Tag Archives: work

Taking the needed time

I took a sick day on Monday for my first cough in years, and it got worse later in the day. Yesterday (Tuesday) morning I retested myself and tested positive for covid. I avoided it for 2.5 years but here I am now in quarantine in our spare bedroom, only leaving to go to the bathroom. My cough is still bad, but this afternoon my sinuses feel clearer and the low grade but constant headache that developed Monday night has subsided with the aid of Advil. I know it’s not over but if that’s the worst of it, a typical sinus infection of yesteryear was more unpleasant (though didn’t sound as bad with this cough). Still, I have a good feeling that I’ll be in full form next week.

What was interesting these past few days was that the headache kept me from my computer and screens more than usual. I took naps and I listened to podcasts and a book to pass a bit of the boredom by, but it was very unusual for me to listen to my body and not just work from home all day. I did do a couple pressing things and answered some texts, but overall I really took sick days and didn’t just work from home while sick.

This was extremely unusual for me. It didn’t come without stress… I haven’t had this many unread emails in well over a year. I have things on my ‘to do’ list that kept creeping into my thoughts even when I tried to let them go. And, I felt guilty that I wasn’t working. That’s the crazy part, I’m home sick, and much of the day I’m thinking about work or feeling guilty for not doing work. I don’t think that’s what’s intended to be done on a sick day?

I’m glad I took the time I needed and I’m willing to bet that I wouldn’t feel as ‘good’ (well at least as ‘fair’) as I do now, had I not taken this time mostly off. And yet I already know that even though I am not going in to work tomorrow, I’m going to be spending at least a few hours catching up. I should probably take the full day off, but I won’t.

I’ll take this as a win for taking the time I needed the past three days. But after 55 years on this planet I still need to figure out that work/life balance thing a little better, so that I can take a guilt-free sick day… to be sick. I’ll probably retire before I really know how to do it right.

Amazing Support

Isn’t it strange how we take the people around us for granted sometimes? It’s not intentional or hurtful. It’s not that we are taking advantage of them. We simply don’t recognize how the people around us support us, lift us up, nurture us, look out for us, and most importantly care for us. They are just there, doing what they do as a part of our work or family, and they make us better, make our jobs easier, and show kindness when we need it.

Remember to show your appreciation once in a while. Not because they went out of their way to support you… rather, just for consistently being there.

‘A’ Game

I had a conversation with a colleague in another district yesterday. I was thanking him for suggesting a great book I’m listening to. We talked about the unique nature of our jobs and he said something that hit a chord with me. He said that while he likes his job as an online school principal, and how unique the challenges are, he’s tired of feeling like there are too many things that come at him at once to give his ‘A’ game all the time. He mentioned that it feels like the best he can do is a ‘C’ or a ‘C+’.

He said, “But that’s not how I like to operate. When I was a teacher I had a lot of control about what my day looked like. Sure, I couldn’t bring my ‘A’ game to every single thing I did, but most of my day was determined by me, and I could regularly bring my ‘A’ game. I can’t do that in this job even though I want to.”

I totally get it. It’s like this job is a juggling act and every time you think you can put on a good show, someone adds one more ball to the balls you are juggling. You looked and felt confident juggling 4 balls, and suddenly you are fumbling with a 5th. Just as you feel good about the 5th ball, a 6th is thrown in. You spend more time picking up the balls than you do juggling. A juggler isn’t showing you their ‘A’ game when they are picking balls up off the floor.

My colleague and I both agreed that we like our jobs, and we want to stay where we are, but lamented about our ability to have control over our days… to decide at the start of the day how many balls we were going to juggle that day. I think that’s something every principal feels and understands. We like our jobs, we just wish we could bring our ‘A’ game to it a little more often.

The struggle is real

This is the time of year that I really struggle to find balance. School startup is over but the pace of the new year hasn’t slowed. Emails are pouring in faster than I can manage them. My desk is a mess… and it seems that most of my days are filled with priority ‘must do’ items and almost no ‘want to do items’.

I’m managing more than leading, and I come home exhausted. It’s hard to keep the motivation going when it feels like momentum is swaying against you. Worse still, I’m writing this past my bedtime because I can’t fall asleep and so figure that I should get this out of the way and sleep in a bit later… if I’m up I may as well be productive.

I’ll keep my healthy living routine going, and try to get to bed earlier tomorrow. I’ll block a bit of time to get a little scope and sequence to the rest of my week. And, I’ll take care of a few big priorities that I know will ease the pressure I’m feeling. The challenge is that schools can throw a wench into the best laid plans and completely disrupt the machinery of the day.

Sometimes you just have to struggle through, knowing that things will eventually ease up. Until then it’s go, go, go. And on that note, I need to go to sleep!

Email Fail

I think email is broken.

1. Spam – it’s not just annoying, it’s dangerous and people are scammed all the time. Sometimes you just need to click a link and you are in trouble. I’ve seen stats ranging from 45-84% of all email being spam. While spam filters might block a lot of this, too much still gets through.

