our attention sometimes. With so many things competing for your focus, how do you decide what to tackle first? That’s where a priority matrix comes in handy when managing time as a school counselor! This tool helps you sort your to-dos by urgency and impact, making it easier to identify what needs to be done now, what can wait, and what might not need your attention at all.

As you see, the left is for how urgent or time sensitive something is. The higher something is, the more urgent it is. Then imagine on the bottom is for the impact something will have or how important it is. The farther to the right, the bigger impact it will have (on students, you, the school) or the more important it is.

All of your tasks, your duties, your to-dos will all land somewhere inside this matrix:

• In the bottom left corner of this matrix is the “not urgent and not super important” quadrant. Any task that falls in here can either be skipped entirely, or at least pushed to last, or as you’ll see, “delete it”.
• The top left corner is the “time sensitive but low impact”, or “schedule it” box. Here will be tasks that you need to make time for, but not the most important on your list of things to complete.
• In the top right corner of the matrix is the quadrant with the highest importance and highest urgency, so anything here should be done soon, if not immediately, hence the “do it” label.
• In the bottom right corner of the matrix are the important, but not urgent, tasks.

Some tasks are more clear-cut or universal for where they’re placed on the matrix. Others are more context-specific, and only you can correctly label them. When you’re having a moment of overwhelm, it can be helpful to list out all of your to-dos and then identify where they would fall in the matrix in order to determine how and when to tackle them to give yourself a plan and some peace of mind.

Let’s look at where some tasks may fall:

• A child has made a statement regarding abuse at home → “do it”, because that is high in urgency and high in importance
• Completing a grant application for an external speaker you’ve never heard of → time-sensitive, but low for impact, so “schedule it”
• Your admin tells you they heard about another school doing a “book swap” among staff → this could fall into either “delete it” or “delegate it” depending on how impactful you think it will be!

If this idea of a priority matrix itself sounds overwhelming, then you can do an even simpler version of this – create your to-do lists as two separate lists or columns. One is “must do” and one is “can do.”

Delegate

There are some things that only we can do, however, there are likely also a handful of things that end up on our plate that could be done by another adult in the building.

To help with managing time as a school counselor, before you tackle something yourself think about some of these questions:

• Is there another member of the admin team that can take this on? For example, if you are running a CICO program. Perhaps, there are other adults who can serve as mentors for your students.
• Is there something I can do to prepare teachers or paras to support the regulation or behavior in their classrooms? This could look like providing supplies for calm corners or sharing ideas for brain breaks or circle questions for building classroom community.
• Can I somehow involve students in this initiative? Maybe you were tasked with an after school club, consider whether some of your older students could take on some of the responsibilities, like collecting sign-ups, coming up with activity ideas, or being peer leaders within the club. This not only lightens your load but also empowers students and builds leadership skills!

To help yourself with this (and thus, better manage your time), you might also consider some work on the front end. Maybe through a training at the beginning of the school year (like this trauma training or this de-escalation training). Doing these will empower other staff/faculty members to take care of situations that you don’t necessarily need to always be called for.

Combine Classes

Depending on how many classes you are responsible for, teaching SEL lessons can take up a huge amount of time. If you find yourself in an especially busy season, you might consider combining classes within grade levels – unless you are in the specials rotation, then feel free to ignore this tip.

Now, this might sound like a nightmare to have like 50 kids in one class, but it can actually be really successful and save you anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes – win, win! For this to be successful, you might have to change up your lesson a bit. You can re-think how students are sitting, how you structure movement activities or small group work, or what materials you might need (or not need).

If you’re finding yourself really stuck, you can even record a mini-lesson to have teachers show their students instead of teaching it “live”. You can accompany this video with a little practice activity, too.

As school counselors, it’s easy to feel like there’s never enough time in the day to get everything done. But by implementing both proactive and reactive time management strategies, you can regain control and make your work more efficient and manageable. Proactive strategies can help you stay organized and minimize stress before it builds up. While reactive strategies ensure that even when things don’t go as planned, you have a system in place to handle it effectively. Taking the time to be intentional about how you manage your time doesn’t just help you—it helps your students too. When you can manage your time well, you’re able to provide the support and services your students need, and in turn, feel more confident and fulfilled in your role as a counselor. You’ve got this!