Tag Archives: time-management

Meetings and spaces in between

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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.

Second monitor

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At work I just updated and replaced computer monitors for my staff. It was time, especially for my online teachers and secretaries, who spend the vast majority of their day looking at screens. Two of my secretaries use 3 monitors, and many teachers and myself use 2. My setup is that I use my laptop as my keyboard and usually have my calendar on that screen, then my two monitors are on the raised platform of a desktop stand-up desk behind my laptop. A couple of my teachers have the same setup, while others put their laptop between the monitors on a flat desk.

No matter what the setup, all but two teachers see great value in having additional monitors. I like having additional monitors so much that I’m considering a second monitor at home. The reality is that more screen real estate means better productivity. Some people might think it means more distractions, but that’s not the case. If you are going to choose a distraction, more monitors won’t add to the distraction. If that’s what you are choosing, one screen is enough.

However, for productivity a second or third screen is invaluable. Almost nothing I end up doing requires just one screen. If I’m dealing with an email about a student, I have email open, and then I might also have our student management system open to see what courses they have with us, and I might also have the ministry data system up to see their transcript of courses. That’s just one of many examples where 3 screens are far better than either jumping from one online system to another or splitting your screen to see different tabs or systems that then require scrolling.

If you spend a lot of time on a screen, do yourself a favour and add at least one more monitor, then watch your speed at tasks and overall productivity increase… but a fair warning to you that once you do it, you can never go back.

PS. And even if it isn’t something that works for you, don’t let that stop you from providing it to others in your organization… it will increase productivity!

Time and attention

This is going to be one extremely busy week. I don’t usually get stressed out about about my schedule but I’ve got so much going on, pulling me in so many directions, that I get tired just thinking about it. Just cancelled a meeting I want to do, but know that it’s optional. This week is about focus and clearing my schedule for the big items.

Sometimes I can get a bit lost in doing the little things and in following the most recent issue in front of me. This week I need to keep my attention on the ‘must do’s’ and stay focused. Distractions need to be at a minimum. What I have control over is my attention. What I pay attention to gets my time. It’s a simple formula, but not always easy to follow… especially as a school administrator.

Sometimes emergent issues rule the day. Many times the priorities of others become my issues. But there are days when I need to look to others for support. Times when I need to ask others for help. And this week, I need to focus my attention on the things that need to get done right away. What I pay attention to gets my time… and this week time is precious.

Creativity with time constraints

I’ve learned over the years that whenever I try to do something creative it always takes much longer than I thought it would. The moment there is a design element to something I’m working on, I will spend too long tweaking it, and making it better. I actually need to give myself time constraints.

If I wrote in the evening with nothing on my agenda, I’d take over an hour to write this, but in the morning, I don’t want to miss my meditation or workout so I have to get writing. I have to write before I meditate, or I’ll spend my meditation time thinking about my writing.

When I edited my Halloween video I gave myself a 3 hour time limit and got it done in less than 2.5 hours. But when I watched it the next day, I thought of several clever edits I could have added. I had to convince myself that it was good enough or I would have spent well over another hour editing. It’s my nature to tinker, tweak, and just throw more time into something creative.

So for me, time constraints are a key strategy to get creative work done, because I could dive deep into something and time just flies by. I get lost in the flow of being creative, but my time isn’t well utilized. If you want me to really get my creative juices flowing then give me a realistic, but really tight timeline.

2 week social media vacation

I’m removing Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram off of my phone until Sunday February 7th, 2021. That’s two weeks of shutting down the social media tools I engage with on some regular daily or weekly level. Staying on my phone will be WhatsApp and Snapchat because they both have family group chats that I engage with, without having other interactions beyond family.

I will continue to blog every day, and these blog posts will auto-post to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook (to my Pair-Dimes page, not my personal wall, so please follow if FB is where you usually see my blog posts). Feel free to chat with me in my blog comments, but comments on other platforms won’t be seen by me.

There is no specific reason I’m doing this, other than curiosity. I want to see what I miss, and how I will use my time. I think I’ll end up with more audio book and podcast listening time, and I’m hoping that I’ll write and meditate more. Time will tell.

