Get Organized! Time Management for School Leaders

Citation

Mons, W.J. (2009), "Get Organized! Time Management for School Leaders", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 47 No. 2, pp. 273-276. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578230910941101

Discovering the wonderful and fascinating world of modern technology can be very exciting and exhilarating, causing even the most professional people amongst us to feel and act a little “giddy” sometimes. In his book, Get Organized!: Time Management for School Leaders, author Frank Buck (2008) is armed with a wealth of experience and knowledge about school leadership. As a veteran school system administrator, he explains with escalating enthusiasm in sometimes euphoric tones, the priceless time saving strategies, techniques and resulting organizational benefits a school leader can enjoy by embracing a personal time management system specifically tailored to fit his own particular needs. Buck delves into the practicalities of using various organizing tools such as a reliable filing system, modern desk top computer, hand held devices and a myriad of other self‐invented tips and tricks that he came up with to complete routine as well as complex tasks that only a seasoned professional could offer to his colleagues so astutely. Buck emphasizes that (p. 5) “Executives waste six weeks per year searching for lost documents”. The underlying message throughout the book is for the school leader to get organized and stay organized because the time spent now preparing will pay big dividends in time saved in the future, but it is how we prepare that determines outcomes.

Frank Buck has served as an Editorial Advisor for the National Association of Elementary School Principals and his nationally‐published articles are aimed at helping school leaders become better organized and better managers of their time. He has also conducted workshops that have drawn rave reviews by teachers and school administrators for their practicality and simplicity of message (p. v). With more than 25 years of experience as an educator, Buck shares many anecdotal stories throughout his book that will surely resonate with other formidable school leaders struggling to regain control of their ever increasing workload and will undoubtedly touch the lives of new school leaders by exposing them to sound solutions to a variety of challenges.

Buck provides simple, easy to adapt and implement, time management tips, tools and techniques for dealing with today's fast paced, hurried world and time critical tasks created by man's own developing nature. He attempts to fill the role of a modern leader stepping outside the plethora of time‐management books available to business executives. Buck reaches out to existing school leaders and speaks to the emerging class of school leaders often dealing with societal changes that pose extraordinary demands on their time – demands that are unique to their profession. Buck's easy to read book includes many step by step directions meant to guide the reader on how to conceptualize and develop a unique personalized time management system that will become an invaluable way for the school leader to be more successful.

Buck provides school leaders with the option of choosing between more traditional methods of accomplishing routine tasks versus choosing more technologically advanced ways of approaching the same tasks in addition to suggesting ways of intertwining the two in an amicable marriage of old and new if one chooses to do so. His rudimentary ideas, explanations and common sense approaches coupled with anecdotal euphemisms will cause bewilderment in some less seasoned professionals but will most definitely arouse the conscience and humorous side of any school leaders that have spent any significant amount of time in the educational trenches.

Buck's continuous pulling of the school leader's heart strings using various motivational techniques derived from his own personal character and value system, helps lift up the most beaten down, time starved school leader to a level where the leader can begin anew and regain the mental strength that is required to continue on in his/her sworn duty and oath of office. A school leader who has been temporarily lost in the increasing fog of despair created by an overbooked calendar will find solace and the courage to carry on in their current capacity by the time they finish reading the first three chapters. They will feel empowered to move on in more hopeful, productive and effective ways.

The continuous simplicity of his message and style of writing transcends socio‐economic boundaries equally into the world often referred to as common sense. Buck seems to rely on the reader's experiential intuitive sense as well and takes the often illusive and mundane tasks that school leaders must endure and turns them into a simplistic and practical method for consistently navigating efficiently and effectively. After a brief reminder to all of his readers in chapter 1 – that a school leader is anyone who steps forward to help shape the direction of what happens in schools – Buck goes on to explain in subsequent chapters many ideas, approaches, and decisions that should be considered and will be required if we want to have more tools to help us simplify our routine tasks as well as the more complex ones. Topics in the book include: “Clear Your Desk”, “Organizing with Paper”, “Organizing Digitally”, “Handling Repeating Tasks”, “Handling Multiple Projects”, “Organizing Your Computer”, “E‐Mail and Other Electronic Timesavers”.