2. Unsubscribe – how many things have you not subscribed to that you have to unsubscribe from? And sometimes the unsubscribe process is the way that spammers know they have a working email and so they target you more. I’ve resorted to ‘block sender’ to unsubscribe from subscriptions that I didn’t sign up for.

3. Unsolicited invitations – worse still is the follow-up, “I don’t know if you saw my first email.” I take the time to block sender when I get these. I don’t owe you a reply when I don’t know you and you cold call me through email. I didn’t miss your email, I wasn’t interested the first time, and I’m just annoyed the second.

4. “Thank you.” – You want to thank me, please do so by not sending me an email thank you. Thank you’s are very polite in conversation, they are just another email adding to my inbox when sent digitally. I know this sounds cranky, but unless you are sending me a hilarious gif that says in some way, ‘Hey, I was so thankful I found this to make you smile’, then save yourself the effort and just don’t reply with a ‘Thanks’.

5. Reply All – Hitting Reply All should require effort, such as a double check to make you think about it:

It is way too easy to Reply All, and this is used far too often. Whenever possible, I blind cc emails when they go to a lot of people and might solicit a Reply All. Sometimes I wish Reply All wasn’t even an option. For the amount of times I’ve used it, I would still be saving time if I had to type everyone’s email in to reply to all, but then also avoided receiving so many in my inbox because it was equally hard for everyone else to send them.

6. Email doesn’t stop – I have a vampire rule for email that I follow: Unless someone that works for me asks a question or needs my help (invites me in), then I’m not allowed to enter their inbox on weekends or after 6pm on a work day. It is annoying how many steps/clicks it takes to delay an email delivery until the next morning, but I’ll do it to avoid sending someone an email when they won’t be dealing with it until the next work day anyway. I rather inconvenience myself than add work to people at or after dinner or on their weekends. Even if I’m sharing a useful resource, it can wait until the next morning. I wish more people did this. If someone wants to think about work on their time off, it should be because they want to, not because a work email came in to interrupt them at home.

—

In a blog post titled Finding Balance, that I wrote over 8 years ago, I created and shared the image above and I said,

“Email is not a productivity tool. It is a poorly used form of communication that engulfs productivity time and requires a disproportionate amount of our lives.”

In the past 8 years I haven’t seen any innovation in email and it still hinders more than helps productivity. Currently I use Microsoft Teams with my work teams and tell them that I will check messages there before email. At least this tool lets me contextualize the messages and so prioritizing my teams is easier than looking at the most recent email that has come in. But email still sucks too much of my time for the value that it does (and mostly does not) return.

Essentially, email has failed, and I would love to see it go away in the same way the fax machine did.

Quite Quitting

I stumbled across the idea of #QuietQuitting which led me to this TikTok video.

The premise is that you don’t actually quit your job, you still perform your duties, but you quit the idea of going ‘above and beyond’. You view work as something you need to do, not something that defines you or determines your self worth.

There is a part of me that struggles with this idea. I can’t see doing the job I have and not wanting to do more, to give more, and to give myself over to my job. Then there is a part of me that totally gets it. I have a job where no matter how many hours I put in beyond the work day, my salary doesn’t change. I’ve fallen into cycles where I’ve dedicated so many hours to my job that I’ve had nothing left for myself or my family. I’ve left work late, and then stayed on my phone working, then gone to bed thinking about the things I still needed to do.

I have recently found a good balance. I get up very early, write, meditate, and exercise so that I feel I’ve accomplished something for myself before I even start my work day. I will stay at work an extra 30 minutes or even an hour longer than planned, but then I don’t do work when I get home. These things provide me with some balance and help me enjoy work more, and still feel like my whole life isn’t work from late August until early July.

But going back to the idea of #QuitQuitting, I see the appeal for people. I don’t think I could do it, but I understand the desire to separate work life from life, and to compartmentalize the two experiences. There are companies now that are seeing the value as well. They are doing things like telling employees what their expectations are and not requiring 8 hour days, (‘This is what you have to do by the end of the week and we don’t care how long you spend doing it or what hours of the day you choose to do them in’). Or, giving employees 4-day work weeks, or ‘Friday optional’ days if work is completed. When you think about it, for many jobs a 40 hour week is completely arbitrary, and a 60 hour week isn’t sustainable for healthy living.

Now in education, where you are responsible for the care of students, a shift to a 4-day week would take a major shift in a culture to adopt, and unlikely to be seen any time soon, but in many other jobs, this is a very likely possibility on a large scale. That said, I think our school, Inquiry Hub could do this. For example, we could make Wednesdays completely optional days, and I could have half my staff there on those days to support students doing their projects. Or we could have Grade 9’s and 10’s off on Mondays and Grade 11’s and 12’s off on Fridays, and focus our learning and support on half of the school on each of those days.

My point is that there are options… and these options can provide a balance for people that give them more time to live their lives outside of school/work, and thus reduce the desire to ‘quit quit’. Because this isn’t just something people are doing at work, I see kids doing this at school too, showing up just to do the minimum.

Maybe the 5 day work week is the problem. Maybe it’s time for us to reevaluate the way we distribute our time between work and the rest of our lives and then maybe people won’t see the need to be #QuietQuitting. Maybe quiet quitting is a signpost that we need to create more work/life balance rather than people trying to unsuccessfully do it on their own.

