By Kirsten Olson , Education Week February 26
During a school visit I am conferring with a first-year principal. This individual is a dedicated, deeply thoughtful school leader committed to improving the conditions of teaching and learning in her building, and to intensifying professionalism among her teachers. In this meeting, we have set aside time to talk about her—about her new role as a school leader and the job’s many structural and interpersonal challenges.
Our meeting is cut short by another meeting that runs late, and the principal tells me she must stuff ballot envelopes while we talk, so that students can vote on who is most professionally dressed in an upcoming advisory meeting. She stands up behind her desk, so that she can stuff envelopes faster. She pauses to take a call from the executive director (from a phone she wears at her waist), then says she has to run to the front of the building to speak to a student who is out of dress code. (Could we talk while we walk through the hallway, she asks quickly?)
“Most educators have almost no day-to-day socialization or support for sustained attention to or focus on their own learning.”
The principal wants to discuss test scores, but this will have to be put off until we meet next week. She wants to confer about the professional-development plans she has for later in the day, but we don’t get to that. Her observations about herself in relation to her new leadership role are raised in a variety of ways, but our conversation is jerky, truncated, on the hoof. I need a rope to lasso in all the topics that wander into the sagebrush during our “meeting” time. This principal, it is important to note, is well acquainted with the literature on the quality of attention in the teaching profession—she and I recently discussed how, for teachers, external interruptions in the classroom dramatically reduce what one writer in the field has called “opportunities to engage intellectually with important ideas.”
In another setting, a group of superintendents and school leaders have gathered for an eagerly anticipated workshop on creating professional networks for collaboration in their districts. The meeting begins at 8:30 a.m. By 9:10, perhaps a third of the audience has already been up and out of their seats, checking their Blackberries or talking on their phones in the hallway. Participants are constantly coming and going, talking among themselves, and passing papers. Later in the day, snow threatens. Superintendents spend hours on their phones conferring about the weather.
At a small professional-development meeting, middle school teachers have come together to discuss the reluctant learners in their buildings. These students, say the district leader, are a critical priority. Building administrators, those with the most positional power, sit in the meeting for only a few minutes. Then they get up and move to the sidelines of the room to talk among themselves. The murmur of their voices, as they stand with arms folded across their chests, is a constant background to the day’s proceedings.
Busyness, multitasking, continuous partial attention. The education sector is addicted, and not just because it is experiencing more accountability pressure than at any time in American history. “Occupations shape people,” wrote Dan C. Lortie in his classic study of the teaching profession, and most educators have almost no day-to-day socialization or support for sustained attention to or focus on their own learning. This fracturing of focus is now coupled with intense performance demands based on standardized tests. It is a blunting brew. “I came into the superintendency wanting to bring reflection to every aspect of my job,” a school leader recently told me. “I feel like I’ve lost that right now.”
I became aware of the hostile, undermining quality of busyness and constant multitasking when I attended a very different kind of workshop recently, one devoted to quiet reflection and deep inner work through the practice of silence and listening. In this workshop, a kind of focused, reverent induction to the meeting was practiced. It was understood to be serious time. There were no cellphones, no laptops, no iPods.
“Busyness is the enemy of change, and multitasking is a roadblock to the satisfaction of focused, sustained attention.”
The agenda was not overpacked. As a participant, you could sit on the floor or on a chair, but you didn’t leave—your presence was part of the gift you gave to everyone else. You were instructed about how to listen, how to quiet your body, and how to ask questions to which you did not have the answer. Uncertainty about the process was considered an “invitation,” not a problem to be solved.
There were school leaders in this room, many searching for new ways to work with their staffs, because they felt they had not been successful in the past—not getting at what really needed to be done, as one of them put it. It was one of the most powerful learning experiences I have ever had, a time of going below the surface with others and pondering big questions—a time of reflection and renewal because, in part, each person was paying attention to nothing else.
So I began to wonder: Is the busyness of the adults in the teaching sector a form of resistance, a way of pushing away meaning and focus? Teachers and administrators have never had more demands placed on them in terms of accountability and performance, and a great many meetings are unfocused, time-wasting, and unrelated to the pressing work at hand. Many have “adapted,” however, by aggressively responding to e-mail, looking at phone messages, getting up and down to go out of the room, announcing that they will have to leave early. Those moves, while perhaps reasonable adaptations to real conditions, are rude and fracturing, not only to other participants but to individuals themselves.
