Tag Archives: planning

Going beyond ‘Reconnect, Reminisce, and Repeat’.

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I got away with a buddy to go fishing for a couple hours on Wednesday. It was part of a bigger day together, and we didn’t fish for long, or catch anything. But we connected and had an adventurous day. Good food, good company, and good scouting for a future fishing trip.

It’s one of the things he and I talk about, which is the idea of connecting for experiences. When you don’t see a good friend regularly, it might be easy to ‘pick back up where you left off’ and feel connected. But it can also feel like that’s all you do… Reconnect, reminisce, and repeat.

We didn’t plan a whole day of fishing, we took advantage of the resources and time available to us and made the most of it with a new experience. We didn’t just talk about the things we’ve done or hope to do, we had an excursion. Too often we think planing and organizing needs to be a drawn out part of connecting, with an event planned on some distant future date.

Last night another buddy texted to see what I was up to and just over an hour later I was sitting on his balcony. Then we walked to a delicious dinner. This was so refreshing compared to, “What are you doing next week Friday?”

Plans don’t need to be big, and novelty and newness make for great experiences. Also, last minute plans can be so much more fun than the bigger, much more planned events can be. Novelty keeps the experiences new enough that they become the things we talk about years from now.

Infrastructure as Afterthought

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I sent this in an email to my MLA:

I want to express my concerns over infrastructure in Coquitlam. Specifically, we are seeing considerable growth in already busy corridors: North Road and Como Lake, Ioco Road, Austin Avenue and soon Rocky Point. What used to be single family homes are now multiplex townhouses and highrises. These are already some of the busiest roads in Coquitlam and now we are significantly increasing the density and thus adding a lot more traffic. It seems that supporting this added traffic is an afterthought. 

For example, just east of North Road on Como Lake are two streets, Tyndall and Clearmont, that have added a large number of people going to those streets, and they both lack left turn lanes. This is already a traffic slow down and it will only intensify as projects complete and new residences are added. These are just two examples of how traffic flow in our cities is going to drastically worsen as density increases. I can only imagine how bad traffic will get in the coming years if there isn’t a plan to deal with this sooner rather than later. 

I understand the need for increased density. I just wonder why it always seems that road infrastructure is an afterthought? Sure, you can add bike lanes, and promote public transit, but when you add hundreds or thousand people to a community, roads and infrastructure need to be proactively considered rather than trying to fix this issue as an afterthought.

If you could turn back time…

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If you could turn back time, what would you do differently? I try to live life without regrets. I do my best to think of ways to feel blessed with the choices I’ve made and the life I have lived.

Occasionally, I’ll wish that I travelled more, or that I chose to be a bit more adventurous… but then I wonder if that would have taken me down paths where I didn’t meet my wife, or my best friend, or if I wouldn’t have had my kids.

I don’t know how the road not taken would have diverted me from the life I have? And so I don’t want to turn back time, but instead I want to appreciate the time I have. And that’s why I think I’m going to retire at the end of the next school year.

More on this later, but I wanted to put that out in the universe. I’m not turning back time, but I’m looking to make the time I have left a little more special.

Meetings and spaces in between

Have you ever gone to a meeting and wondered, “Why am I here?” Or questioned why the meeting wasn’t just a memo or an email? Are there ever times when your schedule can be filled with meetings such that there is almost no time to get anything done? Then one day you look at your schedule and you notice an entire day with no meetings.

If that happens to me, the first thing I think is, “I’m going to get so much done!” And that ends up being half true. Why only half true? Because the void in the calendar gets filled. Interruptions, distractions, and work getting done but stretching to fill the space faster than you imagined.

There is a sweet spot where the spaces between meetings is ideal. If the gap is too small, it’s hard to get anything meaningful done. If the gap is too big, it needs to be filled with intention… there needs to be a goal that is calendared in the space. Or the space gets inefficiently filled. That’s not to say I’m wasting time, but I’m not getting bigger, more ideal, tasks done unless they are planned.

