I’d love to get into classrooms more, but…
I’d love to provide more meaningful feedback to my teachers, but…
I’d love to get to know students and what they’re learning better, but…
Here’s the thing: none of these are excuses. They’re reluctant statements about reality.
This is a tough job, and one that always pulls us in more directions than we can go at once. Everything we have to do is important, and everything needs to be done now, and there’s never enough time to do the non-urgent things we’d really hoped to spend more of our time on.
Steven Covey called them Quadrant II activities – things that are truly important, but not urgent compared to the fires we’re constantly putting out. Things that tend to get crowded out by the urgent.
Most of our instructional leadership work falls into Quadrant II.
The secret of Quadrant II work is a principle I call ergopneumatics, which combines the Greek roots ergo, meaning “work,” and pneuma, meaning “air in motion.”
Like compressed air, “compressed work” moves faster and is more useful. With an impact wrench, you can take the wheel off a race car in a few seconds. With your work under compression, you’ll get things done when you need to be done with them, not when you get around to finishing them.
If I have the rest of the day to write this evaluation, it’s going to take me…you guessed it: the rest of the day. And I might still decide I need to take it home and work on it more after the kids are in bed.
If, on the other hand, I have 45 minutes to write this evaluation, and then I’m leaving on a trip, I’m going to get the evaluation done.
The surprising secret? The evaluation I spend all day on isn’t going to be any better. I can write just as good an evaluation in 45 minutes, and if I have to, I will.
This is why I’m not completely anti-procrastination. Procrastination forces us into compressing the time we spend on a task. But it has downsides too, so I think purposeful compression without procrastination is even better.
Give it a try: impose a deadline on yourself, and commit to stopping and doing something else the moment that deadline arrives. (It’s essential that the deadline be made real by a commitment you make to someone else.) More often than not, you’ll be done with your task. Some examples:
- Writing anything
- Processing your email
- Working through a stack
When we compress our work, it gets done in less time, just as a compressed pile of clothes fits into the suitcase even if it looks too big before we compress it.
Why does this work? A couple of reasons:
- It focuses us on a clear goal
- It forces us to mentally keep track of whether we’re on pace, and we can adjust as needed
- It energizes us to push through and avoid distractions
Give it a try and let me know what you think. If you need to finish an evaluation today, commit to visiting a classroom 50 minutes from now, and get cranking on that eval.
Report back in the comments. How has the principle of ergopneumatics worked for you?