Focused leaders in other sectors are moving toward the so-called “law of the vital few,” the idea that constant choice and activity in professional learning do not produce greater gains. The education sector’s addiction to busyness is both a reasonable adaptation and a terrible dysfunction—a hostile and nonempowered way of dealing with the maddening conditions of the work and the disrespect they feel from the larger world.
We won’t solve these problems by getting busier. The most productive meetings in schools I ever observed were in a school district in New York City in the late 1990s. School leaders had drastically pared down agendas—only one or two topics were allowed per meeting, with unrelenting focus on teaching and learning. No announcements, no facilities talk, no discussions of budgets or schedules. Like my recent personal workshop, these meetings were a revelation to me. Yet I’ve almost never seen them replicated, because they require so much focus and discipline.
“Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit.” Teachers and administrators dislike and feel disrespected by continuous partial attention from students, yet this is very frequently the attitude brought to their own learning and thinking about their work. “You need time ... to find solutions to the dilemmas that face you. To make real change requires deep, devoted, unconstrained attention.
Busyness is the enemy of change, and multitasking is a roadblock to the satisfaction of focused, sustained attention. Our addiction to “doing” may make us feel engaged, active, and in control, when really, we are spinning ever more out of control and moving farther from the real conditions that can change our work.
Showing posts with label Time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Time. Show all posts
Monday, August 03, 2009
Friday, August 15, 2008
Give Yourself the Best Gift: The Gift of Time
by Paul Young
Time. Busy principals always seem to need more of it. So why do they give so much of it away so freely? By gaining control of the time they do have, principals can save precious minutes every day and create more hours in a week for more important things.
If all practicing principals could be granted one wish, most of us would beg for more time. Beginning principals, in particular, get a sense very quickly of how unrelenting and overpowering the workload can be. The anxiety of meeting deadlines never diminishes. Stress builds as more and more people want the principal’s time -- to solve student conflicts, attend IEP meetings, write grants, or supervise lunchrooms. In addition, there are questions, reports, walk-in visits, phone calls, and emails that require the principal’s thoughtful consideration and response. It becomes a challenge to stay focused on any single task. At every level of experience, principals question how they can get more done, often with less support. When they go home -- often late at night after preparing a long ‘to do’ list for the next day -- many feel exhausted, scattered, and frustrated with what seems an unmanageable situation. For principals, time is, indeed, a precious resource. And most principals give it away too freely. We need to learn to regain control of our daily schedules. We need to learn how to create time for ourselves. Do you want to save precious minutes every day? Or create more hours in a week? Some of these practical ideas might help you accomplish that.
ORGANIZATION CREATES TIME
Know what you want to accomplish before you start. Always have a clear vision of what you hope to achieve. Keep notes about important commitments and goals on your calendar and anyplace else where you will be reminded of them often.
Keep a ‘to-do’ list. Refer to it often. Organize and prioritize tasks before you begin your day. Reflect on what you finish before you go home. You won’t get it all done, but if up keep x-ing items off the list you’ll see progress and create time.
Get organized, and know where things are. Create an accurate filing system, and clean out the files several times a year. Organize folders on your computer and be sure to label documents with accessible titles. If you or your secretary must frequently spend time searching for items, you both need to take time to better organize the office.
Eliminate clutter. Arrange the office so that essential things are in close proximity to where they are needed.
STRUCTURING TIME FOR EFFICIENCY
Get your office staff on the same page as you are. Invest time by setting expectations with your office personnel about how they should use their time -- and yours. Be sure timelines for work completion are clear. Teach your secretary how you want your schedule managed and how you want preparations made for meetings, conferences, and key events.
Structure time for routine tasks. Help your secretary increase efficiency by establishing times each day when you’ll be in your office for calls and visits. Likewise, schedule time to visit classrooms, hallways, the lunchroom, the playground, and other strategic locations. Structuring your time creates a daily agenda. Don’t allow others to derail your schedule. Share it with others so they can sync their schedules to yours.
