Ever get to work and realize you’re sick as a dog? Usually someone else helps you realize it: “You look terrible. Go home!”
After making the decision to go home and rest, what do you do?
You say to yourself, “OK, I’m going home…as soon as I get this one thing done.” And that one thing gets done quickly, nothing else does, and you go home and collapse into bed.
We can learn something about time management from the way our fever-addled brains behave.
There’s a concept in finance called zero-based budgeting, which assumes that a department or organization needs no money at all. Then, any money the department wants has to be justified based on specific purposes.
This is a stark contrast to the typical process, which is based on incremental change: How much did we spend last year? Do we need to spend slightly more or slightly less? ZBB asks a different question: What do you need to do, and how much does it really need to cost?
What if we treated our time this way, like we do when we’re going home sick?
What if we asked ourselves “If I had only 10 minutes to work today, what would I get done in those 10 minutes?” Usually, it’s something that is both urgent and important.
But ZBB doesn’t force us to look only at the bare minimums. In the public sector, ZBB also asks departments to decide what they would do if funding remained the same, as well as if funding increased.
So what would you do if you spent exactly the same amount of time working as you did yesterday? (Not a very thought-provoking question, is it?)
A better question: What would you do if you could work, uninterrupted and unconstrained, for the next 168 hours? What would you accomplish? Knowing you can’t do that, what could you pluck out of that scenario and into the realm of possibility?
The routine of having a work day or work week lulls us into unproductive patters. We expect to always be busy, and we expect to always work long hours…and those expectations are self-fulfilling.
That’s why when someone suggests spending dramatically more time in classrooms, it strikes many principals as inconceivable.
But what if we turn the tables, and ask a different set of questions:
- If I had only 10 minutes to work today, what would I get done?
- If I had only four blocks of 10 minutes to work, what would I do?
- If I could work without interruption indefinitely, what would I do?
- If I spent all day in classrooms, except for a handful of 10-minute check-ins in the office, how would the day go?
These questions can lead us to much better decisions about how to spend our time. How do you focus yourself to get things done?