WAPPA Conference Day 2 concurrent session

I went along to Ben Levin’s presentation on ‘Finding the time to do what is important’

Many of the ideas he presented could be applied to any job. Notes I took which I thought were useful included:

• Identify the distracters in your day and week
• Identify the tasks that are vital to success and that only you can do – schedule these first
• ask – what do I spend my time on? what do I want to spend my time on?
• Time is a resource that we need to budget, plan for and allocate
• Need to overcome perfectionist tendencies because you can’t do your best at everything – there isn’t enough time to do everything perfectly
• Save your best for the times where it really matters
• Look at your week, try dividing it up and doing the important stuff first (30% of the time)
• Routines are important as they help to reduce the need for you to work on certain tasks e.g. a child with an injury – have a set routine which anyone can follow
• Delegate things to others and let them do it without standing over them
• accept that surprises will happen. If you have too many surprises than it may mean that your routines aren’t working or that you need one.
• Routines and procedures empower others to feel comfortable to act without you being involved
• Keep priorities ‘in your face’ e.g. posters
• Bind yourself to to act by scheduling and making public commitments
• Be accessible without an open door. An open door communicates that ‘anything someone else wants to talk about is more important than what I have to do'. Have an appointment schedule for things that people need to meet with you about.
• Reduce the number and length of meetings
• Don’t use important meetings times to communicate things that they could read in a memo or email. Meetings should be about discussing important things like how to improve teaching and learning.
• Choose what gets your attention and how much attention you will give to it.
• make things shorter and quicker – handle paper once, deal immediately with things and get them out of the way
• Remember that people have their own interests which are often politically motivated
• learn how to manage conflict
• learn how your team works
• Don’t always be in the middle. Let others argue with each other
• Create vehicles for dialogue – good communication solves many problems
• Remember that no days go according to plan
• Good leaders have:
• VISION – knowing what we want to achieve
• OPTIMISM – knowing the possibilities
• REALISM – flexible, knowing human nature