Never handle mail or memos more than once. Don’t open your mail until you have adequate time to read it, sort it, delegate it, file it, deal with it, return it, or throw it away. Don’t read mail or memos and then place them in a pile for later reference. That pile will consume your desk. Reading the same mail or email a second time is a waste of time.
Turn off the bells on your email. Check email periodically, but you don’t have to react immediately or take action as each email arrives.
Don’t schedule a meeting unless there is a purpose. Envision the desired outcome of meetings while creating the agenda. Start each meeting by stating the purpose and desired goals.
Meet smarter. If it makes sense, assign important tasks -- facilitator, recorder, timekeeper, peacekeeper, and process observer, for example -- to individuals participating in the meeting. Doing so will help you conduct business in less time, and get better results. Be sure minutes are distributed to all those who attended, preferably by email because that saves time at the copier -- and paper.
Shut your door. Many principals hope to score points by adopting open-door policies. As a result, frequent interruptions prevent them from focusing. Build in quiet time so work can get done. Then shut your door and do it. Only the secretary can interrupt.
Take breaks and eat. The body needs nourishment, fresh air, and exercise. Schedule breaks for all those things. A short amount of time invested in those things will result in renewed energy, better focus, and increased productivity.
PROCRASTINATING EATS TIME
Make decisions. Procrastinating creates gridlock. Whenever possible, keep things moving by delegating.
Spend less time talking about problems. It’s easy to spend time describing a problem. But doing that wastes time. Redirect those who focus on detailing problems to instead identify causes and brainstorm solutions.
Skip consensus sometimes. Even though it is desirable to get input from everyone affected by decisions, consensus takes time. You can’t always afford to wait for everyone to agree.
When you delegate... Learn to describe what you want others to do, how, why, where, and when. Most people will perform adequately when they have the principal’s confidence, permission, and reassurance -- and when they understand the timeline for completing tasks. When you delegate, build in a schedule for progress reports.
LET GO OF TIME-EATING STRESS
Learn to shake off problems, criticisms, and disappointments. Principals must have broad shoulders and thick skin. Change is unlikely when everyone likes and agrees with the principal. Change requires a rub to occur. Be prepared to accept the fallout from that. Reflect with your mentor (or a peer) when you get stung by a remark, make changes when it is necessary, but maintain your self-confidence and shake off the disappointment. Don’t hold a grudge.
Know when you’re stuck. Don’t worry or allow stress and anxiety to build over problems, new tasks, or unpleasant human interactions. Know when you’re stuck or need to vent. Have your mentor on speed dial. A short conversation can help redirect your attention, calm your nerves, or brainstorm ideas. Investing time with your mentor is always better than stressing over brewing issues -- and it saves time.
Don’t let negative people dominate your time. Don’t allow yourself to get sucked into the abyss of the whiners, complainers, and attention-seekers on your staff. Ignore their idiosyncratic behaviours. Don’t allow their problems to become yours.
MAKING THE MOST OF “PEOPLE TIME”
Hire good people. It is better to hire people who are best-suited for a job than having to help them improve after they are employed. Spend time recruiting the best, put them to the test, and empower them to do the rest.
Teach people how to get to the point. How many times are you approached with the line “Do you have a couple minutes?” Use role-playing to teach people how to prepare conversations, get to the point, and deliver the bottom line. When the entire staff learns to get to the point, productivity increases.
Conduct walk-with-me meetings. Don’t allow a teacher or parent to make you late for a scheduled appointment. Inform them of your time constraint, then ask them to meet while you walk to the meeting.
Practice the Golden Rule. If you treat others the way you want them to treat you, you won’t waste precious time righting wrongs or patching-up soured relationships.
Cut the crap. Don’t beat around the bush for fear you might offend someone. You don’t have the time to waste. Without being aggressive or arrogant, make your point in a direct manner. Being indirect creates confusion and wastes time. People will learn to respect your forthrightness if you are sincere.
Time. Busy principals always seem to need more of it. So why do they give so much of it away so freely? By gaining control of the time they do have, principals can save precious minutes every day and create more hours in a week for more important things.
