If you’ve made it this far, you’ve captured what you need to do and set up a system to help you actually do it. But what about those odds and ends that you may need to revisit? Those little doodles, emails, handouts, or reference documents that you are just certain you’ll need agan?

As I indicated up front, I have untrained myself from the old habit of scribbling notes during meetings. Instead, I capture things that need to be done; actions that need to be taken. Yet I still find myself staring at piles of stuff that may need a home for some unforeseen time in the future when someone might ask me for it. Old meeting agendas, handouts, memos from the district, and the like.

For me, stuff like this breaks down into two basic categories:

Electronic Stuff

• Emails with information that may not be immediately important but may be important later. Dates for trainings for teacher mentors, for instance. I don’t need it now, but may need it when an interested teacher approaches me about mentoring.
• Other important documents you may need access to later. We have an emergency phone tree at my school, for example. Or maybe you got a PDF of a workshop registration attached to an email.
• PDFs or other articles you keep meaning to read. I receive a lot of publications via email. Many of them are compilations of articles from around the web and there are always a few I’d like to read at some magical point in the future, “when I have the time.”

Evernote has become my digital dumping ground. Enough has been written about Evernote that I’m not going to spend a lot of time on what it does or how it works, rather I’m going to share with you how I make it work for me.

I keep a few notebooks for various purposes. I try to keep stuff that is work-related in its own notebook. In my “LHS Reference” notebook, you’ll find math content standards and frameworks, an emergency phone tree, and a list of important district phone numbers.  If I see an article I like, I ask Firefox to print it as a PDF and dump the PDF into my “Articles & Papers” notebook. Receipts for, well, anything get dumped into “Receipts” and anything without a clearly defined place goes into “Random Stuff.”

I recommend starting with one giant notebook and letting things happen organically. For instance, I think I’m going to have another notebook eventually called “Recipes” where I save recipes I come across online.

Non-Electronic Stuff

For stuff that doesn’t exist in electronic format (handouts, whiteboards from great brainstorming sessions, completed classroom observation instruments, etc), my first question is usually whether I can get it into electronic format (and whether I’d want to). One of these days I’ll get a Fujitsu ScanSnap, but until then I have a few other tricks up my sleeve.

“For handouts, I ask the hander-outer if they can email a copy to me or, “Put it on the wiki.” If it’s an Office document - or anything non-PDF - I’ll turn it into a PDF (this functionality is trivial on a Mac). For whiteboards I’ll shoot a picture or two with my iPhone. Both the PDFs and digital images can get dumped into Evernote where it will happily scan all the legible text and make even digital pictures of my whiteboard searchable.

But, alas, there are some things that just don’t make the jump to digital. For instance, I don’t have the time or the need to scan all the data-collection instruments I use for classroom observations. I have a folder for each teacher I evaluate and the instruments go in there. Once I complete a summative evaluation, I usually shred the instruments and move on.

As I mentioned in my very first post in this series, I don’t keep a lot of random stuff in hard copy format if I can avoid it. Having reference items in Evernote makes them easy to search and access if and when I need them.

Putting it together

We’ve come a long way from capture, to action, to filing away stuff you may need to get your hands on at some future time. Regardless of the system you put in place for yourself, make sure it’s something you can stick with and that it becomes a transparent part of your daily routine. The less you have to think about it the better.

By spending some time up front deciding how you plan to capture, act, and file you can free up your valuable time for other things. Plus you’ll feel less stressed because you’ll know you have at least some of your world under control.

Previously

• Part 1
• Part 2

The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers. - Ralph Nader

As a school leader, what have you done to cultivate teacher leadership in your building?

I don’t mean having your administrative intern handle all of your referrals this semester so that you have time for “more important things.”

How much have you invested in the teacher leaders in your school? Are you inviting them to share their practices — their successes and failures — with their colleagues? Are you encouraging others to listen to what they say? Are you listening?

Remember that not all leaders have titles.

In what can only be described as serendipitously good timing, Merlin Mann of 43Folders gets to the heart of writing doable, next actions using outcome-based thinking.

Think about the thing that’s most on your mind right now. It’s probably not the thing you think is most on your mind; the stuff that’s really getting our attention likes to run behind the refrigerator whenever we turn the lights on. But, anyway. Got it? Okay.

Merlin walks through a simple example that neatly illustrates the kind of broad items most of us end up capturing and how to recognize that what you’ve really got is an action and a project. While far more articulate about this stuff than I am, Merlin makes the point I was shooting for yesterday.

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.

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.

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

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?

Seventh-grade writing prompts aside, I had quite a busy summer both personally and professionally. As I get things ramped back up here at the Universe, I thought it would be fitting to bring some closure to what’s been going on since my last post some time ago. Feels good to get back into the blogging habit and I think I’ll start modestly, shooting for a couple posts a week.

