Get your life back, Part 2

07. August 2008 · 2 comments · Categories: Productivity · Tags:

So you’ve read Part 1. You’ve been a good little capturer. But now it’s time to actually get something done.

Let’s get all those items you’ve captured into some kind of task-management system so you can actually do them.

You want me to do what, again?

You’ve most likely captured a task at a pretty basic level. For instance:

Schedule meeting with district tech person to discuss teacher blogs Plan new teacher lunch for next Friday Call Jeff’s mom about his lousy attendance Email superintendent about idea for saving $1.5 million Buy filters for my son’s aquarium

One of the first things you’ll notice is that I try to begin all of my captured items with action words. Schedule, plan, call, email, buy. It’s a lot easier to see what you have to do when you can see what you have to do. Writing “Jeff – attendance” doesn’t tell me what it is that I need to actually do. Nor does “teacher blogs.”

Fleshing it out.

So you’ve got some input items, but clearly they lack substance. So the next thing to do when I get a minute is to enter these items from wherever they were captured into my task-management system. Right now, that’s Things from Cutured Code, but you could use anything that works for you. Dan Meyer uses a Google Spreadsheet, Patrick Rhone loves his notebooks, some enjoy using 3×5 cards or the Hipster PDA, and still others are attached to homebrew, paper-based systems.

Whatever your pleasure, it’s time to get your action items where they belong. I’m not a strict drinker of the GTD Kool-Aid so this is what I’ve found that works for me. I have three basic places where I do things: Home, Work, and Shopping. So look at the most logical place for each item and put it on the appropriate list — real or virtual.

As you’re putting them in the correct list (GTD die-hards would call these “contexts” — and most folks have far more than I), you also need to make sure you don’t have any multi-step items masquerading as action items. For instance, “Plan new teacher lunch for next Friday,” is not a “do-able” item. It probably has some other things that go along with it like “Check availability of conference room,” “Call restaurant and order food,” “Send invite to teachers and principal,” and “Print and copy agenda.” Once all those things are done, you will be able to check off that item. I (and others) refer to any action that has multiple steps as a “project.” I usually have several of these going at any one time.

Get on with it.

So you’ve captured everything, decided the specific actions you need to take, and identified multiple-step items as projects. Then you’ve placed them in the context where they’re most likely to be completed. Sounds simple, right? But in practice it takes some discipline to religiously capture everything and process it into the right list.

Making ubiquitous capture and efficient processing a part of your daily routine should help you make maximum use of your time at work, allowing you to plow through the drudgery and leaving time for the stuff you really want to be doing while you’re there.

Club Two-Oh

05. August 2008 · 7 comments · Categories: Education, Leadership · Tags:
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. — John Quincy Adams, 6th president (1767-1848)

Funny how a blog post I didn’t even mean to share has inspired me (and others, too!) to make a commitment to spend more time in the classroom.

Sure, 20 walk-throughs per week can seem like a lot, but here is where the math geek in me takes over. Even at ten minutes each, that’s 200 minutes per week. In a 5-day week, that’s 40 minutes per day. Less time than I usually spend answering emails that, arguably, are not as important as what’s going on in classrooms. Oh yeah, and this year I’m teaching a class, too. But I know that I can do it.

Besides, if I am not doing this job to spend time with teachers and students working on instruction, then why am I there at all?

If you’re a school-based administrator and would like to take up this challenge, let’s see your commitment in the comments and/or on your own blog (if you have one). No one will be pounding on your door if you fall off the wagon, but if you put your name in writing down below you’ll feel committed and supported. Like so many challenges, sometimes things are easier if you have others to keep you on track.

Since the math teachers around here appear to need some specific parameters, in my case a classroom visit shall be considered one of the 20 if and only if:

  • I actually enter the classroom (window shopping does not count), and
  • the time spent actually inside the classroom is at least 5 minutes (no “just passing through” visits).

I will also make an effort to connect informally with at least half of the teachers whom I see.

Funny thing, though – cheating on these is really only cheating yourself. It’s like lying about your diet by not counting the calories in that Snickers bar you inhaled. Sure you can look puzzled to your friends, family, and doctor about why you’re not losing weight, but you know why.

Get your life back, Part 1

04. August 2008 · 2 comments · Categories: Leadership, Productivity · Tags: ,

Inspired by both Mr. Meyer‘s “How I Work” video as well as another side project to which I contribute, I thought I’d open the new year with a series of posts that highlight some of the tools and strategies that I use to stay on top of things. You know – keep it light. After all, it’s still technically summer.

Anyone who needs to be productive on a daily basis needs to look hard at three important aspects of their lives: managing inputs, doing stuff, and remembering stuff. Today I’m going to take a look at the first of this trio: Managing your inputs.

“Incoming!“

Everyone — teachers, administrators, students — has a constant stream of information coming at them all day long. Remember this, do that, check on this, follow-up with that, etc.

Like others, I’ve noticed that my brain is not exactly the best, most reliable repository for information. I’ll illustrate with a pretty common scenario.

I’m walking down the hall after herding the lovelies into their next class. Here comes the Media Specialist: “Scott, I need you to make sure you let the new teachers know that we are planning a training for our email client after school on Thursday!” Makes sense. I’m responsible for the new teachers in the building. I can do this. I’ll just send off an email when I get back to my office.

I start sauntering back to my office chanting, “New teachers. Email training. Thursday.” Who needs a Hipster PDA? Uh oh. Here comes one of our department chairs. “Hey, Scott. Remember that presentation you did on preparing slide decks that engage students? Yeah – can you email me that? I’d like to use some of your ideas!” Of course! I’ll get right on it just as soon as I email the new teachers about… Ummm… That thing on Thursday. Or is it Friday? In the library? After school? Oh crap.

