If you ask an educator what gets in the way of their wellbeing, most will answer quickly. They usually know what would help, but they simply do not have the time to do it.
Many schools see this as just another obstacle to work around. They offer yoga classes before school, mindfulness apps, or wellbeing newsletters, hoping staff will fit them in. But for many educators, time is not just a scheduling issue—it is the core challenge of the job. Recent research supports this and shows there are real steps schools can take.
Time Poverty Is Real, Measurable, and Distinct From Being Busy
A 2023 research review by Queensland University of Technology examined 40 studies on teacher workload. It found that heavy workloads and increasing demands create what researchers call “time poverty.” This state harms teachers’ health, wellbeing, and chances of staying in the profession. Time poverty is not just being busy—it is the ongoing feeling of never having enough time to do the job properly.
Researchers have now created ways to measure time poverty directly. For example, a validated Teachers’ Time Poverty Scale, tested with teachers in China, showed that time poverty is a real and measurable issue. It affects mental health and job performance, not just something teachers talk about in the staffroom.
Why You Cannot Coach or Wellness Your Way Out of a Structural Time Problem
This is important because it changes what really helps. A 2025 study that followed 645 teachers for a semester found that time poverty leads to emotional exhaustion, which, over time, lowers wellbeing. Psychological resilience helped a bit, but it did not solve the problem. Resilience training can help people cope, but it cannot create more time.
This is where many wellbeing programs go wrong. They ask educators who already lack time to spend even more of it trying to become more resilient. These efforts often do not work, and it is not the educators’ fault.
Even Small Amounts of Time Back Change How People Feel
The most encouraging research here does not come from education at all. A Harvard Business School study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that people who used money to buy back time, paying someone else to do a task rather than doing it themselves, reported greater life satisfaction than those who spent the same money on possessions. The effect held across four countries and was confirmed experimentally: people who bought themselves time on a given weekend reported more happiness than people who bought themselves things.
Schools do not often think this way, but the idea applies. Giving back even small amounts of protected time, like removing an admin task, cutting a meeting, or simplifying a form, can make educators feel better than adding another wellbeing session.
A Sense of Control Over Time Matters as Much as the Time Itself
Research on time scarcity matches what coaches often see. Studies show that people who feel more control over their time experience less anxiety, even when their workload is the same as others’. A recent review found that feeling in control of your time predicts stress and wellbeing just as much as the actual number of hours you work.
In other words, two teachers might have the same schedule, but the one who has more control over their time will usually feel better. This does not mean schools should stop trying to reduce workload. It also means they should consider who decides how time is used.
A Coaching Perspective: What This Looks Like in Practice
In coaching, when someone says “I don’t have time,” it is usually the beginning of a more helpful conversation, not the end.
The first move is not to help someone squeeze more into their day. It is to separate two different problems that feel identical from the inside: not having enough time, and not feeling any control over the time that exists. Coaching cannot always change the first. It can very often change the second, and the research above suggests that matters more than people expect.
A coaching conversation about time often begins with a simple question: if you had one hour this week that was truly protected, how would you use it? The answer is almost never trivial. It is usually something the educator knows would help their wellbeing, like finishing marking early, taking a walk at lunch, or having an uninterrupted planning period. But many have stopped believing they are allowed to protect this time.
After that, the focus shifts from time management tricks to taking ownership of time. This means finding small pockets of unused time, noticing where time is lost to unnecessary tasks, and practicing reclaiming it. Sometimes, this includes having tough conversations with school leaders.
This is also why time should not be seen as just an individual coaching issue. An educator might leave a coaching session knowing what they want to protect, but return to a school culture that makes it impossible. This is a problem with leadership and systems, not with the educator’s resilience.
Build Time Back Into the System, Not Just Into the Person
None of this means individual strategies are pointless. It means they only work fully when a school is also looking at the structural side: what meetings actually need to happen, what reporting is duplicated, what could be simplified so that time is not just discussed as a wellbeing topic, but actually handed back.
This is also how GEW approaches the issue. Time, along with workload and voice, is central to our Environment dimension in the HIVE Framework, and it comes up often in HIVE Conversations with staff. We do not coach educators to lower their expectations. Instead, we help schools identify where time is lost to unnecessary obstacles and work with both leaders and educators to reclaim it. Time returned by the system is more valuable than time management tips for someone dealing with a system-wide problem.
GEW Takeaway
“I don’t have time” is not just a productivity issue that can be solved with coaching. It is a real, measurable problem that affects wellbeing. The solution is twofold: schools need to give back real time and help educators feel more in control of their time. Schools that treat time as a system-wide issue, not just a personal one, are the ones that see real change.
References
Creagh, S., Thompson, G., Mockler, N., Stacey, M., & Hogan, A. Workload, work intensification and time poverty for teachers and school leaders: a systematic research synthesis. Educational Review, 77(2), 661–680, 2023.
Liu, T., Yang, X., Meng, F., & Wang, Q. Teachers Who are Stuck in Time: Development and Validation of Teachers’ Time Poverty Scale. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 2023.
Wang, K., Huang, T., Lin, X., & Tan, R. Time poverty and teacher subjective well-being in an accelerated society: a three-wave longitudinal analysis of emotional exhaustion, psychological resilience, and gender. Frontiers in Psychology, 2025.
Whillans, A.V., Dunn, E.W., Smeets, P., Bekkers, R., & Norton, M.I. Buying time promotes happiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(32), 8523–8527, 2017. Harvard Business School.
Frontiers in Public Health. Time affluence and health: a scoping review of conceptual and methodological patterns. 2026.