Tag: time

Thoughts on time

During the last month or so I haven’t been making the same contributions to my #PLN in the same way as I had earlier in the year.   My contributions to twitter dropped.   My blog posts reduced significantly in frequency.    My writing and submitting articles to magazines such as UkEdChat slowed.    Now this wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that it bothered me, I was concerned by the fact I no longer seemed to have the time to get these things done.    Where was the time going?

An easy answer might be to suggest the initial phases of the academic year were busy and therefore time was being spent on on work related tasks with blogging, etc. being prioritized as less important and therefore being provided with significantly less on my time.    The difficulty with this answer is that I felt concerned by my lack of blogging, etc. which suggests that I considered it important enough to allocate more time to than I was doing.   This seems to run contrary to my easy answer.

Time is often an issue in education; there isn’t enough time.    The issue with this statement is that the logical response to not having enough of something is to try to get more of it.    Unless someone has invented time travel I am at a loss to see how we might achieve this with time; the amount of time we have in a day, week, month and year is fixed.

Maybe a better statement is therefore “I need to use my time better”.    This is a less likely statement to make as it focuses on my actions.   It is my actions that are the issue as opposed to an external factor such as the lack of available time.    It is more difficult to state this as it highlights and acknowledges ineffectiveness in myself.    Acknowledging your own personal inadequacies is never easy.    On reflection this seems to fit my current situation, the issue is either my management of time or my perception of how I am managing time; time itself isn’t to blame.

We talk about not having enough time to get done what needs to be done as if time was a variable and the tasks we need to accomplish were fixed.    As I have indicated above time is not variable, it is fixed.     It is our use of time which is variable, ranging from highly effective to highly ineffective and even wasteful.   The further complicating matter surrounds the time taken to do tasks.    We see this as fixed when in fact it is not, especially when we are operating without boundaries of time.   Our spending of time on a task expands or contracts into the time we have available.    If we have 1 hour to do something we will get it done in that hour however if we have a break of 30mins following this hour the task may flow into this break period and effectively take up 1 hour 30mins of our valuable time.    Unallocated time gets absorbed.   This is even more the case where we are really engaged by a task, by what Csíkszentmihályi describes as flow.    During flow we lose all track of time so hours can pass without our awareness.

Well for now, I have at least contributed this post so will feel a little happier as to my online contributions at least in the short term.    It remains to be seen whether in the longer term I will need to review how I am managing my time or review my expectations as to what I will achieve with the available time.

 

 

Reflections: doing what matters?

Have finally got around to sitting down to do a short review the past month, or in fact the past two months given I never actually managed to get around to reviewing September.

Firstly I would say that it is amazing how quickly the last two months have flown by.   Now I suspect this is very much due to the busy nature of the start of the new academic year.   This has clearly played a part in the fact I never got around to posting a reflection on September.

On a personal level October has been very important to me as it includes my eldest sons 21st birthday party.   I had missed his 18th as he had been in the UK while I was still living and working in the middle east and unable to get back for it.   As such it was important for me to take time out over the half term to be with him for his 21st and also to take in some football matches in the couple of days which followed the party.   I very much enjoyed actually sitting with him and watching a couple of games over a pint down the local pub, albeit the score of one particular game was not exactly in my favour.

The flip side to the above is that I never contributed to the half term #teacher5aday sketch as I had planned to.    I also contributed little in the way towards twitter over the period and my blog entries were a struggle.

I feel a tinge of regret in how I have let my contributions slide over the last month however it also worries me that I feel this way.   Surely something as important as a milestone in my sons life should take precedence over twitter and blog contributions?     This all makes me consider the issue of the limited amount of time we have available to us on a day, week, month or year and how I manage this finite resource.    Am I focusing on getting as many things done as possible or I am focussing on what is important?    The fact I feel that time has flown over the last two months suggests I have been busy however in being busy have I truly allowed my time to stop and think, to review and ensure that I am doing the right things, the important thing.  Come to that, for me, what actually is important?   Also if I stop doing some things due to them being of lesser importance, is it possible that by my narrowing of focus I may miss out on opportunities which only arise as a result of a broader focus?

I think this is something I need to reflect on in much more detail possibly including reviewing Coveys Seven Habits and First Things First books.     I may share some of my thoughts over the coming weeks but for now I am going to consider the X-Factor and a game of Warhammer with my youngest son to be what matters.

Not another email!!

During the day things can be hectic and busy which leads to a focus on getting the things done in school that need doing and leaving some other things until later.    One of these things can be communication and in particular email communication.    In addition to this we quite often identify things we have forgotten to deal with or come up with great ideas when we are relaxed and no longer in work mode, as normally happens at the end of the day or on weekends.    This again quite often involves email and sending out last minute reminders or requests, and on sending out proposals or posing questions all via email.    Through this we can see large volumes of email being sent at hours outside what would normally be considered normal working hours.

If you are anything like me, when your phone or tablet bleeps to inform you a new message has arrived we invariably look at it.   This is independent of whether this happens during the school day or outside the school day.   The reaction could be described as learned behavior.       Having read the message you will then react to it with some reactions being positive and others not so positive.   This can then colour and impact on your time, which technically should be non-work time.   Recently I found myself not sleeping very well having read a particularly troubling email sent to me late into the evening.   I am convinced the reason for my inability to sleep being that my mind was running both consciously and subconsciously through the issue in hand and all the possible actions which could be taken to resolve things.   All this meant was that I did not enjoy the time I had available to me outside work and I arrived at work more tired than normal the following day albeit with a more detailed picture of my possible options in relation to the issue at hand.

We can try to address this through self control and choosing not to look at messages however after your phone has bleeped five times in an evening I would challenge most people to have ignored the phone.

I am conscious of the ever creeping of work into my home life so have been trying to do something about it.   I cannot control what and when others send me email however I can control my actions and hope that by doing so it will encourage others.

My current approach is to write my emails in the evening and on the weekend when I need to but to save them to draft rather than sending them.   I then send them in the morning of the next working day.   I do note, however, that were issues are emergencies, and by description this should be few and far between, I do engage in emailing out outside of working hours.

How do you manage email?