Transcript - AI Generated
Introduction and Recap of Previous Episode
[0:19] Hi, and welcome back to the Effective Teaching Podcast.
Today, we're going to continue to talk about productivity. in the last episode which was only two days ago I talked about the 20 second rule hopefully you guys have been applying that and have been benefiting from that I would love if you've benefited from that let me know shoot me an email it's just dan at teachers PD net love to hear from you today we're going to continue to talk about a productivity and a time hack that I've got now this kind of comes from my book, so if you haven't.
[0:54] My book, Work Less, Teach More, right?
Which is all about being an effective teacher and living a life you love, which is all essentially about how to be really focused, and doing the work that matters as a teacher, but then also having the time outside of school to focus on the things that matter to you in life as well, essentially.
That's kind of the whole premise of the book, is that we need to be focusing on things that matter to us and putting our energy into those things and you know it basically helps you to reduce your work at school so that you can then focus on family and friends and hobbies and stuff during your time outside of school because really you should have time away from work for sure massive amounts of it.
So today hopefully I'm going to give you something that will help you with that.
We're gonna be talking about using a lack of time to actually improve our productivity.
Now that might sound counterintuitive but it hopefully will make sense as we go along.
But a lack of time, often we hear people make excuses, I don't have time for that, I don't have time for that.
But it's also a lack of time that causes us to become motivated.
And we see this all the time. Whenever there's something that's about to disappear, if there's a deadline for something, that's when suddenly, oh, I'm gonna get stuff done, right? We look at our students.
So here where I am in New South Wales, we've just had all of our year 12 students that have done their leaving school exams, their HSC, and.
[2:19] I can assure you that most of those, a lot of those students have done a lot of study right before those HSC exams, right?
Because there's a deadline, there is a date, there's a time for those exams.
And the same thing we see that our students for assessment tasks, they do it overnight, right? They'll go home, they'll work on it all night, they'll bring in the next day, done, right?
But before that, they're not working on it before that.
And so today we're going to talk about how to use that to our advantage, right? How do we use deadlines to actually help us to be more focus and to get more things done.
And so we are going to be leveraging this idea so we're going to essentially start to create deadlines for when we're going to get things done that are hopefully well before they're actually due.
Using Deadlines and Setting Time Limits for Tasks
[3:02] And you want to spread out your deadlines and all that kind of stuff but basically giving yourself a time limit for getting something done and by having that time limit it forces you to really stay more focused it helps you to be more motivated because you've got I've got to get this done by this time because otherwise you know I'm not gonna get all these other stuff done or I'm not gonna have time to hang out with my kids or something I'm not sure what it is that's afterwards for you but we're gonna be leveraging this we're gonna be leveraging this idea that we work hard to meet deadlines and so I want to encourage you for the things in your work life right when someone else asked or can I have can you guys create a unit of work I'm someone's going to come ask for you, can you create the unit of work for year seven this year?
[3:46] And then you're like, sure, rather than creating it as we go, right, what I want you to do is to sit down, smash it out in a day, okay, and you give yourself that time limit to sit down all day, you're focused on getting this done, and at the end of the day it needs to be done, right, you're not working on it again after that day.
And you might say, you know, you're gonna start at eight o'clock in the morning and finish at four, that's it, that's all the time it gets to create that unit of work.
Now you might choose to give yourself a little bit longer for a unit of work but it's about just setting those deadlines and we're gonna hack those basically to benefit us in getting the work done in a shorter frame of time and it helps us to also move away from perfectionism because a lot of us as teachers when we're trying to design these look this learning for our students we get stuck in this zone where we think that what we've created it's not quite good enough maybe we can make it a bit better we need to go and make you know the spreadsheet look pretty as well.
We need to make sure there's nice decorations up in our class.
We've got to make sure that the worksheets all colored, color-coded, everything's working. None of that is needed.
[4:52] A lot of that is fluff that's on the side. And if you like doing that, that's fine. Enjoy doing that.
But then don't complain afterwards about how creating this thing is taking you so long.
Well, it's taking you so long because you're fluffing around on bits that actually aren't having a great impact.
Okay, and this is the thing. With effectiveness, we're actually shifting from doing all the things to focusing on the things that matter, right?
What are the things that actually have a big impact on the learning of my students?
And that's that core essential design that you have to your unit of work, but I'm starting to get distracted here So we're leveraging time.
We're leveraging our deadlines and stuff.