If all practicing principals could be granted one wish, most of us would beg for more time. Beginning principals, in particular, get a sense very quickly of how unrelenting and overpowering the workload can be. The anxiety of meeting deadlines never diminishes. Stress builds as more and more people want the principal’s time -- to solve student conflicts, attend IEP meetings, write grants, or supervise lunchrooms. In addition, there are questions, reports, walk-in visits, phone calls, and emails that require the principal’s thoughtful consideration and response. It becomes a challenge to stay focused on any single task. At every level of experience, principals question how they can get more done, often with less support. When they go home -- often late at night after preparing a long ‘to do’ list for the next day -- many feel exhausted, scattered, and frustrated with what seems an unmanageable situation. For principals, time is, indeed, a precious resource. And most principals give it away too freely. We need to learn to regain control of our daily schedules. We need to learn how to create time for ourselves. Do you want to save precious minutes every day? Or create more hours in a week? Some of these practical ideas might help you accomplish that.
ORGANIZATION CREATES TIME
Know what you want to accomplish before you start. Always have a clear vision of what you hope to achieve. Keep notes about important commitments and goals on your calendar and anyplace else where you will be reminded of them often.
Keep a ‘to-do’ list. Refer to it often. Organize and prioritize tasks before you begin your day. Reflect on what you finish before you go home. You won’t get it all done, but if up keep x-ing items off the list you’ll see progress and create time.
Get organized, and know where things are. Create an accurate filing system, and clean out the files several times a year. Organize folders on your computer and be sure to label documents with accessible titles. If you or your secretary must frequently spend time searching for items, you both need to take time to better organize the office.
Eliminate clutter. Arrange the office so that essential things are in close proximity to where they are needed.
STRUCTURING TIME FOR EFFICIENCY
Get your office staff on the same page as you are. Invest time by setting expectations with your office personnel about how they should use their time -- and yours. Be sure timelines for work completion are clear. Teach your secretary how you want your schedule managed and how you want preparations made for meetings, conferences, and key events.
Structure time for routine tasks. Help your secretary increase efficiency by establishing times each day when you’ll be in your office for calls and visits. Likewise, schedule time to visit classrooms, hallways, the lunchroom, the playground, and other strategic locations. Structuring your time creates a daily agenda. Don’t allow others to derail your schedule. Share it with others so they can sync their schedules to yours.
Never handle mail or memos more than once. Don’t open your mail until you have adequate time to read it, sort it, delegate it, file it, deal with it, return it, or throw it away. Don’t read mail or memos and then place them in a pile for later reference. That pile will consume your desk. Reading the same mail or email a second time is a waste of time.
Turn off the bells on your email. Check email periodically, but you don’t have to react immediately or take action as each email arrives.
Don’t schedule a meeting unless there is a purpose. Envision the desired outcome of meetings while creating the agenda. Start each meeting by stating the purpose and desired goals.
Meet smarter. If it makes sense, assign important tasks -- facilitator, recorder, timekeeper, peacekeeper, and process observer, for example -- to individuals participating in the meeting. Doing so will help you conduct business in less time, and get better results. Be sure minutes are distributed to all those who attended, preferably by email because that saves time at the copier -- and paper.
Shut your door. Many principals hope to score points by adopting open-door policies. As a result, frequent interruptions prevent them from focusing. Build in quiet time so work can get done. Then shut your door and do it. Only the secretary can interrupt.
Take breaks and eat. The body needs nourishment, fresh air, and exercise. Schedule breaks for all those things. A short amount of time invested in those things will result in renewed energy, better focus, and increased productivity.
PROCRASTINATING EATS TIME
Make decisions. Procrastinating creates gridlock. Whenever possible, keep things moving by delegating.
Spend less time talking about problems. It’s easy to spend time describing a problem. But doing that wastes time. Redirect those who focus on detailing problems to instead identify causes and brainstorm solutions.
Skip consensus sometimes. Even though it is desirable to get input from everyone affected by decisions, consensus takes time. You can’t always afford to wait for everyone to agree.
When you delegate... Learn to describe what you want others to do, how, why, where, and when. Most people will perform adequately when they have the principal’s confidence, permission, and reassurance -- and when they understand the timeline for completing tasks. When you delegate, build in a schedule for progress reports.