In chapter 2, Buck discusses several ways of accomplishing tasks by slightly modifying traditional methods and apparatuses that would be universally recognizable by anybody who has ever been charged with performing such duties. They would include those manual labor‐intensive tasks like labeling folders, stuffing envelopes and filing documents inside tall metal cabinets. The techniques and strategies that he shares for dealing with these more traditional tasks using more traditional tools and techniques take on a different appearance, purpose and meaning once the time management lesson for that topic is over. For example, Buck introduces us to the term he coined, and his tool known as the “tickler file” which plays a prominent role in his arsenal of tips and tricks that he believes the conscientious leader should arm himself with in order to combat today's barrage of demands on his time. A tickler file could be a simple compilation of manila folders labeled from January to February representing a calendar year, and a set labeled from 1 through 31 representing a calendar month respectively. As a result, documents that need to be dealt with on certain days of the year could be easily accessed and just as easily filed away depending on needs and preferences in order to save time.

Buck's simplistic explanation of this unorthodox way of reasoning between which documents to deal with and which ones to ignore initially provokes embarrassment in the reader but seems to suit him just fine. After the initial shock of simplistic reasoning subsides, the reader is left contemplating the brilliance behind such simple concepts and is left wondering how things got so complicated in the first place. The tickler file system is just one of the many simple and practical ways that Buck shares with us in order to help us resolve a complex task for which there originally seemed to have no answer. The same simplistic messages, themes and ideas are repeated throughout this book and serve as a reminder to keep it simple. As reiterated by Buck (p. 53), “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity”. Buck shares all of this while at the same time providing a little therapeutic relief that serves to soothe the school leader's stress related anxiety that is most encouraging, delightful and welcomed. He further reiterates that (p. 9) “Much of the stress we feel is related to the many responsibilities we are expected to remember. From the examples you have seen, tickler files relieve that stress by doing the remembering for you. When you drop a piece of paper in the tickler file, you can now forget about it [until it is needed again]”.

Another prominent player in Buck's time management game arriving on the field in chapter 3 is the “signature tool” for which the school leader must answer a pressing question and come to terms with before utilizing it effectively; is it going to be paper or digital? The school leader is asked to decide which communication medium is most suitable for the most common tasks he/she is faced with on a daily basis and to commit to using that signature tool unremittingly. The decision between the two is not an easy one. Buck claims (p. 13) that “The master thinker knows that ideas are elusive and often quickly forgotten, so he traps them with a notebook and pencil. He heeds the Chinese proverb: “The strongest mind is weaker than the palest ink”.” Buck further asserts that (p. 31) that “There's not enough time in the day. Our enemy is time, and technology is the only way [to combat that]”. The tips and tricks offered by Buck, whether the school leader chooses paper or digital, vary from somewhat broad ideas when discussing paper based filing systems, to ideas including excruciating detail‐oriented digital‐tracking task lists explaining click by click directions complete with computer screen shots. The amount of time Buck spent depicting the intricacies of specific informational programs is somewhat risky given the ever‐changing world of software development and the propensity for organizations and individuals to be constantly changing. If a school leader is a prolific user of the popular Microsoft Outlook e‐mail software program, he/she would be well advised to consider Buck's numerous illustrations on the uses, tips and tricks that this program can provide. Otherwise, a school leader would do well just to realize that this type of software and connectivity does exist in the marketplace on various platforms and should be considered when trying to figure out a way in which to better manage time.

Undoubtedly, this book should somehow find its way into the libraries, offices and personal hands of many disorganized school leaders struggling to make sense out of the piles of paperwork stacked around their offices and the various sticky notes placed in strategic locations around their desktop work spaces. This reviewer salutes Frank Buck for focusing on the issues of time management for school leaders and organizational skills specific to the educational establishment in a way that is both meaningful and relevant to this unique environment. The choice of a school leader to embrace a workable time management system is absolutely necessary to ensure the success of such a time – critical mission. Frank Buck has provided aspiring and practicing school leaders with very valuable information that would render a decision to embrace a certain type of time management system a poor one, only if the decision is to not embrace one at all.