Every teacher knows this job is immense. So many demands coming at us from all directions. But…and hear me out…what if self-imposed deadlines teachers put on their own plates are adding to the noise. In this episode, I discuss teacher perfectionism, burnout, setting boundaries as a teacher, and my favorite–how to make stress your friend (seriously). You don’t want to miss this one.
It’s Sunday night, I haven’t finished what I told my collab teacher I’d have ready, and a few years ago I know exactly what I would have done about it. This time, I didn’t do that. I want to tell you why, because I think it says something bigger about the deadlines we build for ourselves as teachers, and what actually happens when we let one slide.
This one starts small. It’s just gamification, a classroom points system I’ve used for years and finally decided to bring back at my new school. But the choice I made on a random Sunday night turned into something I couldn’t stop thinking about, especially once I connected it back to a stress study I used to teach my psychology students and never fully applied to my own life. This episode is about self-imposed deadlines, teacher perfectionism, and what it actually looks like to set boundaries as a teacher when nobody but you is enforcing the timeline.
Self-Imposed Deadlines Teachers Set
I told my collab teacher I’d have something ready by the weekend. Then the weekend happened, and it wasn’t ready. I walk through why my old response to that would’ve cost me a night of sleep, and the question I asked myself instead that I don’t think I would have let myself ask a few years ago.
Gamification has been one of my go-to classroom management tools for years, but I held off using it at my new middle school for a specific reason tied to how teams work. I share what finally changed my mind, and it involves a teacher across the hall doing something nobody else on the team was doing.
The Study: How to Make Stress Your Friend
I used to assign a certain TEDx talk to my psychology students. It turns out I was slower than my students to actually apply the lesson to myself. I get into the specific research finding about stress and belief that reframed what I was feeling that Sunday night, and why the panic itself wasn’t actually the problem.
I could tell you I chose my family that night purely because family matters most. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. I get honest about what else was going on, and why I don’t think that complicates the lesson at all.
I used to think what I was practicing was learning to look less perfect for other teachers. I’ve changed my mind about what this actually is, and it’s a distinction worth sitting with if you’ve ever felt like being imperfect on purpose was its own kind of performance.
Key Takeaway: Teacher perfectionism often runs on deadlines you invented yourself, not ones anyone actually imposed. Learning to ask “do I actually have to do this right now” is what separates a self-imposed deadline from a real one, and protecting your weekend as a teacher when the answer is no isn’t avoidance, it’s boundaries.
Key Moments:
00:00:00 – Leah opens with the unfinished task and the old instinct to stay up all night to meet a self-imposed deadline.
00:01:25 – The backstory on why she waited a month to bring classroom gamification back at her new middle school, and what changed her mind.
00:03:56 – The question that shifted everything: why does this have to start on Monday, and what happened when she let the deadline move.
00:05:45 – Kelly McGonigal’s stress research enters the episode, and Leah reframes the Sunday night panic through the lens of belief versus stress itself.
00:07:12 – The honest, less clean version of why she chose her family that night, and how avoidance and meaning can coexist.
00:10:19 – Leah connects the moment back to her chasm framework and names it a “mini chasm.”
00:11:25 – A quick mention of the free Sustainable Teacher Sequence email course, built around the same framework.
00:12:07 – The closing challenge: pick one deadline this week and ask if it’s actually real.
Resources and Links
Smart Classroom Gamification – Leah’s course on building and implementing a classroom gamification system
The Sustainable Teacher Sequence – Leah’s free email course on the chasm framework, triage, and boundary scripts for teachers
Kelly McGonigal’s TED talk on stress – referenced in the episode
Living in the Chasm: Why Teacher Burnout Isn’t Your Fault – Season 1, Episode 37, If Teachers Ruled the World, March 24, 2026.
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Show Transcript
It’s Sunday night, and I haven’t done something I told my collab teacher I’d do. I said I’d spend the weekend setting up gamification for my classes. I had it all planned out.
And here we are, Sunday night, and it’s not done. A few years ago, I know what would have happened. I would have stayed up all night getting it ready so it could launch first thing Monday morning.
Because that’s what you do. You said you’d have it done, so you have it done. No excuses, no delays, no letting anyone down.
But that’s not what happened this time. And I want to talk about why, because I think there’s something in it for you.
Here’s the backstory. I gamified my classroom for years at my old school, high school, full year system, the whole thing. It works great. I think it’s one of the most useful tools I have.
I’ve especially gotten good feedback on the system from middle school teachers who’ve taken my course, maybe even more than high school teachers. That course, Smart Classroom Gamification, shows you how to build and implement the system. I’ll link to that in the show notes if you’re interested.
Anyway, when I moved to this new school, I made a decision not to bring it in right away. Middle school runs on teams. You’ve got PBIS, you’ve got whatever system the team’s already built, and I didn’t want to walk in as the new person doing my own thing before I understood what everyone else was doing. So I waited. I watched.
A month in now, I feel comfortable bringing it in. We don’t have one big shared system for the team. We’ve got PBIS and we communicate, but there isn’t any procedure I’d be stepping on.
And I noticed the social studies teacher across the hall from me running these little competitions between her classes for turning work in on time. Nobody else on the team is doing that. Seeing her do that gave me permission to think, okay, I can do my own thing. Not the full year high school version, a semester version for middle schoolers. Let it reset and adjust it in the spring.
So I told my collab teacher this weekend, I’ve got it, I’ll build it. And then the weekend happened. Life happened, and Sunday night rolled around and it wasn’t done.
And here’s where the old me would have completely stressed, had a huge meltdown. The old me hears “I told someone I’d have it done” and treats that like a contract that can’t be broken, no matter what it costs me. Old me stays up until midnight or three in the morning, gets it done, walks into Monday exhausted, and calls that a win. But that’s not a win.
