Thing 47: Productivity Tools

I'm a believer in systems: one of my career goals in education is working to help the profession work smarter not harder.  My colleague put it well recently, there is a hero/martyr myth that is told about educators that harms the profession as a whole.  The educators we celebrate are those who make personal sacrifices, going above and beyond, dedicating time and personal funds in service of this "calling."

I recently attended my nieces graduation, where the principal lauded his AP's, specifically calling out how they were there at 5am every day before he got there, working diligently,  and were often there past 5pm each day for events, celebrations, and sports.  While clearly representative of the kind of passion we should strive to have in our profession, I view these kind of testimonials as a failure, not a success to celebrate.  Should a person have to work a 60 hour work week, sacrificing personal and family time to be a highly effective educator?  This, in combination with the recent high stakes accountability measures and budget cuts, makes me worry for the long term health of our education system.

Technology, to me, provides the tools to build systems to address efficiency and further education as a profession, developing it into something that is sustainable.  Productivity tools are a big part of that.

Prior to exploring this tool, I had explored the Microsoft Outlook suite to help manage my time, in conjunction with my reading of The Time Trap by Mackenzie and Nickerson.  This has been very useful, if time consuming.  If your organization runs using the Microsoft Suite, especially if your job requires collaboration, I would recommend Outlook as your daily productivity tool.  Using the quadrant system, you can create color coded labels to categorize the importance of incoming tasks, then using the flag system, you can set the timeline for completion. 

By flagging these tasks, they appear beneath your Outlook calendar, you can then drag these tasks up to your calendar, blocking out specific times you will be working on said tasks. 

If those are shared tasks, you can right click on the task to assign it to someone else.  This automatically puts it on their task list, and you can track its completion in your own outlook, asking for periodic updates.

It is a powerful productivity tool, but it can be overwhelming.  In exploring this topic, I found a more informal tool that has some added benefits.

WorkFlowy

This tool is quite powerful and flexible.  It allows for task list generation in a simple format - if you know how to make billeted lists within any word processor, you are set.  Each bullet point acts as a mini menu, allowing you to share (through a unique link) copy, complete task (also ctrl+enter hotkey), add notes, etc.  By clicking on subheadings, you can zoom in, so that you only see the parts of the list that you want to at any time.

My favorite part is the inclusion of hashtags.  You can categorize tasks by topic (for instance, I labeled English 4 #E4 and #APLit for my AP class).  By clicking on that tag, you will zoom in on only tasks related to those classes.  This helps address the very real issue of trying to decide how to categorize your tasks; even though I placed the Refutation Paragraph task in my grading list, if I want to see everything that needs to be done for my APLit class, it's one click away.

This is the resource I would use if I only had teaching responsibilities.  If I'm dealing with scheduling meetings, collaborative tasks, recurring events, and/or receiving tasks frequently through email, I would have to stick with Microsoft Outlook due to its full integration with the calendar system.

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As an aside - I am a fan of reader-view extensions.  Just Read is particularly full featured one.  Not only is it convenient for consumption, it helps address issues of printing out texts or resources for class!