And so this Whole process is there's three steps to it to get this process Happening one is to have a clock or a timer viewable to help you keep you focused Okay, so it's not about I can't do this in an hour And then you just start without looking at the clock and then when you get to the end you're like Am I finished and the time's gone away from you?
No, no you want to see the clock.
[5:55] Because looking at the clock will keep you focused right and what keeps kids focused on an exam for three hours Because they can see the clock that's counting down the three hours that they have to finish this whole exam Okay, if you give a kid an exam and say can you please just complete that at any point in time?
They're not even gonna start right? You'll be lucky if they bother giving you anything back ever but because there's a deadline, you have to start at this time and go to that time, they finish the exam generally in the three hours.
There are some kids who don't manage their time well in that three hours but most kids can finish an exam by the time they're in year 12 within three hours.
And you too, as you improve and develop yourself in your effectiveness, you can actually improve to the point where you can create a unit of work quite simply in a day.
[6:41] And that's focusing on the core elements.
You may not create all the resources for it in a day right because that does take a bit more time to create resources and to find resources but there are ways of leveraging other people to help you with that or even AI these days to help you with that.
Anyway so first step, step number one was to have a clock or timer viewable while you're going to do your task that you've chosen.
[7:06] Next step, set the timer, choose how long you're going to spend to get the task done.
And I want to really encourage you, this is the thing, the next step for it, is that as you think about how long this task is going to take you, right, so maybe you've got your year 10 assessment task that you've got to go through and mark and give feedback on.
And so I want you to look at them and say, all right, I am normally, it would take me, let's say it's going to take you three hours normally, but it's a big task or whatever, you've got 20 students, 30 students right.
So it normally takes me about three hours to mark these.
I want you to set your deadline time up for half of that time.
And the reason for that is because before when you were doing it you didn't have this to keep you focused.
You didn't have this whole process of I've only got this amount of time to get it done.
And I want you to if you want to take it like further with this kind of process.
[7:58] Is yep, set up your timer, set up your clock.
It's going to go for it. we'll get this three hours of marking done in an hour, hour and a half now.
You set that up and you can see it. If you want to take it a step further in terms of holding yourself accountable to making sure that you don't just get to the end of that time and go, I'm just going to add another hour because I still am only halfway through. Okay.
What we're going to do is actually see if we can schedule something in for at that hour and a half spot.
So you might tell someone, hey, we're going to go have a coffee, I'm going to leave, we're going to meet at this time.
Okay. And that means that when you're marking needs to be done because you're gonna go out for coffee or you go out and have dinner with someone or Maybe you're gonna go and have a meeting with someone else in your faculty or something to talk about the marks and stuff And so you might say hey, I'm gonna mark my classes you tens you mark your classes you tens Let's do it in an hour and a half right we're gonna set our timer and then afterwards.
Setting Up for Efficient Marking
[8:50] We're gonna chat about it and make sure that we're good right and make sure that there's nothing that can Make it so that you can just add an extra half an hour, okay?
And I'm not saying that you may not do that, but I'm saying that you want to set it up so it's harder for you to do that.
You want to set it up in a way where you actually have quality motivation.
Maybe you have to go to class, right? You look at your periods off and you go, okay, I've got an hour and a half off this period.
I need to get all this marking done this period before I go to that class.
I've told them that I'm going to return it to them, whatever.
Okay, sit down and you smash it out because you are more focused and you start to read through and you're starting to even start to read faster because you get into the groove of reading and you know what you're looking for as you're marking things because you're marking them all at once and all really quickly next to each other.
It makes you more efficient in your marking.
[9:40] Your feedback will start to become more focused and more effective as well I must say because when you provide feedback now You're not going to be going through and putting on there's a comp should be a comma here You spoke that word wrong, but that's not Unless you're marking spelling, right?
That's not what you tend need you tend need to know, you know Did they actually evaluate this?
You know, you can just write you don't have a judgment here when you do an evaluation You've got to write a judgment at the end feedback done.
Okay, we're looking at shorter amounts of feedback And there's I think there's episodes in in here as well.
If you want to go back to previous episodes I wish I knew them off the top of my head, but I don't But you go back to other ones that talk about effective feedback processes And yeah There's a three-step process, that you use To give effective feedback that doesn't take up a lot of your time and that allows the students to have time to really get it done well.
Three Steps to Faster and More Effective Marking
[10:31] So let's let's recap There's a step one was to make sure you can view the clock and decide then you're going to decide on how long okay?
