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Links to suggested To-do List Apps
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In this section, I’m going to share with you a strategy for managing the work you aren’t doing yet, guilt-free, so you can confidently get into classrooms every day, and still make sure you get your other work done in a timely manner.
You’re never going to get ALL of your work finished, so it’s essential to have effective systems for keeping track of unfinished work. But to be honest, most of us don’t have effective systems that we’ve purposefully designed to make our lives easier. We have a mishmash of systems that have developed accidentally over time.
For example, if someone comes into your office and asks you to do something for them, but you can’t do it on the spot, you might do what a lot of people do, and write it down on a sticky note. But eventually, if you get too many sticky notes on your desk, that system starts to break down. And when one system breaks down, we have to compensate some other way, by developing another system, or trying to keep it all in our heads.
Maybe you have a to-do list on a legal pad, or in a Google doc, or maybe you’re great with sticky notes. But the nature of our work as school leaders is that just about any system is eventually going to overflow and break down, because you just have so much to do.
Even if you have the biggest desk of anyone in your school, it can literally overflow with unfinished work, even if you’re working 60 or 70 hours a week trying to keep up.
So we need better systems that can handle this volume of unfinished work, and I recommend that you use an electronic application of some kind to organize this work. Electronic applications have the advantage of being able to hold as much as you want to put into them; unlike with a sheet of paper in a planner, or a corner of your desk, you won’t run out of space. Another advantage is that it’s easier to move things around electronically, and with modern apps you can access your information on your computer, or smartphone, or tablet, so even if you’re not in the office, you can stay current on your work.
Because the app landscape is constantly changing, I’ve listed a few of my current recommendations on the page below, and we’ll keep this list updated as my recommendations change.
Within whatever app you choose, you can make different lists or folders, so you can have what I call PEEP: A Place for Everything, and Everything in its Place.
For example, you might have a list of things to talk about at your leadership team meeting, and you may have a list of parents you need to call back. You may have a list of tasks related to a grant you’re applying for that have to be done in a certain order. It’s going to vary. Make up whatever lists you need to.
But here’s the important twist: Don’t look at these as to-do lists that you’ll be able to completely finish. The reality is that you’ll never finish all of this work, and if you only allow something on the list if you know for sure that you’ll get to it, that means you have to have another system for everything else. Often these are the tasks that we leave in our email, or voicemail, or in our heads, and as a result, when we’re looking at our to-do list, we’re not really seeing everything, so we can’t really prioritize.
So instead of seeing theses lists in your to-do app as to-do lists, see them as backlogs or databases of possible tasks.
Give up on the idea that you’re going to do everything on these lists, and start to see them merely as options, as a decision-making dashboard. When you make this mental shift, it becomes much easier to actually list everything, because while a longer to-do list is overwhelming, a complete backlog, that really lists everything you could be working on, gives you tremendous peace of mind.
Within each backlog, you can prioritize, and then get done as much as you can. In whatever app you’re using, I want to encourage you to physically drag these items to the top of the list, so what you do first is the most important work. For example, if there are 25 items in your leadership team backlog, you know you probably can’t get to all 25 in the next meeting. So what do you do? You prioritize, and put just the most important items, from the top of your list, on the agenda. The rest of them stay there, on your backlog, and you can consider them again when you’re planning for the following meeting.
Are you ever going to get to all of them? Probably not, because new and more important issues are going to come up, and some of those items are going to perpetually sink to the bottom of the list. It’s your call as a leader, and that’s why I want to encourage you to use an app that allows you to sort manually, so you can decide what’s most important at any given moment, and move it to the top of the list.
So, pick an app, and within that app, create as many lists as you need, so you can have backlogs for all the work you need to do. You can use additional fields, like due date, to make sure you don’t miss anything urgent. The goal here is to get one app where everything you’re responsible for is organized in one place, so when you’re prioritizing and organizing your work, you’re seeing everything.
This means that if you get a voicemail or a sticky note, you put it in the app. It’s usually just a few seconds to type something in, so don’t worry about the extra effort it takes to move something over. It’ll be worth it because you can prioritize more effectively.
So here’s your action step for this section: decide what app you’re going to use to manage your backlogs. If you’re using something you’re happy with, keep using it, or if you’re not using something electronic, take a look at my recommendations below and pick one that works for you.
I’m Justin Baeder, and I’ll see you in the next section.
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