Verwandte Artikel zu Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done

Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done - Hardcover

Vanderkam, Laura

 
9780735219816: Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0735219818 ISBN 13: 9780735219816
Verlag: Portfolio, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

"I well recall a conversation with an executive I hoped to interview about her astonishing productivity. I began our call with an assurance that I would not take much of her time. She laughed. 'Oh, I have all the time in the world,' she said."

Most of us feel constantly behind, unsure how to escape feeling oppressed by busyness. Laura Vanderkam, unlike other time-management gurus, believes that in order to get more done, we must first feel like we have all the time in the world. Think about it: why haven't you trained for that 5K or read War and Peace? Probably because you feel beaten down by all the time you don't seem to have.

In this book, Vanderkam reveals the seven counterintuitive principles the most time-free people have adopted. She teaches mindset shifts to help you feel calm on the busiest days and tools to help you get more done without feeling overwhelmed. You'll meet people such as...

♦ An elementary school principal who figured out how to spend more time mentoring teachers, and less time supervising the cafeteria

♦ An executive who builds lots of meeting-free space into his calendar, despite managing teams across multiple continents

♦ A CEO who does focused work in a Waffle House early in the morning, so he can keep an open door and a relaxed mindset all day

♦ An artist who overcame a creative block, and reached new heights of productivity, by being more gentle with herself, rather than more demanding

The strategies in this book can help if your life feels out of control, but they can also help if you want to take your career, your relationships, and your personal happiness to the next level. Vanderkam has packed this book with insights from busy yet relaxed professionals, including "time makeovers" of people who are learning how to use these tools. Off the Clock can inspire the rest of us to create lives that are not only productive, but enjoyable in the moment.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laura Vanderkam is the bestselling author of What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, I Know How She Does It, and 168 Hours, among others. Her 2016 TED talk, "How to Gain Control of Your Free Time," has been viewed more than 5 million times. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, and other publications. She lives with her husband and their four children outside Philadelphia.

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ONE

Tend Your Garden

Mindfulness gives you time. Time gives you choices.Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom.

-Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English

Robert Kauffman has been a school principal for twenty-one years. During that time, he's discovered a truth about education and, really, any field involving good intentions and infinite demands. "I think people are often just overwhelmed," he says. Being a principal is an "ambiguous" job, which lends itself to "winging it." A new school leader will feel compelled to focus on the crises right in front of her. The trouble is that, at the end of a crisis-filled day, she'll realize she never did check in with that teacher who wanted advice on reteaching a math concept few pupils understood. The urgent crowds out the important. The important doesn't get done.

Thanks to his two decades of experience, Kauffman imagined he was more effective than average, but in 2016, when he became the principal of Hillside Elementary School in Farmington Hills, Michigan, he knew he would be challenged in new ways. The school had an outsized proportion of English-language learners. He wanted to find time to support his best teachers, and mentor those who needed help. He wanted to focus on improving student performance without getting derailed by every late bus and broken pipe.

So in late 2016, Kauffman signed on to the National SAM Innovation Project. This fascinating principal professional development program is centered on the belief that principal time is uniquely valuable. A teacher can influence the twenty-five students in his class. A principal can influence a whole school. But for principal time to be invested well, first the principal needs to know where his time goes. Then he can figure out options for redeploying time to the tasks that he does best. After that, he can do the hard work of following up daily to check that these lofty goals are reflected in the reality of how he spends his hours.

Kauffman, who calls himself a "data dork," was keen to get this information. After the principal did some initial work with SAM headquarters, a black-clad gentleman appeared at Hillside Elementary School to follow Kauffman around for a Monday-through-Friday school week. Like Kauffman's very own Boswell, the man recorded in five-minute increments absolutely everything Kauffman did. This included snacks and water breaks. He followed him into the lunchroom and into meetings. He made notes as Kauffman dealt with the plethora of discipline issues that of course cropped up during a week when teachers were conscious of creating a good impression. Kauffman had prepared the staff, though he notes that they were still deadly curious about the whole process. Some tried to engage the mysterious scribe in conversation, generally with no result (he was beholden to clean data!).

