Thanks to The Leadership Committee for English Education in Quebec for the invitation to be a part of the Leadership for School Improvement Workshop. The workshop is an intensive program for Quebec school leaders willing to make a significant commitment of time and energy to improve their skills. Because organization and time management are so vital to school leadership, this workshop was included in the series both this year and last.

My full-day workshop was one in a three-day series. In the fall, the same group returns for an additional three days. Various presenters addressing various topics give these school leaders a range of skills, thoughts, and challenges.

Time Management: An Emphasis on Digital Organization

Today’s school leaders are looking for digital ways to handle the ever-increasing amount of information which arrives digitally. Throughout the morning, we continued to return the digital task list as the tool to handle digital challenges. We examined the “Magnificent 7” elements to look for in a digital task list and why each one is important and used Toodledo as an example of a tool which handles them all. Note: In October 2018, I left Toodledo in favor of Remember The Milk due to changes made by a new owner.

Our group learned how to use Toodledo to:

• Quickly trap tasks so they are not forgotten.
• Store information related to handling a task.
• Use the repeating task feature to prevent forgetting in the future.
• Get email empty every day.
• Enter tasks by simply talking into the phone.

Keeping Digital Notes

Not only do busy school leaders have many tasks to accomplish, but we also have a great deal of information which we must be able to retrieve quickly and retrieve from anywhere. We are responsible for documenting phones calls and one-on-one meetings.

During the morning, we talked about how to document quickly and easily via paper. In the afternoon, we talked about how to structure the exact same system using Evernote. For those who like the idea of both a digital task list and Evernote as a way to take digital notes,we explored TaskClone.

A Wonderful Setting

The weather was great…a little nip in the morning air as the last bit of snow was melting. The setting allowed us not only to step back from the many tasks we face, but learn about ways to handle them more effectively when we return.