XplanaZine

If you’re like me, you wake up at least every other day with the heartfelt resolution to get more organized. Now I guess I’ve lived long enough not to take myself too seriously when it comes to organization, but I have developed a couple of tricks that let me feel like I’m at least making good progress. Check out these tricks.

1. I keep my desk clean. Now that sounds simple doesn’t it. But, don’t be tricked. This really doesn’t mean a darn thing. I keep my desk clean by dumping stuff in my briefcase or by throwing away papers that I probably really needed. The chaos grows but I can come to my office and “feel’ organized in the mornings.
2. I empty my e-mail inbox everyday. This is a long-standing ritual with me. I can’t go to bed at night without making sure my inbox is empty. Now, the reality is that I maintain this ritual by dumping everything into an elaborate set of folders. I guess it’s more organized than leaving them in my inbox so this is likely a net “win” for me.
3. I keep a list of things to do that day. I’m not really a “list” kind of guy but it’s a ritual I started a long time ago and it seems to work for me. Again, it’s mostly smoke and mirrors because I don’t try to check everything off my list and I certainly don’t go back and look at what I have or haven’t done. Heck, that would create a whole lot of panic that I don’t need in my life.

Of course, I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that there are truckloads of things I’m not mentioning and those are the things that make me wake up everyday and shout that I need to get organized. And, to tell you the truth, about the only thing that keeps me from lapsing into total despair is the fact that I know millions of others are sharing this same experience with me. It’s kind of sad, but there is some comfort to be derived from it.

It’s true, organization is tough no matter what your profession. But if you’re a teacher, it’s really tough and it becomes harder and harder everyday. We teachers have more work requirements than ever before. The pressure is on to show improved results, to provide more information on our students, to have better class modules. We have more competition than ever before.

We try to pool our efforts — to collaborate. We work in departmental committees, develop collaborative projects with other schools, and write grants with cooperation from multiple institutions or organizations. We collaborate any way we can to help get better results and reduce the strain of progress. But each of those collaborations introduces a new level of complexity in our lives. So now, in addition to keeping up with my own stuff, I’ve introduced the complexity of others and their systems into my life as well.

As teachers, we have to get organized but we need help. In particular, we need information help. We need common information systems that will allow us to organize all of our information — teaching materials, assessments, reporting, and research — in an efficient manner that also embraces collaboration with others without adding additional complexity.

Yes, we need lots of help. We need a magical set of information boxes in which to put things so that they are perfectly organized and never get lost. And we need for these magical information boxes to seem transparently obvious to others and to be sharable by them. When we have such a system, we’ll also have:

1. Roundtrip reporting systems that allow teachers to assign materials related to discipline standards, assess students based on those materials, and to track the efficiency of the materials as well as the progress of the students. Materials that produce better results can be tagged and shared with others across the nation or globe.
2. Collaboration with colleagues that focuses on the labor of organization and more on creativity, innovation, and leaning. Out magical information boxes should do all of the real work for us, leaving our minds free to concentrate on the important things.
3. Better repositories for finding new teaching materials. We’re all looking for something new. We all need new materials that can break the monotony of the classroom and that can produce better learning results. The problem is in finding them. They are placed on personal sites or in public repositories but are not labeled the way we would label them or stored in the location we would store them. The materials exists but all too often we can’t find them. Our magical information boxes will make storing and sharing materials a breeze.
4. Better overall organization. In the digital age, keeping up with it all is the real problem. I don’t want to have to think about where I put it or what I should call it so that others will understand.

The good news is that we already have parts of our magical information boxes in place. And the rest is soon on its way. In Monday’s post I’ll talk about what we already have and what we need to do to make our lives as teachers an organizational wonderland.

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