So we're deciding how long and we're gonna try and make it half the time that it normally takes because we have this goal of really pushing ourselves to go faster.
And then the third step is to race the clock.
Okay, so make sure the clock's viewable, decide how long it's gonna take, and then you're gonna race the clock.
So you set it going, you start marking, right?
And you should know roughly, like if you're marking, well, we've been running this marking example the whole way through, right?
But even if it's a unit of work or whatever it is you're doing in the amount of time that you've allotted, think to yourself as you set this out, how many of these do I need to be up to at what time?
By the time I get to halfway, I should be halfway through my marking, right? I should be halfway through the number of lessons that I'm planning throughout my unit.
And so you're really keeping yourself on track while you're doing that.
So as you go, each time you turn one, you're just checking, yep, that took, I have three minutes to mark each one.
[11:29] That's just without me doing any maths, so don't send me messages if your maths was wrong. Of course it's wrong. I didn't think about it, I'm just making up numbers.
But, what we're looking at here is just, we wanna race the clock, we wanna try and get it done, and think about how we're doing it, right?
So, we're marking student papers, you wanna be in a quiet place, set the timer, and then go.
And it will help you to keep focused, it's gonna help you to get better feedback, and it's gonna help you to make the decisions as you mark, faster, okay? Because you're doing it, we're trying to beat that clock, right?
And it ensures that you don't get distracted, You're not going to start going off and going, I'm just going to go and get a snack.
I'm going to go down to the staff room and go and check my inbox or whatever, my pigeonhole, or I'm going to go and check my email and come back to my marking.
No, it keeps you focused on your marking because you're trying to beat that clock.
[12:20] Now, if you want to take this to the next level, right, if you want to be, yeah, I come from a PDHPE background, and so that means that I'm quite competitive, right? And so, I mentioned earlier that you might sit down with a friend to mark and you might go okay we're gonna get this marked in an hour and a half.
If you want to go a step further you can actually go, you know what guys, an hour and a half is our max.
All right, there's two of us here or maybe there's three of you.
We're marking you tens, assessment tasks.
[12:45] It's a race, right? Divide them out evenly, right? We have to mark our ones.
Hour and a half is your limit. That's when we're gonna have a thing where we chat about each other's marks and all the rest of it and even that we're only gonna spend half an hour on, right? Those types of things should have timers too.
We're an hour and a half to get this done, but it's a race, right?
And you might decide, you know, the winner's gonna get something or whatever, or the loser gets, you know, a photo taken and put up on a pinboard of shame.
I don't know, like, don't mock people, don't, but have fun at the same time, right?
So basically what we're doing is gonna bring a bit of, an element of fun into our marking by making it slightly competitive.
And because you're racing other people, then suddenly you've got even more focus, right?
Your laser focus you're not even going to check that time you're like no I'm gonna get these done as fast as I can right I'm not wasting time checking the time to see if I'm on time I'm gonna just keep going keep going I'm gonna mark and mark and mark and give that feedback still right and you can say there are levels of where we have to at least write whatever two sentences three sentences for feedback at least right for each student's paper as we go through this and that's going to improve the.
[13:53] Rate at which you get your marking done, your focus, which is actually like people get worried they're like, oh, you know, I feel like I'm not going to do as good a job marking and all the rest, but you'll actually probably do a better job marking because you are more focused.
Okay, your brain processes very quickly, right?
And one of the things I like, I use a similar method to this actually to train myself in my speed reading.
And basically the idea is that your brain can actually process things faster than it can verbalise them, right?
So you can actually read and we're often trained here when we're kids we read and we read out loud and all the rest of it and then we just start to read out loud in our head and that actually slows down the speed at which we can read because we can.
[14:35] Absorb the meaning of the words that we're looking at without actually saying them in our head, And we become more efficient, but also more focused and we can actually take more in by practicing going faster Okay, and so it helps you to become more focused.
It helps you to not get distracted It's helping you to actually do a better job of mind because you're gonna read this whole thing at once and go right, That's at this level right and you will actually find that you just know that as you look at the crop marking criteria And you're reading it as you do lots of them at once You're like, oh, yes.
Yeah, that's this. That's this That's this it becomes so much easier to match it up to the criteria because you're doing it It's a batch you're doing it all at once you're in a quiet space But you're also racing someone else your focus you've got to make sure you beat the clock But also you want to beat your mates, and so you're having fun with your marking and going at this great race That's that's an extra level of you know We've scheduled this time and we're gonna get this marking done.