It’s easy to fill time doing stuff that needs to get done, but not necessarily doing the things that really move me or my team forward. It’s easy to fill the in between spaces with tasks, not goals, with busywork not work that I want to do.

The things I must do crowd out the things I want and hope to do. My calendar fills, the spaces in between get filled. I stay on top of what needs to be done but struggle to get the things I hope to do done. Those items often get rushed or not done at all. Unless I fill the spaces in between with intention, they get filled with tasks. necessary tasks, but not the only tasks I want my day filled with. The key is to fill my calendar with intentions, not just meetings.

Scope and sequence

As a principal of two very different schools, I juggle a lot of timelines and deadlines that are different for each school. My ‘regular’ school isn’t so regular, being very small and having year-long courses unlike the rest of the district high schools that have 2 semesters. My online school has thousands of part-time students, and 3 different funding periods compared to just one for all the other schools in the district. For that school, I have over 30 teachers in the 8 other high schools that have to meet different funding criteria for me compared to what they have to do for courses they teach in the high school… Everywhere I turn, I have timelines, expectations, and differentiated learning opportunities that are not the same in other schools.

As I approach retirement in the next few years, I realize that my position would be somewhat overwhelming to come into. This is true mostly around understanding the timing of everything needed to be done. The reality is that there are many people I know that could step into my job and do great things… but they would also feel like the first year was only about managing all the pieces and not about actually leading.

So, I’m starting the year with a focus on scope and sequence. It’s time for me to track all the timelines that for me are on autopilot, and I just get done. I’m going to lay out a year long plan for items and procedures that I normally just do, with a specific focus on the things that are not part of the usual processes that happen in other schools.

I enjoy the environments I’ve worked in with these two schools. There is a lot of opportunity for out-of-the-box thinking. With that comes some diverse needs and skills that really fit outside of ‘normal’. A detailed scope and sequence will help make the transition into this role much smoother than it would be without one.

Little and big bumps

Yesterday’s grad went well. There were a few bumps along the way, including our livestream going down, which is not anything you would want to happen. Even after a reboot, it never worked as planned. So, to remote grandparents and others waiting to watch from home, it was a disappointment.

At the event there were a few other bumps. One funny one was that our awards have nominees, and then a winner is announced. But the teacher who had the announcing envelopes tucked them inside a shelf in the lectern then forgot where he put them… and another teacher doing the first award presentation didn’t know who the winner was? That caused a bit of a scramble. But it also caused some laughs. It wasn’t a big deal, and got sorted out quickly.

Big bumps like the livestream going down are regrettable. We don’t know what caused the issue, and if we could have foreseen the issue in any way, it would be upsetting to know that we could have prevented it. But this wasn’t the first livestream we’ve done, and we didn’t do anything differently. The technology failed us, and we still don’t know the cause.

Little bumps like the lost winner envelopes are more preventable than our big bump was, but less important. No one missed out on anything, and the delay was minor… even entertaining.

Planning a big event is challenging to do without a few bumps. Stress levels can be high, and there are a lot of moving parts. Seldom does everything go perfectly. The trick is to not sweat over the little bumps, and to do everything in your power to avoid the big bumps.

Small bumps don’t ruin the event, big bumps can. I feel sorry for those that were trying to watch our event from home. We learned a lesson to always ensure we are saving a local recording and not just recording to the cloud. That way if a livestream connection ever goes down again, we will still have a local copy of the event to share later. That is to say, if our livestream ever dies again, the at home audience can watch it later… and the big bump becomes a small bump.

Travel plans

I find it odd how much time we spend planning to go away. We have a cat that needs attending to, and fortunately we have a nephew who will be staying at our place while away. There are flights and places to stay to arrange. There is the packing, and the planning of things to do.

Holiday getaways are wonderful things, and I feel fortunate to be able to enjoy the great trip to Spain we have planned, but I don’t get excited by the planning and prep work the way I see others get. I don’t know how to ‘do’ anticipatory excitement. But I love arriving at a new destination. I love waking up in the morning in a foreign place knowing that the sights and sounds of the day will be different and new. I enjoy the flavours of new foods.

