Category: Articles

Thank you for joining me this Tuesday, January 17 for my webinar with Educational Research Newsletter. For more information on increasing your productivity using the iPad and other tools, please feel free to sign up for my Tips & Articles mailing list.

Tips & Articles on Productivity from Justin Baeder

If you participated in the webinar, you will receive an email from ERN containing the download links for the PowerPoint file and handouts. Feel free to email me directly at info@eduleadership.org with any additional questions about using the iPad to increase your productivity.

The fine folks at Evernote, in addition to creating the best cross-platform application for keeping all of your information at your fingertips, have recently released two great new free apps that I want to highlight.

First, Clearly is a new tool for reading articles, news stories, and blog posts from websites without all the cruft that typically surrounds them. Clearly is a browser extension, meaning it’s something that you install from within your web browser. The only downside is that your browser must be Google Chrome, which isn’t really a downside since Chrome is by far the fastest browser around. You can get Chrome here for Windows or Mac.

The second tool is Skitch for iPad, which is based on the popular Mac app for quickly snapping and editing screenshots and photos. I’ve been using Skitch for years (virtually all of the images on this site went through Skitch at some point), so I’m delighted to see it on the iPad app store.

You can use Skitch to quickly annotate photos of student work or classroom displays. A picture says a thousand words, but often adding a few words or an arrow to a picture can say even more.

Skitch and Clearly are both free, and allow you to save their respective data to your Evernote account, reinforcing its position as your virtual brain in the cloud.

Two interacting forces – the power of tradition and the impulse to try something new – create
an ever-growing list of tasks that might not be truly essential to the core work of the school.

From my article “Adjusting to the New Normal” in Principal Magazine, November/December 2011 (Vol. 91, #2, p. 16-19), via the Marshall Memo

This month’s Principal Magazine from the National Association of Elementary School Principals is all about doing more with less.

My article focuses on ways to deal with reductions in office staff, such as an assistant principal or secretary. If you subscribe to Principal Magazine, you can read the article here.

Please join me this Friday, November 11, 2012 (Veterans’ Day) for an online workshop focusing on high-performance strategies for managing email in your role as a school leader. Since this is a US holiday, hopefully people will have a little more flexibility to participate. The workshop will be held from 10am to 12pm Pacific time, and will include an opportunity for Q&A.

Oh, and it’s free.

The workshop will be held online via Fuze Meeting, our webinar and workshop platform. To join the workshop on Friday, click here (note this link will not work until 9:55 AM on Friday, November 11). You can also participate via telephone only (if you’ll be away from a computer), but since this workshop is about email, it’s probably best to be at a computer and get the full experience.

Update:
Thanks to everyone who joined me! You can view the recorded presentation here.

I’m excited that the National Association of Elementary School Principals’ National Conference will be in Seattle, March 22-24, 2012.

I will be presenting a 2-hour session entitled “Using Apple’s iPad™ to Maximize Your Effectiveness as a Leader” on Thursday, March 22, from 7:45 –9:45 a.m.

Hope to see you there! You can register here.

How do principals decide what to spend their time on, and how to they get their work done efficiently?

As part of my PhD program at the University of Washington, I recently completed my research and inquiry (R&I) presentation on the small qualitative study I did last year on principals’ prioritization and productivity strategies.

I did an earlier video to explain my study and its findings, and thought I’d post it here in case anyone is interested:

(I made this video to take the place of an in-class presentation when I was sick, which is why my voice sounds different).

What’s the point of investing time and energy in becoming more productive? I can think of four major reasons:

• To reduce the sense of overload and overwhelm created by our demanding jobs
• To provide better service and responsiveness to our constituents
• To have more time to advance our top priorities
• To make time for things we haven’t been doing, but should

My mission is to help school leaders become a bit more productive, whether it’s 1%, 5%, or even 50%. When we can get a better handle on our work, it inevitably makes a difference for kids and their learning.

Thanks to everyone who joined me for my session “High-Performance Leadership: Working Smarter with 21st Century Tools” at the AWSP Principals’ Conference in Spokane. This is always one of my favorite conferences – it’s a great chance to get together with principals from around the state.

Here are some resources from the presentation:

• My PowerPoint slides (11.7 MB)
• Remember the Milk – task management app for web and mobile
• NudgeMail – a service that will return emails you send it at a specific time in the future
• How to set up a tickler file (short article)
• TextExpander (Mac) and PhraseExpress (Windows) are a great way to save time when writing

I will send an email to everyone who requested handouts shortly. Thanks again for coming!

If you weren’t able to come, you might be interested in the online version – two spots are left at the $99 rate.

How fast should you respond to an email? I think there’s a sweet spot between too-fast and too-slow. Here’s what I mean – I call it the Pizza Rule.

If you’re making a pizza, and you eat a slice as soon as it’s out of the oven, you’ll burn your mouth, and you won’t be able to enjoy the pizza’s taste. On the other hand, if you wait until the pizza isn’t hot any more, it won’t be as good.

Similarly, if you reply to all email immediately, you’ll spend a lot more time total on it. Ultimately, you’ll have little time for anything else. We aren’t in the email-answering business – we have other places to be!

If you reply to email too slowly, though, you’ll suffer a variety of consequences, from disappointed constituents to time-consuming interruptions.

The key is to answer within the sweet spot – in other words, to eat your pizza while it’s still hot, but not too hot.

I think the sweet spot varies for different people and different audiences, but for me, it’s usually somewhere between 4 and 20 hours. Any less, and email becomes a nervous habit; any more, and the work doesn’t get done.

At this point, you might be wondering “Why isn’t it faster to answer email right away?” There are several reasons:

• Many emails contain ambiguities or errors that will be corrected in short order by others. You don’t always need to be the one to point out or ask about these issues. (The most common one I see is when someone proposes a date and day of the week that don’t match, like “Friday, October 22″ when Friday is really the 21st.)
• If you reply immediately, other people will reciprocate, and you’ll consequently engage in more back-and-forth chats throughout the day. This essentially turns email into an instant messenger (IM), which it isn’t meant to be. If people need to reach you immediately, they can pick up the phone and call you.
• Taking a bit of time to think about an issue can make it easier to respond later, especially if it’s an emotionally tough issue to deal with.

Similarly, taking too long to reply to email can waste your time, too:

• If you’re slow to reply, people will find more reliable and time-consuming ways to reach you, such as seeking you out in person. While it might only take 30 seconds to reply to an email, if someone has to wait two days for your response, they may track you down, and you’ll end up with a 5-minute conversation instead. Aside from the inefficiency, it’s unpleasant (and unprofessional) to leave people waiting.
• If a group email has seen too much discussion, it may be hard to weigh in definitively without responding to all of the points that have been raised; an earlier email could have determined a reasonable course of action with less discussion.

The bottom line? Find your sweet spot, and answer in that timeframe.