Find ways to make the mundane routine.
Bandwidth – one thing we all wish we had more of. In today’s post, we’ll look at the power of the simple checklist to free up time for school leaders.
As of the publishing of this post, I’ve been in my current position for about three-and-a-half years. About four months after I began, I received news that the head of high school counseling had accepted a position at another international school and would be transitioning at the end of the school year. His upcoming transition unsettled the community – both because he was deeply respected and because he was solely responsible for some of the school’s most mission-critical projects. He single-handedly coordinated the annual revision of the high school’s program planning guide as well as the construction of the master schedule.
After the head of high school counseling had announced that he would be moving on, he and I led work that resulted in the careful documentation of the highly complex processes by which the program planning guide and master schedule were produced. Ultimately, those processes were outlined in a checklist, and the tasks in those processes were delegated to a team, rather than to another individual. The goal? To build a system that ensures those essential projects would never again be jeopardized by the normal year-to-year transience of our faculty.
The checklist we created is a core part of that system. And I continue to turn more and more frequently to checklists to help make routine the more mundane aspects of being a school leader. As you consider how checklists might help free bandwidth for your teams, there are two resources that I highly recommend.
The Checklist Manifesto
Reading this book by Atul Gawande will make just about anyone a believer in the power of checklists. The book outlines the qualities of effective checklists. They are brief (i.e., 5 to 9 items on a single page), use simple and exact wording, and focus on "killer items" (i.e., those that are essential but often overlooked). An excellent summary of the book is available at FactorLab's website.
To Do
This is now my preferred app for creating, sharing, and managing checklists. It is free, easy-to-use, and extremely powerful. I use it daily and cannot recommend it highly enough. In a future post, we will look at task automation - the step beyond checklist creation. Microsoft To Do is at the heart of our task automation approach.
Are checklists a core part of your work? What advice do you have for leaders seeking to reduce time spent on routine tasks so that they can divert bandwidth to tasks of greater urgency?