There’s a question that’s been nagging at me for months and months, starting at the end of last school year, persisting at times through the summer, and now louder and clearer with a new school year under way. It’s been a hard one for me to voice because I’m keen on focusing on what I […]
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Only Handle It Once (OHIO): A Simple Discipline for Making More of Your Time
Get talking with a productivity buff about email, and you’re bound to hear OHIO, an acronym that stands for “Only Handle It Once.” The idea is pretty simple: if you’re going to open an email, then right then and there you’ve also got to deal with it by responding, archiving, forwarding (shudder), or task-listing. You […]
Fearfully and Wonderfully
Today as I met my students for the first time, I couldn’t help recalling an old Hebrew hymn in which the author writes, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” While perhaps not many of us public school teachers share the Hebrew poet’s […]
The Precious S’s, Part 2: Skipping
All of our tasks exist on a spectrum. On one end are the tasks that directly touch the core purpose of our jobs, and on the other end are the tasks that we ought to try skipping. But which tasks are those? Which can we not just satisfice, but skip? To have a chance of […]
The Precious S’s, Part 1: Satisficing
If you and I are going to stay sane this year — sane as in healthy, of sound mind, common sensical, practical — then we’ll need to practice what I’ve come to call the precious s’s: satisficing and skipping. Satisficing is what we do when we accept an available option as satisfactory rather than working […]