Chores with headphones

Yesterday I cut the grass and cleaned out my hot tub. Two boring jobs that aren’t hard, but take a bit of time to do. I did them both with headphones on, listening to a spy novel series I’ve been enjoying the past couple weeks. I was able to listen to the last couple hours of book two and then start book three.

It’s amazing what a shift in attitude I have towards menial jobs when I’m listening to a book. Music doesn’t do this for me, but a good book or long format podcast does. Suddenly the job is a physical distraction that allows me to keep my focus on what I’m listening to. I find it hard to sit and do nothing for too long while listening to a book. I also can’t do something that involves a lot of thinking while listening to a book or my mind wonders and I need to rewind and listen again.

Simple chores (and driving) are the perfect things to do when listening to a good book or podcast. I enjoy doing the task more, and I enjoy the book I’m listening too as well. It’s my chores equivalent to pairing a good wine with dinner… it makes both things more enjoyable.

Summer mode

There are still a few things I need to do before I go full into summer mode. Most I’ll get done this week, but a few items will drag into next week. But I’m already feeling distracted and like I’m slowing down. I don’t feel very efficient right now.

Part of this is the routine woes that I already spoke about. I have tried to keep my routines, but it’s 6:30am and I’m usually done writing and meditating by now. I’ve already pushed my workout later in the day twice and missed a workout this week, and it’s only Thursday.

Part of me knows it has been a long year and I’m partially checked out, which is easy to do going to a building where there are no students or teachers, and even my secretaries have been relocated for summer. Part of me feels like I’m just being lazy. No matter how I look at it, I’m less productive than I should be. Yesterday I checked two things off of my ‘To Do’ list and I added two more. Today I hope to add nothing new and just check off a few more.

One item I’m excited to do will have to wait. It’s a series of lessons I’m developing based on James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. I want to create 10 two-to-three minute lessons to run over 2 weeks, with a goal of students starting a good habit that they decide on. My whiteboard in my office has had most of the concept and plan on it all year, but I really need some uninterrupted planning time to get it from idea to reality, and my ‘to do’ list is too big of a distraction right now. Still, I’m excited to get this ready for September, and I know I’ll be coming into my office to get it done over the break.

But for right now, I need to stay in work mode and get stuff done. Summer holidays won’t feel like holidays until I can put my ‘away from office’ notification on my email. Until then, I need to push summer mode to the side.

Time dilation

Yesterday I experienced a bit of a time warp. My morning went a bit slow, both in my productivity and in how long it felt. After lunch it felt like everything was thrown my way, and I was constantly on my ‘to do’ list, which seemed to be filled with things that took longer than they should.

At one point a package arrived, and I thought I’d take a break and take it to the teacher who ordered it. When I passed my grade 9 classroom it was empty, and I wondered where they were? As I learned, they had left for home. I thought it was about 2:30 in the afternoon and it was actually 3:50. It was almost an hour and a half later than I thought!

I’m always amazed by experiences like this. How can one hour of busy work or fun disappear, and another hour of slow work or boredom feel like an eternity? Just like actual time dilation is about time being different based on relative velocity, it seems as though we can experience this based on the velocity of our thoughts relative to actual time.

I also wonder about how relative time is based on our age. Five years is half of a lifetime to a 10 year old, but just 1/11th of a lifetime for me. Does my perception of time change with age? Does the importance of events alter because of the relative time of the experience compared to how many more experiences the event is compared to?

And what makes a single day feel both short and long at the same time? It’s early April, and I already know that the school year will be ending before I realize it. I’ll be swept up in all the things that are coming up, like report cards and grad prep, and suddenly I’ll be saying goodbye to a whole group of students. On that journey I’ll have long and short days, but looking back at the end of June, I’ll think the days from now until then just breezed by.

It’s not just a day in time that dilates, but weeks, months, and years too. It just seems strange… We want to fill our time with activities and events that are enjoyable and thus tend to go by faster. So, we are literally speeding up our lives. But the alternative is to spend a perceptually longer life that is less busy and enjoyable. Is one of the goals of life to have it feel like it’s going too fast? Or is this just an outcome of a good life?

One cation I think this brings attention to is that if time is going to race by, we should at least do our best to make it joyful and not just busy. Because time can also race by when we are just busy, but to what end?

Hit the road running

I won’t pretend that I didn’t do any work over the last couple weeks of March break. I’m on a Ministry committee that required two online meetings, and there was a district deadline for online learning that required a fair bit of communication with my bosses. But for the most part I really let work go from my mind and enjoyed my break.

Now on the eve of returning to work, work life is creating back into my brain. There are new covid protocols to review. There are neglected emails to look at. There is a ‘To Do’ list pushed to my calendar for my return.

I’ll enjoy a nice family dinner tonight, I’ll do a bit of planning for the week, I’ll get a good night’s sleep. And tomorrow I hit the road running.

I hope fellow educators got some rest and relaxation, and feel refreshed as we head into the home stretch.