Confession: I am a maker of lists.
Confession: I am a maker of lists. When presented with a complex task which I know will eat up hours and the completion of which will take a significant amount of time, I get fired up when I chart out potential steps and timelines, chunk together the major pieces, draw it all up on a sticky note or on a far too complex and color-coded spreadsheet.
There is something so gratifying about sketching little squares next to words or designing an electronic to-do list with items organized just so, knowing that I will check them off at some later date.
I completely get into the planning.
Applying this approach to our work as educators has always made sense to me. In my experience, this type ofpreparation is critically necessary to balance all that teachers and administrators must complete in our days, weeks, and months.
From a broader perspective, the creation of committees and the composition of strategic plans are large-scale approaches to making checklists. When addressing issues that are likely more complex than what we approach individually on a daily basis, these marco-structures help move things forward in our schools. I am not sure we could run our schools without them.
How do we work on curriculum revision? Form a committee. Where do we want to be in five years? In ten? Draft a strategic plan.
Often, when I make a list or sit on a committee, I can find myself overwhelmed by the enormity of the subject of the list or the charge of the committee. What to do then? Simplify. Simplify. Simplify. Likewise, I can also get down deep into the minutia of a task, look at it from all angles of which I can conceive, and break it into its most simple parts. Then, I can assign pieces to timelines, ask people to perform tasks, allocate resources and color in spaces on the calendar. Planning of this sort can be invaluable to our schools.
Until it isn’t.
Here’s the thing: I can spend hours in the planning, days in the design, weeks in the idea. Sometimes I forget it is in the doing that things get done.
I know that I spend a metric ton of time on the planning – the measuring twice, cutting once approach – of my work.
I spend an awful lot.
This is not a bad thing. I am not advocating the abandonment of list making. My God, I would feel lost without my lists. Nor do I think that our schools should disband all committees (though I bet they could do without a few of them) and scrap all strategic plans (but I would be most careful with deadlines associated with them).
These are tools of the trade: these lists and committees and plans.
But they are not the trade.
It’s in the doing that things get done.