Now it’s time to start packing so that I’m not in a scramble the night before we leave… and hopefully a little excitement will creep into the tasks I need to do.

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held

Stanford University professor Paul Saffo is a futurist and future forecaster who coined the phrase, “Strong opinions, weakly held.”

I love this idea. One of the biggest problems today is that too many people have strong opinions that are strongly held. Well, maybe the biggest problem is that too many people have incorrect, unsubstantiated, or uninformed strong opinions that are strongly held. And these poorly formulated strong opinions are exactly the kind of thing that gets magnified on social media… they incite interaction that is more likely to become viral by attracting both opposing views, and the attention of equally like minded, strongly held opinions. Strong opinions, weakly held don’t pull as much social media attention, mainly because these aren’t opinions that people need to shout about online.

The power of strong opinions, weakly held is that ‘strong opinions’ allow you to ‘see’ and be passionate about your perspective, while being ‘loosely held’ allows you to take newly found information and adjust or change your strong opinions.

Case in point: Flat Earthers are the perfect example of strong opinions strongly held. Any evidence given to them doesn’t matter, it’s immediately cast as false or contrived by people conspiring against them. And so no matter the proof given to them, their strong opinion of a flat earth stay unchanged.

Imagine if doctors and scientists held such strong opinions? We’d probably still be blood letting with leaches to treat a fever, and not washing our hands before dealing with open wounds, surgery, and childbirth. Progress comes from being able to let go of conventions and norms that keep us stuck in our current frame of thinking.

Nothing wrong with strong opinions, they are just better off loosely held.

Wait for it

Anticipation is a funny thing. When you look forward to something that you are excited about, the anticipation can work in your favour or against you. It can be a big part of the event, the buildup actually becomes part of the experience. It can be more fun than the actual event, like planning a surprise party for someone else where the organizing and conspiring brings great joy. It could also ruin the event when expectations exceed outcomes.

I have never been someone that gets overly excited in anticipation, and so it always fascinates me to see others build up anticipation. When my kids were young, I used to fake anticipation to play along with theirs. I didn’t want my lack of anticipation to be something that took away their joy in looking forward to an event.

I remember when we lived in China, my wife and her sister planned to surprise our kids on a visit to Thailand. My sister-in-law, brother-in-law, and their two kids were going to meet us in Chang Mai, and our kids didn’t know. The day came after a lot of excited planning and we went to a night market knowing they would be there too. The surprise was amazing. It was a wonderful reunion!

After the holiday we were flying home and one of my daughters said, “I wish that I knew they were coming so that I could have been excited longer.” I wasn’t expecting to hear this. Upon reflection of the surprise, she thought it would have been more fun to know in advance and be thrilled in the knowing. It wasn’t like she was sad, she really loved the time together, she just wished the knowing and anticipatory waiting was part of the event rather than the surprise.

That little conversation helped me appreciate the value of anticipation more. It helped me see that if you don’t build it up too much anticipation could be part of the fun. They say good things come to those who wait, but maybe sometimes the wait itself is a good thing.

Your priorities are not your priority

I’m listening to ‘The One Thing‘ by Gary Keller and this concept hit me over the head.

For years, there was no plural for the word priority. This makes sense. If you have more than one priority the multiple things on your list are no longer your ONE priority.

I was talking to a colleague today, (we are holidaying at the same campground), on our morning walk we discussed how some days our jobs are such that the 3-5 things we started the day wanting to prioritize remain undone at the end of our day. Other people’s priorities (and problems) get in the way of our own daily accomplishments.

Keller states, “Purpose without priority is powerless.”

Priority, not priorities.

If I were to start my day planning and scheduling to accomplish my one priority, what would that look like? How successful would I be, compared to trying to divide my day between the many things on my ‘To Do’ list? Yes, those things still need to get done, but are all of them a, or my, priority? If I had a daily focus on my one priority for the day, would that change my sense of purpose on those days when things generally get in the way of what I intend to do?

Will the daily act of determining my one priority change my ability to plan and execute?

What’s my one priority for today?