Posts from — August 2007

Thinks:

• My gadget-geekiness has finally met its match. Check out Principal Miller’s most recent podcast - this time a recording of a staff development on (You guessed it!) podcasting.
• My copies of iWork and iLife ‘08 arrived on Friday. I have got to learn Pages.
• Check out my August post for LeaderTalk titled, Word up. (Those of us who grew up in the 80s will be able to hear Cameo singing it now…)

Quote for the week:
“You don’t own a TV? What’s all your furniture pointed at?”
– Joey Tribbiani

I initially headed to his site to grab a copy of his mini-thesis on assessment in math to share with some new teachers, but imagine my surprise!

In a move that is sure to stun the School 2.0 crowd, Dan Meyer has a wiki! And - get this - it’s chock full o’ great opening day activities.

This is a great resource and one that I plan to tap as I meet with our brand new teachers next Friday.

I had the good fortune of being invited to appear with Principal Miller on her most recent podcast. She was focused on productivity and asked me to contribute. We ended up both on and off the topic, but I think it made for some great conversation. Heck - she called me an “expert!” How could I refuse?

[Direct link to the podcast]

Some links to items we discussed:

• 43 Folders
• Inbox Zero
• Levenger
• Productive Talk
• DIY Planner
• iCal
• Backpack
• TaDa List

Some additional GTD resources - places where I’ve learned all that I know about GTD and productivity:

• The Cranking Widgets Blog
• Black Belt Productivity
• Zen Habits
• Lifehack
• Lifehacker

Here are some Flickr pics (click through to see notes) that I took of my various Levenger Circa products. They’re cameraphone pics so apologies in advance for the quality…

Image: “Speak up.” by dietpoison

One of the most important tenets of GTD is the notion of ubiquitous capture. Why the need to capture everything? Simply put, you can’t rely on your memory. As much as we might like to think we can trust our brains, the fact is that as educators we are barraged daily by a thousand things competing for our attention - some of them requiring action, some of them just white noise that distracts us from the former.

Let’s say you’re on your morning duty in the cafeteria and notice a table with a wobbly leg. You make a mental note to speak with your head custodian as soon as the kids are safely in class. In the meantime, you wander a bit more and talk with Suzy about last night’s band concert, answer Juan’s question about the college visitation this afternoon, and end up chewing the fat with one of your coaches about Friday night’s football game. When you do end up back in your office, you fire up your email client to see 41 unread messages and spend the next half-hour weeding through them and doing email triage.

Your wobbly table leg is all but forgotten. But if you’ve had the tools to capture your thought right then and there, you could have saved a freshman the embarrassment of having the table collapse during lunch thereby covering him in school-issued pizza sauce. It’s not important what tool or tools you decide on as your capture devices — analog, digital, a chisel and stone tablet — as long as you make it part of your routine to have it with you. A capture tool left in your office does no good.

A stack of index cards and a binder clip work great (a la the Hipster PDA), as does a cell phone and an account on Jott (See my post on Jott here). And the best part of ubiquitous capture is that once you trust yourself to capture your actionable items, you’ve freed your brain to work on other, more pressing items instead of trying to remember a dozen unrelated items that need tending to.

So as we start a new year, choose a capture device and make it a part of your regular routine to grab it every time you walk out of your office and use it often. Your brain will thank you for it, and you can stop worrying about what you might be missing.

Image: “Collander” by jbweir