Eduleadership
Justin Baeder on principal performance & productivity
Getting Organized in the Google Era
Jul 7th
One of my first summer reads this year was Douglas C. Merrill and James A. Martin’s Getting Organized in the Google Era, a book on organization and productivity.
The book is devoted to two primary themes: Merrill’s insights on organization and information management (from his PhD and background in cognitive psychology, as well as his career as a Google and EMI Music executive), and descriptions of how he uses various digital tools (mainly free Google products) to stay organized.
An unstated core premise of the book is that search (e.g. in Gmail) can replace a lot of labor-intensive organizational strategies, such as meticulously filing everything message or document in folders. This is a fairly straightforward idea, and not one that I thought needed a whole book to explain it.
However, the book is full of other ideas that are smart and useful, such as keeping track of important documents by emailing yourself a PDF and describing it in the message with keywords that you can use later to easily find it. He also suggests stating in the email where the hardcopy original is filed, which is particularly useful for legal documents.
If you haven’t read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, you should do so before reading Getting Organized in the Google Era. But Merrill and Martin’s book is a fun read and a great tour of the mind of a highly productive and creative leader.
Getting Organized in the Google Era is available in hardcover and Kindle e-book editions.
See also: Get Organized! Time Management for School Leaders, which I reviewed recently.
Organizing Your Workload: Junk Drawer or Silverware Drawer?
May 1st
Is your workload as a school leader more like a junk drawer, or a neatly organized silverware drawer? Is your work spread out all over your desk and mind, or neatly arranged into manageable lists?
Think of every piece of information, communication, and work you have on your plate right now, and imagine that it’s all represented by something that might literally be on your plate: silverware.
Is that how your work feels – all jumbled up in a big pile? When things just get dumped in a drawer, the drawer can become difficult to open and close, and it can be hard to find what you’re looking for. This is as true for the ideas and obligations that clutter our minds as it is for the utensils that clutter our kitchens.
If all of your work is represented by random sticky notes in your pockets, on your desk, and around your monitor, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Your life starts to look and feel like a junk drawer.
But you probably keep your actual silverware in a drawer with dividers:
It’s cleaner, easier to keep updated, and much less stressful to look at.
But the work of a school leader is not so neat a collection of knives, forks, and spoons; you have eggbeaters, cheese graters, and countless other miscellanea cluttering up your desk and mind.
The problem with miscellaneous items is that it’s hard to create places to put them. Each unique item requires unique thinking about what to do with it, and this is very time-consuming.
But we don’t need to treat everything as miscellaneous junk. Much of our work arrives in predictable forms, and we need to develop systems that can deal with these common forms in a consistent and efficient manner.
To do this with the work of school leadership rather than silverware, we need lists rather than drawer dividers.
Request from the district office? Put it on your to-do list. Idea for the next newsletter? Put it on your newsletter list. Voicemail from a concerned parent? Put it on your list of calls to make.
But this can get extremely cumbersome if you’re relying on paper lists. Electronic tools can provide the flexibility necessary for getting a large workload under control.
Remember the Milk is an excellent tool for managing lists. There are countless others, but I’ve been using Remember the Milk on and off for four years, and it gets better every day. The web interface is terrific, and there are apps for the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, and just about every other platform you can imagine. You can even email items to RTM, and they’ll be routed to the correct list automatically.
Some lists you might start with:
- Lists of data or other required documents you’ve received from staff
- Lists of calls to make, tasks to complete, and projects to start
- Lists of items to include in your next parent newsletter, leadership team agenda, or other recurring communication or meeting
- Lists of feedback you plan to give to staff
- Lists of ideas, which you may or may not act on
It will take some tweaking to make your lists match your work, to ensure that everything can flow neatly into your system. When your system is running smoothly, you’ll spend less time sorting through piles, less time thinking “What is this, and what do I do with it?” and more time actually doing the work of leadership.
The Tickler File: What It Is and Why You Need One
Apr 13th
How do you get paper that you’ll need in the future off of your desk for now, without losing track of it? How can you have a clean desk and still make sure you have the documents you need in front of you at the right time?
Click here to download this article: The Tickler File: What It Is and Why You Need One (PDF)
Why You Need a Label-Maker
Apr 7th
Filing paper is boring, and I’m a big-picture leader, so I don’t worry about little things like that. Right?
Wrong. Even as the captain of your ship, you need an at-hand file system to manage your paper. Yes, your boring, mundane, beneath-you paper.
Read this free article from David Allen for a great explanation (you have to register and download it).
I concur strongly with David’s advice that a label maker will make a huge difference. I use a Brother PT-1280, which is about $40 from Amazon.
My file cabinet is a 4-drawer lateral cabinet – more than I need – and I use two of the drawers for hanging files. I put one labeled manilla folder in each hanging file, and it’s incredibly easy to use.
David says to just let your manilla folders stand up without hanging files, but I found that this gave me papercuts and cuticle damage as I tried to flip through files, so I go with the one-file-per-hanging-folder method. Here’s part of one drawer:
Why can’t the secretary can’t do the filing?
Some filing – for example, student records and anything that doesn’t need to be at your fingertips – should be done by someone other than the principal.
But as David points out in the article linked above, if you can’t file things quickly – in under a minute – you won’t file them at all, and you’ll end up with huge piles on your desk – the mess productive administrators try to avoid.
There are two other reasons school administrators need an at-hand filing system:
- Your secretary is not really “your” secretary – she or he likely has 10 other hats to wear in the front office, and you often have to wait for others to finish before making your request. This introduces such an inefficiency that it makes much more sense just to keep your own file system.
- Physically, you need a lot of your files close at hand. Some are confidential (e.g. your HR files), and others are simply used so often that you don’t want to have to send someone else to retrieve or return it.
How do you file? Any tips on managing paper?
Back to the label-maker – why the emphasis on printed labels? Try it for yourself and you’ll see – they look and feel more professional, they’re easier to alphabetize, and they are just more fun to use.
Managing To-Do Lists
Nov 23rd
How do you keep track of your tasks? Do you have a to-do list, a random collection of sticky notes, a journal, or a more complex system?
If you keep a to-do list, a common problem is that the list gets too long, and it becomes harder to sort through it. When you reach this point, do you break it into multiple lists, and if so, on the basis of what criteria?
David Allen, in his bestselling book Getting Things Done, recommends collecting tasks on a “next actions” list, and only splitting it into separate project when you actually have multi-step projects.
I find it tempting to subdivide my lists by topic, even when a set of tasks isn’t actually a project – for example, when I have a number of tasks that are all about staff evaluations, but are in fact discrete tasks rather than a coordinated project in the sense that, say, planning a trip is a project. This isn’t a good idea.
The problem with creating too many lists is that they create too many places in which your tasks can hide.
How do you keep your tasks organized and visible, so you can keep track of them and make sure you complete them?