LET GO OF TIME-EATING STRESS
Learn to shake off problems, criticisms, and disappointments. Principals must have broad shoulders and thick skin. Change is unlikely when everyone likes and agrees with the principal. Change requires a rub to occur. Be prepared to accept the fallout from that. Reflect with your mentor (or a peer) when you get stung by a remark, make changes when it is necessary, but maintain your self-confidence and shake off the disappointment. Don’t hold a grudge.
Know when you’re stuck. Don’t worry or allow stress and anxiety to build over problems, new tasks, or unpleasant human interactions. Know when you’re stuck or need to vent. Have your mentor on speed dial. A short conversation can help redirect your attention, calm your nerves, or brainstorm ideas. Investing time with your mentor is always better than stressing over brewing issues -- and it saves time.
Don’t let negative people dominate your time. Don’t allow yourself to get sucked into the abyss of the whiners, complainers, and attention-seekers on your staff. Ignore their idiosyncratic behaviours. Don’t allow their problems to become yours.
MAKING THE MOST OF “PEOPLE TIME”
Hire good people. It is better to hire people who are best-suited for a job than having to help them improve after they are employed. Spend time recruiting the best, put them to the test, and empower them to do the rest.
Teach people how to get to the point. How many times are you approached with the line “Do you have a couple minutes?” Use role-playing to teach people how to prepare conversations, get to the point, and deliver the bottom line. When the entire staff learns to get to the point, productivity increases.
Conduct walk-with-me meetings. Don’t allow a teacher or parent to make you late for a scheduled appointment. Inform them of your time constraint, then ask them to meet while you walk to the meeting.
Practice the Golden Rule. If you treat others the way you want them to treat you, you won’t waste precious time righting wrongs or patching-up soured relationships.
Cut the crap. Don’t beat around the bush for fear you might offend someone. You don’t have the time to waste. Without being aggressive or arrogant, make your point in a direct manner. Being indirect creates confusion and wastes time. People will learn to respect your forthrightness if you are sincere.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Time
The bad news is time flies. The good news is you're the pilot -Michael Altshuler,
professional leadership coach
professional leadership coach
Monday, June 04, 2007
A higher perspective on time
"Be mindful of how you approach time. Watching the clock is not the same as watching the sun rise." - Sophia Bedford-Pierce
What would your soul consider a waste of time?
To a soul, the only real time is right NOW. Not the future or the past. It lives in connecting deeply with the rich experience of each moment. Through awareness we can be in touch with our authentic self and how it perceives all of the energies and guidance around and within us.
What would your soul consider a waste of time?
To a soul, the only real time is right NOW. Not the future or the past. It lives in connecting deeply with the rich experience of each moment. Through awareness we can be in touch with our authentic self and how it perceives all of the energies and guidance around and within us.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Quotable quotes
“We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery” H.G. Wells
Monday, June 13, 2005
Time limits
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Friday, June 03, 2005
Identify Time-Suckers
Cutting wasted time from your day is like cutting extra calories from your diet. First identify where the time is going. Commit to keeping an accurate record (down to 5-minute increments) of your schedule for one week.
Be specific. Instead of labeling 3 hours as "office work," list how long you were on the phone versus writing memos/newsletters/letters/submissions. At the end of the week, total the categories.
Just knowing how much time you’re spending on e-mail, phone calls, staff problems does help. Your goal is to spend less time at work and to work more efficiently. You can’t eliminate them completely; just minimize them. For example, check your e-mail hourly instead of every 5 minutes. Little changes make a big difference.
Be specific. Instead of labeling 3 hours as "office work," list how long you were on the phone versus writing memos/newsletters/letters/submissions. At the end of the week, total the categories.
Just knowing how much time you’re spending on e-mail, phone calls, staff problems does help. Your goal is to spend less time at work and to work more efficiently. You can’t eliminate them completely; just minimize them. For example, check your e-mail hourly instead of every 5 minutes. Little changes make a big difference.
Monday, May 09, 2005
Quotes
"Knowing others is wisdom; knowing the self is enlightenment." -- Tao Te Ching
"Until you value yourself, you will not value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it." -- M. Scott Peck
"Until you value yourself, you will not value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it." -- M. Scott Peck
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