Eduleadership
Justin Baeder on principal performance & productivity
Essential Email Tips for School Leaders
Aug 28th
Here’s my latest article: Essential Email Tips for School Leaders (PDF)
Quick Tips (Summary):
- Cut down on email by unsubscribing from mailing lists and setting expectations with others.
- Use your mobile phone to keep up with “FYI” messages that require no action or that you can deal with while out and about in your school; keep others marked as unread and deal with them on your computer.
- On your computer, read a message once and deal with it; if necessary, add a task to your to-do list rather than repeatedly marking it as unread.
- Use a text shortcut program to write commonly used phrases more quickly.
- Learn the keyboard shortcuts for your email application, and work on your typing speed.
- Only process your email once or twice a day; close your email program or turn off automatic downloading to avoid distractions.
- Don’t answer email immediately when it comes in; it’s meant to be asynchronous. Strive to answer within a day, but at a time that works for you.
- Save your email to your computer, and make it search-friendly by adding keywords to messages you think you might need to locate later.
- Don’t over-file or create elaborate rules – they only slow you down.
- Set the example in your school by using email to communicate more efficiently.
What to Do Every Day
Jun 8th
What’s on your list of things that you need to do every day – things that you hold yourself accountable for getting done – regardless of how the day goes, and regardless of how busy you are? What are the things that you hold yourself accountable for doing every single day?
I have three things on the list right now, and I can’t say that I’ve gotten to the point where I’m consistently getting them all done.
The first is to journal, to do some reflective writing, thinking about my school, thinking about what it needs, thinking about what my staff needs, and what I need to do to be a better leader. Journaling every day is at the top of my list.
The second thing that I believe I need to do is provide feedback to two teachers. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s not a goal that I consistently meet, and by focusing on that target, I can shape my practice in order to make that possible. So observing and providing feedback of some type to two teachers per day is my second goal.
The third thing that’s on my list is getting my inboxes empty. Looking at all of my different in-baskets – the one on my desk for paper, my email, my voicemail, and my “to do” list inbox (yes, it has its own inbox) – I want to get all of them checked and sorted and emptied. It’s not that I will actually do all the work in those inboxes, but I will get them empty so that I know what’s in them and have everything organized and put into a place where I can deal with it effectively later.
What would be on your list of things that you have to do every day? It needs to be a short list. I don’t think we can effectively hold ourselves accountable for doing 17 different things in a day and have any kind of success.
But I think that there are things that we, as leaders, need to develop as a practice and the only way to develop a habit is to do it consistently until you do it automatically.
What goes on your list of the things that you need to do every day?
Why We Can Procrastinate and Still Succeed
May 11th
Have you ever put off a major project until the last minute, then pounded through it in no time flat, with no loss in the quality of the final product? Have you ever told yourself to space out a large series of tasks so you don’t have to them all at once, but then procrastinated, and yet still successfully done them all at once?
I’m working on staff evaluations now, and while I’m on track to finish them in plenty of time, it occurred to me today why procrastination doesn’t always lead to failure – why we can wait until impossibly late in the game and get incredible work done in a short time.
In a word, batching.
When it’s two hours before your deadline and you have to write the paper, complete the report, develop the presentation – there is no time for distractions, no time for multi-tasking, no time for shifting gears as you jump from project to project. You focus, and you get it done.
But it’s not just the power of focus that enables you to accomplish so much in so little time. It’s also the reduced friction of switching from one thing to another. I wrote five evaluations today, probably in less time total than it would have taken me to write them individually if I’d spread them out over a number of days. The skill set and criteria for writing evaluations are fresh in my mind, and I don’t have to mentally re-tool each time I start on a new evaluation.
Read more about why batching works
Performance Is Instructional Leadership
May 8th
The masthead of this site (currently) says that my focus is on principal performance and productivity. When we talk about school leaders’ performance, what kind of actions, duties, or art are we describing?
I just started Kim Marshall’s excellent book Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation: How to Work Smart, Build Collaboration, and Close the Achievement Gap, and it occurred to me within the first few pages that performance is, in essence, about instructional leadership.
Even though many productivity strategies focus on management tasks rather than instructional leadership, the gains in performance that can result from increased productivity are in instructional leadership.
Why is this? I think it’s because instructional leadership doesn’t get the attention it deserves unless the management work is under control. Being productive enough to keep your head above water can dramatically increase your time spent on instructional leadership. To use a different metaphor, you can’t remodel your house while it’s on fire. Management work has a built-in urgency that the work of instructional leadership typically lacks.
The consequences of ignoring critical school management work are often immediate and dire, though, so it won’t work to simply act as if instructional leadership is the only priority.
Let’s say a school leader spends 40 hours a week on management work – attending meetings, doing paperwork, handling student discipline – and their remaining time on instructional leadership – observing instruction, providing feedback to teachers, planning professional development, etc. If the leader works 60 hours a week, that leaves 20 hours a week for instructional leadership (and not much personal free time).
If increased productivity can enable the leader to handle the management work in 30 hours a week, that leaves an additional ten hours for instructional leadership, without an increase in time at work. This is a 50% increase in time available for instructional leadership.
Instructional leadership is “the work.” It is the primary means by which principals influence student learning, and we simply must create time for it.
The Principal’s iPad: First Week
May 5th
Last Friday, the iPad 3G went on sale in the US. Last Saturday, I bought one. This week, I’ve been carrying it with me everywhere, putting it through the paces in my work as an elementary principal.
The first thing I noticed is that…everyone noticed. It’s a huge distraction – kids ask me if it’s a big iPod Touch, and adults say “I knew you’d have one sooner or later” (my reputation is more solidified than I thought). I am hoping the distraction will fade as the novelty wears off.