Soon thereafter, Kauffman received his stats. He learned that he was spending 39.2 percent of his time on "instructional leadership"-the teacher and curriculum management that tends to be the highest-value use of a principal's time. That's better than the average principal, who spends about 30 percent of her time on these matters, but less than Kauffman wanted. Time passes whether or not we think about how we spend it, and this is as true in an elementary school as it is anywhere else. Without active tending, Kauffman's time was easily taken over by the equivalent of weeds: dealing with paperwork that could be managed by other people, constantly answering email, and spending too much time supervising the cafeteria.

So, like a landscape designer surveying his plot, he sketched ideas of what he would like his time to look like. He brainstormed ways to be in the classrooms more often. He created "Teaching Tuesdays," during which he'd teach lessons to give teachers examples of techniques. Most worked, though some bombed, which was a learning experience for everyone. He designated times during which he would give teachers positive feedback. "I'm not a celebratory feedback guy," he confesses. "The joke is if I say it's okay, it means it's great," but lauding what goes right is curiously motivational.

With guidance from SAM headquarters, he aimed to build in thirty minutes a day for personal matters, such as making doctor appointments or calling contractors to get bids on home projects. Without dedicated time, these activities could bleed into the rest of the day and derail other goals. Or else they might not happen, creating work/life stress (more the case for Kauffman; his baseline was a mere 1.4 percent of time spent on anything remotely personal, including time in the bathroom). He also worked on not scheduling every minute. "You want to leave open space in your calendar," he says. That way, "whatever comes up comes up."

All this was exciting, but putting twenty minutes on the schedule to give a teacher celebratory feedback is only helpful if you then spend twenty minutes actually doing it. Things come up. Yet here's the reality of those interruptions and setbacks: If the fire alarm goes off during those scheduled twenty minutes, that doesn't change the fact that the feedback was a priority. Using time well means immediately rescheduling that feedback to a time that has been intentionally left open precisely because things like the fire alarm will happen.

During the six months after he tracked his time, Kauffman and an employee he designated to be his "school administration manager" (that's the "SAM" part of the program) checked in every day to see if his time was spent as it was supposed to be spent. If the previous day had gone off the rails, they tried to understand why. They analyzed what prevented Kauffman from spending time on the things only he could do. "I think the single greatest thing of SAM is that a principal is held accountable for his time," he says. His SAM kept nudging him to make time on his schedule to work with a teacher who really needed guidance. They had identified this as a priority, so it was given larger swaths of space than Kauffman might have naturally given it. His SAM urged him to stop doing things, such as lunchroom duty, that others could do. They figured out who could be a "first responder" if a parent called about an issue that didn't need to be escalated up the chain of command. "I was everywhere prior to SAM," Kauffman says. "But we can't be everywhere, nor should we be everywhere."

The result: a follow-up study at the end of the 2016-2017 school year found that Kauffman was spending 51 percent of his time on instructional leadership. That's like gaining an additional twelve days of high-impact work time during the one hundred days he spent on this calendar awareness. That time had impact as teachers responded to Kauffman's focus on their skills. The proportion of Hillside students demonstrating proficiency on state math tests rose by 4.2 percentage points that year, with similar gains in reading.

None of this is easy; constantly minding time is more challenging than letting it slip unnoticed into the past. It is also never done. Habits ("Teaching Tuesdays") help make good decisions automatic, yet there is never a moment when the time thing is figured out. Six veteran teachers might decide to leave, and a principal's time would then need to pivot to mentoring the new ones. The school day might change. School demographics might change. This is why the constant evaluation is necessary.

Yet this labor-this discipline-can lead to a surprising mental lightening. J. Thomas Roth, principal of Reddick Elementary School in Hillsborough County, Florida, has also tracked and monitored his time through the National SAM Innovation Project. He notes that this attention "has upgraded my life all the way around. I'm more effective at school," he says, having massively increased the time he spends on instructional...

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Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0735219818
ISBN 13 
9780735219816
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Portfolio
https://www.wetones.co.uk/

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