Personally

• Moved the blog to a new host and gave it some new, simple digs. I also decided to include my proudest blogging accomplishment to date: nomination for membership in Dan’s club. I decided to put that badge on my sidebar to remind me why I do this job. Of course, it’s “for the children.” But it’s also for the teachers who bust their butts day in and day out to raise the level of play in their classrooms. To innovate in ways that change the game for themselves and their colleagues.
• Took an amazing family road trip (our first ever!) to Cody, Wyoming, and Yellowstone National Park. Lessons learned include: if/when you decide to take that step of buying a minivan get the DVD player!
• Got involved (rather serendipitously) in a project with some of the guys I knew from the days when the forums at 43 Folders were the place to be for productive folks. We launched a new blog and forum called Work.Life.Creativity. Head over and sign up!
• I’m a bike commuter.
• I didn’t buy an iPhone 3G.
• I really want a Kindle.

Professionally

• I’ve Tweeted about this a couple times, but I’m actually teaching a class next year! While I act like this is a major hardship, what with my administratorial responsibilities and all, the truth is I’m really psyched. Since I’ll be teaching in the IB program (I’m sorry - I meant IB Programme), that meant mandatory summer training in St. Petersburg, Florida. Lesson learned: Even though I grew up in Florida, it’s dang humid down there! Bad for my hair.
• I forgot how to do lesson plans.
• I submitted proposals to present at both the K12 Online Conference in October and FETC in January.
• A Kindle would really streamline my professional reading, don’t you think? And it would pay for itself after 10 or so books. If I could get my grad school textbooks on the thing, it would pay for itself after, like, two books.

Sundry

• Dabbled in Plurk. Meh.
• Decided that pretending Twitter has applications for the classroom is a bit of a stretch. I have, however, acknowledged that it has expanded my professional network and given me unprecedented access to the brains of a lot of people whom I like and respect.
• Finally, Edupunk? Seriously? Edupunk on Wikipedia? Put down the Kool-Aid, people. There’s nothing “punk” about effective, engaging instruction.
• On the other hand, if calling yourself “Edupunk” makes you feel hip, or more importantly teach better, go for it.

So I’m getting things warmed back up over here at the Universe. If you’ve dropped me from your readers or blogrolls, hook it back up! Starting a new year and teaching a class will make for some interesting blogging, after all.

In the coming week, I’m going to start the year off with a “How I Work” series, partly inspired by this great video of Mr. Meyer’s and partly by my participation at WLC.

This is probably long overdue, but I’ll feel much better getting it out in the open so it’s “official.” I’ve bitten off quite a bit this school year, including a new job, starting a doctoral program, and teaching a college course. Add into that the modestly successful podcast I work on with Melinda Miller, a soon-to-be 4-year-old and a daughter who just turned one and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

So something has to give.

After much reflection, for me it’s going to be the Universe. I’m not saying I will never pick up here again or post on occasion when I have something to write about - I’m sure I will - but finding time to craft any sort of meaningful, high-quality posts has proven to be exceedingly difficult given the papers I’m writing for grad school and the capstone class I’m teaching for teachers-to-be.

My prioritized list of commitments looks something like this:

1. Being a good husband and father by making time for my family FIRST.
   
2. Earning money to support my family by performing well at my day job.
3. Passing my grad school classes.
4. Teaching my undergrad class.
5. Continuing to build the audience around our Practical Principals podcast.
   

Were it not for this blog, I would likely have missed out on the chance to meet (virtually, anyway…) some incredible people with whom I continue to interact via other means. So if you’re looking for me online these days, try here:

If we’re friendly, you can also find me at:

• Flickr
• Vimeo
  

I just felt the need to make it official because I have felt this “weight” hanging over me; this feeling that I’m “slacking” by not keeping the Universe up-to-date.

Remember - this isn’t “good-bye,” it’s “see ya ’round.” I’m officially going on a blogging sabbatical.

[Image credit: "Untitled" by burnblue]

Ben Wildboer shows how he used some ideas he found online (including some from yours truly!) to upgrade a slide deck about basic Earth structure. His blog post includes an “Extreme Makeover” like before and after look at his entire slide deck.

Ben’s immediate observation distills everything I’ve been trying to convey as succinctly as I’ve seen it done:

There were several students that expressed regret at the demise of the bullet points. It’s easier for them to just copy down exactly what it says (of course it is, they don’t have to actually pay attention or comprehend to do that). How well they’ve been trained by their past experiences!

Ah yes. Undoing years of damage done by the ubiquitous bullet point. Challenging, to say the least. But definitely a battle worth fighting.

Go check out Ben’s slide decks. And the rest of his blog while you’re there. He’s off to a great start!!