I actually deleted the Apps Sunday night, and I wrote everything above before going to bed. This morning I realized that one thing I’ll need to think about is how I get news? Normally I start my day in Twitter Search looking at the News tab and trending hashtags to get a sense of what’s happening in the world. This has been my strategy for a couple years because television and radio news are not designed to inform as much as to keep you watching and listening. And while I read some print news on my phone, it tends to be focussed on the coronavirus or US politics these days… and it seems to be more commentary and opinion than actual news.

In the end, I won’t have missed much if I’m tuned out of the news for two weeks. And although I’m not always in the room, my wife does watch evening news on tv. I will survive just fine with less news along with my social media vacation.

Interestingly, I came across some Coronavirus news this morning and did a little math with the stats. It seems that while the US has vaccinated 20.5 million people, Canada has only vaccinated 0.817 million. Looking at populations, my math tells me that the US has vaccinated 6% of their population while Canada has only vaccinated 2%. What’s the first thing I thought of doing with that info? Tweeting it… my social media vacation has already started to curtail my behaviour.

I’ll share my vacation experience and reflections on February 7th.

A world of meetings

Today is the first day in a while that I don’t have an 8:30am neeting, but I have one at 9, a long one at 10, then 12, 12:30. And 1pm. For almost four and a half hours I’ll be sitting at my desk staring at my computer screen in meetings. That’s less than what I had yesterday. And yesterday, I ended up on 3 one-on-one conversations with teachers, and a phone call with a student as well. I barely got out of my chair.

I know things will settle down. I value much of the work being done in many of these meetings, but right now I feel like these meetings are equally a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I still get to connect with colleagues and video helps me feel far more connected than voice alone. Cursed because many meetings could just be informational meetings take 1/10th of the time.

Spending 4-6 hours a day in meetings is not efficient or effective, and some days even small ‘to do’ lists are taken home, or added to tomorrow’s list.

What’s really making this tough is that when I normally have days like this, I can take a break by walking down the hall and checking in on kids. I can peek in on teachers teaching a class. I can sit in a busy staff room and join a conversation. My daily 12:30 meeting is a staff check-in organized by the teachers and still feels like this, but for the most part I miss the opportunities to connect with students and teachers in a busy school… and I’m getting a bit tired of non-stop meetings.

Stuck on the ’To Do’ list

I seem to be running out of digital ink right now. I’ve got well over a dozen drafts for posts started, but every one of them needs more time than I’m ready to put into them. I have a backlog of ideas without the ability to follow through. This kind of backlog doesn’t just happen for writing, it can also happen with ‘To Do’ lists.

How many of you have something on your ‘To Do’ list that feels too big to get done? Some of these can be broken into smaller parts but that takes time too. Some just need a big chunk of time to be dedicated to them. Some need other people to act as well as you. And so sometimes a week later, that big item is still on the list. It also sits on your mind.

Other things get added to the list, and they also get completed and removed from the list. Meanwhile the big task(s) remain. They loom. They weigh you down. The little things jump ahead because they are easier, and the reward of completing them is closer.

[[Insert strategies, advice, and wisdom here]]

The reality is that I don’t have any great strategies for dealing with these. I let them sit – procrastinating a bit too long – then I block time off, (or stay late, or come in on weekends), roll up my sleeves, and just get’em done.

I’m open to smarter suggestions.

Balance and a river of information

Almost 2 years ago now, I had to seriously shift my attitude around online information. I was gullibly trying to read every tweet in my ’stream’ and diligently trying to keep my unread items on Google Reader at a handful. I saw these as pools of information and I wanted to hold on to the information that came into the pool. It was too much. The shift for me was seeing information as a river. Now, I’ll paddle along the stream, but when I get out, I don’t feel the need to pay attention to the stream of information that goes by. It has been liberating.

The key is finding balance rather than being inefficient as I tried to demonstrate in this 4 slide presentation I did for a Connectivism course:


That was the first assignment for the course and it helped me decide to drop out of the course as I tried to seek balance.

I think I’ve made a few points, but if I could make one more it would be that my life still lacks balance and I still spend too much time online… but 3 years ago I would have ‘wasted’ that same amount of time, or more, watching TV. In the wise words of the Comedy Network’s tag-line… to me my online life is ‘Time well wasted’.

via a comment I made on weblogg-ed.com – ‘The Choices We Make’

~ The idea behind a post I’ve written in my head about 50 times… some day I’ll really expand on this idea on my Pairadimes blog.

The original post for the slide presentation is here: Connectivism, Relationships and Balance. But it is in the comments that the ideas behind the presentation really came out.