You can see how the system begins to break down. And this doesn’t even touch on the stuff that comes out of our weekly administrative meetings where we discuss professional development and the general day-to-day operation of the building.

I’ve never been one of those people who could carry a pen and paper everywhere, so for these kinds of “chance” requests, I’ll use my iPhone. If someone approaches me with something that needs to be done I’ll pull out the phone, open up my productivity program of choice (currently vacillating between OmniFocus and Things) , and drop it into the Inbox for processing later. If you subscribe to Remember the Milk, you can text message a Twitter to @rtm and it will zip right into your RTM inbox. If that’s not a mouthful I don’t know what is! Alternately, if I’m driving, I can phone my brain dump into Jott – a speech-to-text service I’ve been using for quite a while.

Meeting of the minds.

I hate taking notes in meetings. I bet you do, too. We do it, however, because it seems like the expected behavior. We all went to school, right? And when the Person In Charge started speaking — whether about the French-Indian War or factoring polynomials — we started writing. We’re well trained.

What bugged me most about taking meeting notes was that I’d never, ever look at them again. I’d file them away thinking, “OK. If anyone asks me what Bill said about new dry erase boards at Monday’s meeting I’ll be ready!” But no one ever asked. Not once.

A couple years ago I came across a great tidbit that liberated me from the compulsive urge to try to scribble down everything in a meeting. It was a post at Behance about their “Action Method.” In short, you should be primarily focused on capturing action steps; stuff that we need to actually do. You don’t have to write down every single piece of information discussed.

“During a brainstorm, meeting, or on the run, ideas arrive in a flurry of other activity and can be lost unless they are captured and transformed into action steps.”

The method’s third component frees me of the guilt of not archiving every single piece of information I receive: “File reference items. Sparingly.” That’s it! What do I do with that binder of notes we have from our monthly department meetings? Throw it out! That folder full of notes scribbled at the professional development workshop you attended in the late-90s? Trash it.

For notes during meetings, I’m definitely a low-tech guy. I have a Levenger letter-sized Circa notebook that holds all the aspects of my non-digital work life. Into the Circa goes any actions that I capture during the meeting. When I’m back in my office, I scan the list and move any relevant items into OmniFocus so they’re available to me at my desk or on my iPhone. Having them digitally enables me to adjust due dates and priorities as well as move them around as needed.

If the phone doesn’t ring, it’s me.

Phone calls are a fact of life for most of us, and school-based administrators are no different. Whether it’s a parent calling to request that I fire a math teacher, a district administrator calling to check the status of our school improvement plan, or my wife calling to make sure I pick up diapers on the way home, I take in a lot of information from the phone.

For phone calls, I’ve adopted a one 3×5 card per call/issue method. When I get a call I immediately reach for a blank card and a pen. I’ll immediately date the card and write down the caller’s name and number. If the card requires some action on my part, I’ll do it immediately (if practical and possible) and get back to the caller. Most of these things don’t require entry into OmniFocus because they’re be as simple as “Excuse Johnny’s absence for last Friday. He had a tummy ache.” If they’re bigger (“Set up a conference with the math teacher and the counselor to determine why Andrea can’t seem to remember to go to Trigonometry.”), I may shoot off an email to both parties and put the item in OF to remind make sure I remember to get back to the parent once I hear from the teacher and counselor.

When I’ve finished dealing with an issue, I’ll throw the cards into an old-school 3×5 box arranged chronologically. That way if Mrs. Johnson calls again and says, “Remember when I spoke to you last month about the mean lunch lady?” I can quickly reference that card in my file.

Three-pronged attack.

So those are the basics of my approach to capturing stuff that needs doing. For stand-up meetings in the hallway, I’ll shoot ‘em directly into iPhone. During meetings, I’ll dedicate a page in my Circa to capturing actionable items only. And for phone calls, I use one index card per call or issue.

When you’re capturing items into your inbox, be it physical or electronic, make sure to free yourself from thinking about due dates, projects, contexts, resources, timelines, priorities, etc. and just get the item captured. You’ll deal with the other stuff later.

After years of hacking away at things little by little, I feel like I’ve finally arrived with a system that lets me get things done without worrying that I’m missing something.

Now what?

Assuming you can manage what information is important to you and filter out the stuff that doesn’t require some kind of action on your part, what you should be asking next is, “Now that I’ve got a plan for capturing stuff I need to do, how do I actually make the time to do it?”

The message today is to recognize that you just can’t trust your well-meaning brain to remember important stuff. You’ve got too much coming your way during the day for that. Get it out of your head. Get all of it completely out of your head. That way your brain can focus on solving that whole global warming thing or dreaming up ways to improve the economy.

Coming up: Now that it’s all out of your head, it’s time to start actually doing something with it.


Photo Credits: “file cabinets” by h. wren “Bat Phone” by Phillie Casablanca

Up and out

03. August 2008 · 13 comments · Categories: Education, Leadership · Tags: ,
No good decision was ever made in a swivel chair. — George S. Patton, Army general (1885-1945)

So here it is. I’m going to put it out there and be accountable to you.

Beginning with the first week of school, I will visit a minimum of 20 classrooms per week, not including formal observations. That’s roughly four classrooms per day. It sounds like a lot when you say it that way, but for a 5-10 minute walk-through, that’s only about 40 minutes per day maximum.

Why have I found it so hard to make this happen? I always start out strong, but things break down some time around Novemeber or December. I suppose I could make the typical excuse. After all, it’s easy to get bogged down pushing papers, checking email, and returning voicemails.

But that’s not really a good excuse, is it?

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