Too busy

Indeed, I have been too busy since August 1st, but that's fixed now.

Being too busy is the common state of modern people in general. Not just in education. If I look at my calendar, and I see that almost every hour in the next two weeks is spoken for, this means that when an unexpected crisis arises, I won't have the time to deal with it without cancelling something that's already on my calendar. It means I am too busy. The same goes for an opportunity, except that's even worse: It is easier to justify cancelling a meeting for a crisis, but a mere opportunity? Chances are that I will let the opportunity fade away, and keep my original appointments.

Being too busy is especially true for managers. Not just those whose title says "Manager", but all those who should manage their time; who need to navigate a world of semi-expected tasks. Quite a few pensioners I know, somehow feel too busy... When the manager’s time is filled with “busy”, there is no room for seeing, thinking, responding, innovating. Being too busy causes one to do what’s prescribed and not what’s urgent. At best, if one overcomes the default behavior of following the calendar, one tends to what’s urgent and not to what’s important.

It's clear that school principals are managers - they manage a rather complex system, with students, teachers, parents and Government continually throwing semi-expected demands at them. Most school principals are too busy to deal with unexpected opportunities. Their time is chopped and divided into administrative tasks, legal responsibilities, and pedagogic concerns. Few of them are lucky enough to have some time for vision and leadership. Most of them make the time to respond to crises. Few have the time and freedom to respond to opportunities.

It is also easy to see how school teachers are too busy. They often have a full day of classes to teach - appointments. If anything comes up that requires their attention, there is no time to attend to it. And something always comes up: A pupil needs an extra explanation; another pupil has an idea; yet another is sick for 2 weeks and needs to pick up the material studied in that time... No time. Too busy.

More surprisingly at first glance, the pupils are too busy. They have full days of classes, with a few minutes between them to change rooms or books, and possibly to copy yesterday's homework from the kids who do their homework. What happens if the unexpected occurs, and the material being taught in class is very interesting for the students? What happens if an event in the news offers an opportunity to look into a new subject? Nothing happens - no time to talk about it for a few hours, to decide to explore the issue, to look for an expert, to do anything but end the 45-minute lesson and go on to the next lesson. By the time the same class convenes again in a few days, the magic is gone.

“Too Busy” doesn't mean doing more, or too much. It means doing too much prescribed activity. If one is occupied with prescribed activities, there is no time for innovation, for looking around and seeing what is happening, what is needed, what can be done, what must be done. This is the situation with many officials - too busy with prescribed activities and with prescribed work methods. This last issue of prescribed work methods is an interesting one. Since the industrial revolution, industry and society have benefited much from advancing the concept of work methods. But lately, the changes in society and in technology are so fast, that a prescribed work methodology becomes obsolete soon after they are invented and acquired. But this is a matter for a separate entry in the blog.

Prescribed activities give people a sense of purpose. If they ask themselves what they have done in the past month (or if the boss asks) they can look it up in their calendar and see that they have done a lot. But this is a false sense of purpose. Maybe the sense of purpose should work the other way around: Maybe the more entries one has in one’s calendar, the less one is likely to have achieved. In the fast moving and too busy hi-tech industry, many people consider meeting to be a time-drain. Even in the newspaper industry, the founder of Le-Monde - Hubert Beuve-Mery - is said to have made the decision that all meetings will take place standing up. The idea being that if people are not too physically comfortable, there is a chance to shorten this prescribed activity to its minimum.

In the normal human experience, every movement or repeating action tends to fade: A ball rolling, tends to roll more and more slowly – due to friction – and stop. Even of it rolls downhill – the hill is finite, and the rolling will stop soon enough. The same with a car, if we stop pumping gas into it, the same with a natural sound – even crickets don’t chirp forever. But when I set a recurring meeting in my computerized calendar, it will still be there every Tuesday in the year 2096. Our calendars – even just the paper ones – allow us to set up (prescribe) a meeting or any other activity 3 months in advance, and it will still be there on the prescribed day, even if the reason for the meeting disappeared in the mean time. We are often too busy with what’s no longer important. Trying to deal with this, some people double and triple book their time, planning to cancel the less important meetings. This way they waste the time of others, who may have vacated the time for a meeting doomed to be cancelled. Man, we are in trouble.

A cultural change is required, for us to see the benefit in the holes in the calendar. Specifically for school principals, teachers and students. I think we will enjoy that change.