The second thing I noticed is how useful it is for so many things. Among my favorite apps:
1. iCal – all of my personal and work calendars sync with my district’s Outlook/Exchange server, as well as my Mac and my iPhone via MobileMe. Having this always at hand via the iPhone is indispensable, but the iPad makes iCal even more readable and usable.
2. OmniFocus – this great iPhone app by OmniGroup works fine on the iPad, though a native iPad version is coming soon. OmniFocus is my to-do list and data collection hub – every newsletter idea, every completed observation report, every task I need to complete – it all goes in OmniFocus, and syncs with my iPhone and Mac (again, via MobileMe). One of the more expensive apps at $20, but worth it.
3. Mail – the email client on the iPad is surprisingly robust and user-friendly. I don’t answer much email on the iPad, since I type faster on my laptop, but it’s useful to scan my emails and dispense with anything that doesn’t need action or a reply.
4. Evernote – the iPad is so easy to carry that I’ve kept it with me virtually all of the time, so I can capture ideas in Evernote whenever I have something I don’t want to forget. I used it to take notes in classrooms today, which I emailed to myself, edited on my Mac, and forwarded on to the teachers I observed. Free.
5. Safari – while I will never give up Firefox on my Mac, Safari for iPad is the way your grandmother will finally “get” the web. It’s completely intuitive, impossible to break, and a great way to browse text, images, and video (HTML 5) on the internet.
Will the iPad change your work and life? If you have an iPhone, you’ll love having an iPad, especially if you’ve never gotten used to the tiny screen and keyboard on the iPhone. I will share more of my experience using the iPad to stay on top of my work as a school leader, and would love to talk to any other principals who are using the iPad at work. Drop me a line in the comments if you’d like to chat.
In case you were wondering, I wrote this post on my iPad, with the help of the $69 keyboard dock and the free WordPress iPhone app.
Why Batching Works
May 2nd
Batching is the practice of doing a bunch of something at once. For example, checking your email periodically and dealing with it all at once, rather than as it comes in throughout the day, is a type of batching.
Batching is a great timesaver for many types of tasks. But why does it work?
1. Fewer physical transitions
When your email client is already open, or your phone message pad is already out on your desk, it’s easier to blast through a number of emails or calls. The act of moving to another location, obtaining other materials, or switching to different technology takes time, and batching can recapture this time for more important work. This is the most obvious benefit to batching – just as you wouldn’t make a single chocolate chip cookie from scratch, it’s much more efficient to physically perform a group of actions rather than just one.
2. Fewer mental transitions
Doing good work requires not only the right tools and information, but also having your head in the game. When you can do several of one type of task, the experience from one task transfers onto the next. For example, if you’re making a difficult request of one person, batch it with another request with someone else, so you only have to get into the mindset that these requests will require one time.
3. Fewer interruptions to yourself and others
The main characteristic of batchable tasks is that you can do several of them in a row, without stopping. Often, when we have to seek someone else to help with the completion of a task (e.g. the school secretary), we’re interrupting their other tasks. It’s much more efficient to interrupt once and hand over ten tasks, or request ten pieces of information, than to interrupt ten times.
4. The power of focusing on a goal
When you have ten phone calls to return, it’s easy to see the goal: get all ten done. Batching creates a clear goal for the particular set of tasks, and this goal will help you be more focused on getting them done.
If you’re not sure how batching can help improve your workflow, try keeping lists, and batching similar tasks as you work through each list.
Why Multitasking Doesn’t Work
Apr 14th
“Multitasking usually makes you less efficient,” he writes, because “the brain is especially inept at memorizing bits of information.”
–James Merrill, in this LA Times review of his new book Getting Organized in the Google Era: How to Get Stuff out of Your Head, Find It When You Need It, and Get It Done Right
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.
What is Productivity in Education, and Why Does It Matter?
Apr 6th
Productivity is a bit of a bad word in the social sector. It smacks of factories, of Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s early-20th Century studies on the optimal type of shovel for shoveling coal. Surely we are above such things – the time-study man with a stopwatch, standing over the laborer and setting production quotas. Surely we have better images for doing our best for children as educators.
But what is productivity? It is two things:
1. Doing the right work, and doing it well
2. Doing this work quickly, consistently, all day long
The metaphor of the factory certainly fits with the concept of productivity better than does the world of education. But I’d like to suggest that productivity is one of the most urgent issues in the social sector in general, and in education in particular.
Part of our problem is that we don’t always have a clear picture of what “the right work” is, or of what “doing it well” looks like. We need to gain clarity on these issues.
If you ask teachers, they tend to know what the right work is, and when they’re doing it well. Doing it quickly, consistently, all day long may be more of a challenge, given the interruptions and unique circumstances that are an inevitable part of working with children. But I’d like to look elsewhere for a moment.
What about principals? How productive are principals? How productive am I as an elementary principal?
I get the sense that many principals today are in a state of crisis, a state of perpetual firefighting that never allows a moment for reflection or decision-making about what “the right work” might be or how we might do it more efficiently.
But what if we could? What if we could get more of our work done, better and faster? What would that mean for student learning? We aren’t talking about shoveling coal or cranking out widgets, so productivity clearly has different manifestations in educational leadership. We’re talking about:
- More feedback and instructional dialogue with teachers
- More connection and visibility with students
- More collaboration with community, parents, and district staff
If we’re here for anything other than to be warm bodies in the principals’ office, we must surely believe that we have an impact in these areas, and greater productivity – even a little bit – would have an impact on student learning.
Productivity isn’t a bad word. It’s an opportunity to improve our practice, to improve our profession, and to increase our students’ chances of success while they’re under our care.
Better Than “Sort Of” Organized
Mar 23rd
There is a light-year’s difference between being “sort of” organized and having everything downloaded, clarified, updated, and reviewed. -David Allen
