Please help me leave work on time...

[ContractedHours]

Work in a school (admin/pastoral) full time. In so many ways I love my job. The students, the team I work with, the teachers (OK there is the odd exception) and (most) of the parents.

But in the three years I have been there I think I have left on time a handful of times. Always work through lunch.

There is so much to do deadline wise (admissions, new starters, parents evenings, open evenings, census) yet this has to be juggled with daily enquiries, requests, safeguarding issues, etc. Limited people to share the workload with. One similar role in my team - she is the same with no lunchbreaks/working late, so cannot ask her to do more.

I am shit at doing a half-arsed job...I want to do my best for the students/my colleagues etc so I end up finishing a minimum of 30-45 minutes late every day. Often later.

My boss, as she leaves every evening, is telling me to pack up and go home....and not to log on at home all well and good but the stuff needs doing and I cannot do it all 8.30-4.30 and no-one else can do it or has time to do

So this year I am determined to do that --to leave at the end of my contracted hours and not login again until the next day. Ha....it has worked 1 day out of 6 so far!😐

So, I have:
Set a vibrating alarm on my watch to go at 4pm (finish at 4.30pm) to tell me to start packing up
Set a audible alarm on my phone at 4.35pm to tell me to call my son to remind him to get on with his revision (GSCE year)

I am hoping these "nags" will push me out of the door. But am not sure how these alone will help...I need to shift my mindset as well as my end of day time keeping....I need to switch off the "I'll just quickly do this before I leave" mentality.

I earn a measly £21.5k....I am not paid enough to be working like this..

Has anyone else managed to change from always working late to leaving on time? If so, what helped you do that?

TL/DR :
What else can I do to get my arse out of school and not do hours of unpaid overtime

As far as I can see, the only way to get more help employed is to seriously drop the ball, multiple times if necessary.

So don't book the coach if it means staying late. But you will need to keep evidence and track everything you do, so that you can explain exactly why the coach didn't get booked.

Get into the habit of passing the responsibility back up to the manager - so at lunchtime or mid-afternoon drop a quick email to your manager saying "I haven't had time to book coach due to doing [safeguarding tasks 1, 2 and 3], would you like me to do it tomorrow or can you do it today?"

Or email in the morning to say "my to-do list today is copied below - as I won't have time to complete everything what would you like me to drop or defer?"

Ultimately this is your manager's problem, not yours.

I’ve taken to writing my list of tasks on a whiteboard on the wall (obviously there are things that don’t make it to the wall like “answer the phone”) and try to keep it as up to date as possible throughout the day. It invariably gets longer before it gets shorter but I think making your huge list of tasks visible to others is helpful.

You need to get better at pushing back on extra tasks too. When they employed a new person and then gave you XY and Z things to do, you could have said there wouldn’t be time to do all of them. But it’s not too late - now you’ve had a year of it so you can have a sit down chat with your manager(s) and explain which tasks there aren’t time for in either of your workloads.

These workloads haven’t been handed down on a stone tablet from God, they’re just what some other humans reckon is possible. If it’s not possible, the actual “good worker” thing to do is not to kill yourself trying, but to point out that it’s not possible and (ideally) say what’s needed instead. Could be more staff, reassigning work or dumping it altogether!