It has to be done in that time. Let's race But you can apply that to yourself without the racing.
[15:36] So that every task that you do pretty much, when you check your emails in the morning, rather than just opening it up and then going through them and going, oh, yep, yep, yep.
Set yourself a timer. In this case, you know what? If I'm checking my emails, I only wanna spend a maximum of 20 minutes checking my emails in the morning.
So there's a timer, it's on. All these emails are in front of me, 20 minutes. I've gotta go through.
And I'm not saying you've gotta reply to all your emails and all that kind of stuff, right? But you can set different times for different processes.
But you're gonna check all your emails in 20 minutes and you might flag some of them I would address that later address that later, but you're reading through them all and getting rid of them and you're adding any important and, Urgent tasks to your list or important tasks on your list as well, and you're going to schedule that in later But we're working through and trying to improve our productivity by doing this three-step.
Three-step Process for Improved Productivity
[16:23] Process very simple three-step process But it's really going to improve your productivity.
It's going to help you to stay focused It's going to help you to do a better job of whatever it is that you're doing because you're focused All right, and I'm not saying that you want to race when you're creating units of work.
That's not quite the same But you do want to be having that time and say I've got to get this done in this time because it just stops all The fluff from coming in.
Okay, you don't get distracted by our okay now I'm going to start creating this resource over here and come back to the unit But no you create the whole unit at once and then you go right?
Here's all the here's the resources I need to make and then you go I'm gonna make the resources the next day.
Okay, and you might take two days to create all the resources, right? But these days I would highly encourage you to use AI if it's possible to create some of your resources if you need Yeah questions on a particular document Ask it to read the document and then ask it to generate a bunch of comprehension questions or high order thinking questions about that around the context whatever you can give it lots of guidelines, but, It'll create all the resources for you really quickly if you need it like a scenario. It's really helpful.
Anyway getting distracted again. I apologise focusing on right getting things done in time to help our productivity.
Setting aside dedicated time to complete tasks efficiently
[17:34] So go and give that a go this week. It's coming up towards the end of term so there's probably some marking that you're going to do or maybe you're thinking about units of work for next year.
[17:43] Pick some time, set it aside and say this is the time that it's going to get done in.
Okay and if it's not enough time to get the whole thing done right so if you've only got an hour and a half and you're beginning a unit of work right you may look at that and go I'm not going to get all of it done.
But set yourself a goal right you've got to go okay in this hour and a half I need to have you know the first three lessons done.
[18:02] Something like that. And so you're gonna sit down and go right Smashing out the first three lessons in this hour and a half so that that unit of work is done or maybe you're gonna sit Down and maybe you're using an understanding by design, process, you know that kind of backwards mapping process and you're like I'm gonna complete step one and step two of the unit design.
[18:21] Scaffold, that's the world.
I'm looking for scaffold when I complete those in this hour and a half Or maybe you're really efficient and you're gonna finish the whole thing in the hour and a half and then you're ready for the next when you want to sit down and actually start writing that program.
So I hope this all makes sense. I hope that you see how this will really help and improve the rate at which you get stuff done and that is this is productivity okay so this is not necessarily effectiveness this is productivity which is part of effectiveness right so you want to be more productive in what you're doing but you also want to start to focus and make sure you're productive on the right tasks right and that's the effective bit is making sure that You're not being more productive by just, by doing like data entry, right?
Someone else should be doing data entry. I know that generally that's not what happens at schools, but data entry, you could ask a student to sit next to you and enter data, right?
As long as it's not a breach of confidentiality, basically.
[19:18] Or you could ask a teacher's aide or admin assistant, or you could ask other people, just go, look, here's all my marks.
Can you just put them into that spreadsheet there? Right?
It's a waste of time for a teacher to do that. I don't see why I'd be paying a teacher's wage to enter data when I can pay an administrator's wage to do that.
Anyway Once again distracted on other topics.
See this is my problem. This is why I'm trying to keep myself focused I hope this focus process helps you to get things done faster.
I look forward to our next Episode can't wait to chat to you again soon If you haven't subscribed make sure you hit the subscribe button just go to teacherspd.net.
[19:56] I'm sure that there's, you can click on the podcast thing there, there's buttons there to subscribe all over the website.
So come and subscribe if you're not getting the emails to remind you that the next episode is out, the next episode is out, and to give you a bit of an idea of what's in there.
Come and subscribe if you want to, but let's keep going with improving our effectiveness.