Tag Archives: work

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.

An extra day

This past weekend was a 3-day weekend, and it was wonderful to get the extra day off. I feel like I had a holiday. It’s amazing the difference between a two-day and a three-day weekend. If I were ever to start a company, I think I’d institute a 4-day work week.

I’m looking forward to work today. I feel well rested. I have thought about some goals I really want to get to. I finished an audio book that I had about 10 hours to listen to at the start of the weekend.

How different would life be if the work week was just 4 days long? Would people be more productive either at work or at home? Would happiness be greater or would people fall into a similar pattern of happiness that we have now? What would a world with 4 day weeks do to the overall creativity expressed by people?

I’d love to see an entire country try this out. I think the first thing you’d notice is positive immigration… I know I’d like to live there!

What a great day it is today

A few years ago the Ministry updated their student management system from something called BCeSIS to MYEDBC. I hated BCeSIS, which I affectionately called BC-Feces, and was looking forward to the change. But it wasn’t a smooth transition. What made it worse was that it did not take into consideration students working online, starting and finishing their courses outside of scheduled semesters.

As the principal of the online school this was frustrating for me, but even more frustrating for my secretary. She would spend hours updating student files, then the next day her work would disappear. Gone!

I wanted to do something for my secretary, and knew that she wanted a rainbow bowl to put candies and treats in on her desk. I had no idea how hard that request would be? I looked everywhere for a rainbow bowl and could only find something cheap and plastic, or something expensive and ugly.

Then I was ordering some mugs for the school and decided to make her a rainbow mug. At that time, with the frustration she was facing with the student management system, I had a Thursday morning tradition. On Thursdays mornings we had district principal meetings (that were not online) and I’d get to school after the secretaries. On this day I’d walk into my office and declare, “What a great day it is today!”

So, this might was born:

Every secretary has had one since, each one with a different colour on the inside, so we can tell them apart. I still use mine every day, and it will continue to be a gift I give any secretary I have.

Two great divides

The gap between the rich and poor is getting bigger. The middle class seem to be lower down in the separation of this gap. One simple thing keeps the divide growing, and that is debt.

When a typical person buys a house, and starts paying a mortgage, then their future income is tied to their debt.

When a rich person buys a house, they are making an investment with their earnings, and their house becomes a future source of income.

One pays interest, the other reduces capital gains. One pays monthly, the other moves their money around. When one does renovations to add value to their home, they increase their debt, the other adds to their write-offs, and reduces taxes on gains.

But the part of this that really makes a difference is that with interest rates so low, the rich don’t use their own money, they too borrow money for expenses. But while poorer people use a large part of their income to pay off the low interest debts, the rich use their ‘extra’ money to make more money than the cost of the low interest debt. By borrowing, they increase the wealth gap. This great divide gets bigger.

This is a bit of an oversimplification, but it speaks to the fact that people live in different worlds. The same way I’ve described this gap, I can describe another gap between the ‘poor’ middle class and the truly poor. For the truly poor, they can’t buy a home, and so their rent does not go towards any equity. Their wages only go to survival. An unexpected debt of just a couple thousand dollars can be enough disrupt the balance and cause homelessness, or force the need to take out a high interest loan… because the poor are a risk to default and so they pay a premium on debt. Then payments for that debt become the focus of wages, but there is no house, no equity made on that debt, it’s purely an expense.

For the truly poor, the wealth gap is a an inescapable chasm. This is the gap that matters most in our world, the one that keeps people at or near poverty levels. This is the great divide that really matters, and it’s one that should be addressed by the leaders of our world in the same way that they are approaching climate change. It matters not just to the poor, it should matter to everyone. Because in this amazing world we live in, there is no need for the poverty we see to exist.

It comes down to this

I just deleted 3 paragraphs that led up to me writing this:

If you can’t take care of yourself during your busiest times, then you aren’t actually taking care of yourself.

That’s the whole post. No excuses, no postponing, no making up for it later. Take care of yourself. You’ll get more done and feel better doing it.