So I sat there this Sunday night and asked myself a question I don’t think I would have let myself ask, even just a few years ago.
Why does this have to start on Monday? Nobody told me it had to be Monday. That was my deadline. I built that deadline in my head because Monday’s when the week begins. As my husband would tell me, this is one of my self-imposed deadlines, and I need to learn to let those go.
Anyway, my students don’t need gamification to start on Monday. They need it to start when it’s ready. They really need me to be rested. They don’t want some grouchy teacher who’s had maybe two hours of sleep walking in and destroying their lives with my grouchiness.
And you know what? I can introduce it on a Tuesday, a Thursday, a Friday. The system will work exactly the same either way. The only thing that changes is whether I spend my Sunday night with my family, or hunched over my laptop building a point system nobody’s grading me on.
So I didn’t do it. I closed my laptop. I did puzzles next to my husband and son. We read books. That was my weekend, and I protected it.
And Monday came and went without gamification, and nothing bad happened. My collab teacher didn’t even notice. The world kept turning. My students are just fine. I’ll introduce it this week when it’s ready, and it will be exactly as good as it would have been if I’d sacrificed my Sunday for it. Maybe even better, because I’ll have more time to think it through.
Here’s something I used to teach my psychology students, but I was really slow to learn it myself. There’s a psychologist named Kelly McGonigal who gave a talk, a very famous TEDx talk about stress.
Her big finding, out of a study that followed something like thirty thousand adults for eight years, was that stress itself might not be what harms you. Believing stress is harmful might be what harms you. That’s huge. Stress itself might not harm you. Believing stress is harmful might be what harms you.
People under a lot of stress who didn’t view it as damaging had a lower risk of dying than people who barely had any stress at all. So it’s not the stress. It’s the story we attach to the stress.
And sitting there on Sunday night, the panic I felt wasn’t actually the problem. The problem was the story I was telling myself about what that panic meant. I was telling myself it meant I was failing my collab teacher, failing my students, failing at being someone people could count on. None of that was true. It was just a feeling, and I got to choose what story to attach to it.
Now, I want to be honest with you here for a second instead of giving you the clean version. It wasn’t purely that I chose my family because family is what matters most, even though that is definitely true. It was also that I just didn’t want to deal with the stress of building the thing that night. Both were happening at once.
I’ve thought about whether that’s a problem, whether avoiding something and choosing something meaningful can be the same act at the same time. I don’t think it’s a problem. I think when you’re trying to do everything, plan that lesson, grade that stack of papers, sponsor that club, answer that email, hit that deadline you made up for yourself, you actually miss the meaningful stuff that’s right in front of you. The stress stops being useful and starts being toxic, because it’s not pointed at anything real anymore. It’s just pointed at your own expectations of yourself.
Stepping back from “I have to do this right now” and asking “do I actually have to” is what let me see there was a choice at all. My perfectionism told me I needed to prep that gamification system that night. When I actually looked at it, I didn’t have to do that. And once I saw that, choosing my family stopped being avoidance. It was just clarity.
McGonigal’s research also talks about how stress pushes us toward other people if we let it. There’s a hormone called oxytocin that gets released when you’re under stress. Most people know it as the cuddle hormone, but it’s actually a stress hormone. It’s part of what makes you want to reach out to the people you’re close to when things feel like too much.
So when I put the laptop away and sat down to do a puzzle next to my husband and my son, that was not me checking out. That was, biologically, exactly what my body was asking for. Connection instead of isolation. Us instead of me, alone with a screen at midnight.
I used to think what I was doing in moments like this was learning to appear less perfect, like I was performing some kind of “it’s okay to be messy” thing for other teachers to see. But that’s not what it actually is. This isn’t about appearance at all. This is about boundaries. Real ones.
My weekend is my time. Time with my family, time with my husband, time with my son. Time that’s mine and isn’t up for negotiation just because I made myself a promise on a Friday that I couldn’t keep by Sunday.
If you’ve listened to the chasm episode from last season, you know the framework I keep coming back to. The chasm is that gap between what the system demands of us as teachers and what a human being actually has the capacity to give in any one moment.
The teachers who make it through this career long term, the ones who don’t burn out in year five, are the ones who learn to live in that gap instead of treating it as their own personal failure.
This was a mini chasm, a small one. Nobody was going to write me up for introducing gamification two days late. But the pull I felt to override my own rest for a self-imposed deadline, that’s the same instinct, just on a smaller scale. And if I can’t catch it in the small moments, on a random Sunday night over a classroom point system, I’m not going to catch it in the bigger ones either.
If any of this is landing for you, if the chasm is a new idea or you want more of it, I actually built a free email course around this exact framework called the Sustainable Teacher Sequence.
Four short lessons, nothing complicated. The chasm, a simple way to sort out what’s actually worth your energy, scripts for the conversations you dread, and one mindset shift that makes good enough feel sustainable instead of like settling. It’s free, and the link is in the show notes. Head to leahcleary.com and check that out.
So here’s what I want you to do this week. Pick one deadline. Just one. Something you’ve told yourself, or maybe someone else who’s not your boss has told you, to have done by a certain time. And ask yourself honestly, is that a real deadline, or is that deadline invented?
Sometimes it’s real. Grades have to post. Report cards have a date. Some things genuinely can’t move. But a lot of the deadlines running our lives as teachers are ones we built ourselves out of habit, out of guilt, out of wanting to be the reliable one who never drops the ball. And those deadlines, those can move. Tuesday can become Thursday.
I gamified my classroom for years because I believe in it. I still believe in it, and I introduced it a few days late this semester because I believe in something else more, which is that I get to have a weekend. Both of those things can be true.
That’s it for this one. Go find your one deadline for this week and ask if that deadline is really real. I’ll see you next time.