Death by a thousand paper cuts

This is the term I use when too many small things come my way. I then spend my entire day successfully getting two-thirds of those things done, and creating an unruly ‘to do’ list for the next day, after staying at work a little longer than I hoped.

I haven’t done it yet this school year, but today I’m blocking some time in my calendar for a project I’m hoping to get done in the coming weeks. It was a September goal that never happened.

It’s quite apparent to me that unless I slot time in for visioning and projects that move my schools forward, the paper cut tasks win me over and consume my day. Blocking this time off won’t magically create more time in my calendar. I’m not going to suddenly have less little things to do… but I’m not going to go home feeling like I spent the day getting paper cuts. I’ll feel more like I had a productive day rather than just a busy day.

I know that when I do these things that I want to get done, (which I know are good for my school), then I don’t go home feeling like I want to describe my day as ‘death by a thousand paper cuts’. I know that I will feel a lot more like my day accomplished something beyond the many little (but important) things land on my desk.

The Learning Cliff

Everyone has heard of the Learning Curve. When you try something new and challenging, it is said that this has a ‘steep learning curve’. When new staff, teachers and secretaries, join my online school, I always tell them that they are going to experience a learning cliff. That is to say, there is so much to learn that you literally won’t remember how to do something shortly after you’ve tried to internalize it. You will hit a cliff or a barrier where you feel frustrated and think, “I already asked about this, I should know this.”

The reality is, ‘No, you shouldn’t,’ it’s totally understandable that you didn’t take in the answer to this question you have, when you tried to learn 15 other things at the same time. So, it’s perfectly ok to ask a second, third, even fourth time. We all worked through the learning cliff by asking the same questions more than once. We all know what it’s like to have so many new systems added to what we do. We all know it feels dumb asking again. We all appreciated others answering our same questions more than once. We are all happy to do the same for you.

I try to have this conversation in front of my long-time secretaries, because they agree and acknowledge that they heard me say this. And that they both appreciated the freedom to ask, and the welcoming responses to the same questions.

You don’t know that you didn’t learn everything you needed to until you hit the cliff with this feeling of, ‘I’ve been told how to do this already,’ or ‘I know that I did this before, why can’t I figure out how to do it again?’

When the culture is ‘ just ask again’, it turns the cliff back into a curve… there’s still a lot to learn, but the path to greater learning is more gradual and attainable.

Weekend blues

Sometimes, at the start of the school year, weekends are tough. They are too short, there is work on your mind, and routines are too hard to follow.

This was one of those weekends. It’s not over, and I’m looking forward to my evening plans, but school is on my brain.

It’s moments like these that I feel like a split personality. Part of me longs for a job I don’t bring home. Part of me is so excited about the year to come, filled with potential… and I can’t imagine doing anything else.

I think a 4 day week would be the perfect balance. I’d have a lot less weekend blues. I think my mind would clear more easily, and I’d head back to work fully energized. But that’s not the reality, and I’ll be in bed by 9:30 tonight. And I’ll be ready to start my weekday routine long before the sun rises tomorrow.

Mind occupied

Yes, it’s the long weekend before school starts, and I should be resting up for what promises to be a challenging year… but I’m not able to let my thoughts of the days to come out of my mind. I’ll be going into work today, and making sure that everything I need to do the first couple days goes seamlessly. I know there will be distractions. I know there will be a lot of conversations and connections that will take time. I know that there are new members to the team that I’ll need to support, and that need to know how easy it is to get support. And ultimately, I know that no amount of planning will make the coming days go exactly as planned.

That’s why I’m going in today. I want the students first visit to the school this year to be something that makes them feel welcome. I want my first staff meeting to demonstrate that I was prepared and ready to support my staff. I want to be ready in such a way that when unexpected interruptions to my plans happen, things can still go smoothly.

I could sit at home and think about work all day today and tomorrow, or I can go to work, fell like I’ve fully prepared myself, then take tomorrow completely off. If my mind is going to be occupied with work, I might as well use my time effectively.