PJ Caposey’s latest book, Manage Your Time or Time Will Manage You (ACSD, 2018), more-or-less delivers on its subtitle’s bold promise: “Strategies that work from an educator who’s been there.”

The book opens with a self-assessment designed to help readers determine the root cause of their own clock management challenges. Are you work avoidant, a people pleaser, a prisoner of the moment, checklist dependent, disorganized, tecnology avoidant, a self-server, or perpetually imbalanced?

It then devotes a chapter to each of these, beginning with a more thorough diagnosis, then proposing several coping mechanisms and providing advice on how to tackle the deeper issue. Onto this framework, Caposey embroiders compelling personal anecdotes drawn from experience and references to popular education research (in case you haven’t had enough of Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth).

The result is an easy to read, practical tome that envelops you in cozy, warm blanket of hope. It falls short in one area: not offering sufficient advice on prioritization, an activity that seems in education both tectonically consequential and hopelessly vexed. More on that below.

This is barely a critique, however, not least because Caposey is probably at work on a prioritization book right now. He’s a seasoned superintendent, principal, and teacher, author of four books, father to four children and, according to page 115, a two-time cancer survivor, all of which in my view qualifies him to write as many books about time as he wants.

What I can offer beyond a hearty recommendation are brief thoughts on the larger context of time in education, a note my own experience with prioritization, and some concrete ideas for professional development, in case your own teachers or school leaders need a lifeline to survive the quicksand of time in a contemporary school.

The Clock in the School House

It’s difficult to explain to non-educators the tyranny of the clock in pK-12 education. No less an eminence than Ted Sizer, who spent 50 years observing schools, concedes in The Red Pencil(2004, Yale U. Press) that the clock is one thing that just can’t be escaped.

I work in a district with no bells and no clocks on the walls, a design choice that attempts to humanize the changing of periods. The adults on campus help students know where to be and when to be there. Nevertheless, each year the school leader sends a piece of paper to Sacramento codifying our instructional minutes. This document, along with our attendance records, are what keep our doors open, at the most basic level.

As a result, for example, biology class begins at 930am sharp and maybe the teacher has to use the bathroom or is crying or didn’t quite finish making copies, or maybe the students remain excited about the discussion they were having in math class or perhaps Erik is still re-living an argument at home and Sarah can only focus on tonight’s game and etc., etc. Expecting thirty human beings to convene productively in one room at precisely 930am seems not just idealistic but insane.

So the point is that educators do complex and human work, on a schedule suited for bureaucrats, which makes the day to day, the second to second, extremely challenging.

There are other domains where the clock’s watchful gaze is equally felt, including athletics (not baseball) and the financial markets, but they are fundamentally different from schools in the following ways:

• for the most part, participants choose to be involved
• participants are exposed to huge upside potential (black swan payoffs in finance, enormous financial rewards in pro sports, glory and accolades in kids athletics)

Lacking choice and upside, educators are uniquely beholden to the clock, which is basically the situation edtec orgs like Khan Academy, Alt-School, and Summit are trying to address. No doubt strides in asynchronous learning will help, but I have a suspicion that futuristic significant learning experiences will still happen within groups collocated in time-space and working toward a common goal.

So, today and probably into the future, yrs truly and others will struggle to lead, support, and challenge everyone in the building and make all the rigidly scheduled time together meaningful.

So, thanks, PJ Caposey! Your book, and more like it, are most welcome to those on the ground teaching and learning and leading.

Coping Mechanisms and Solutions for Time Management

To get a flavor of the book, let’s look at a few snippets.

For those who struggle with work avoidance, Caposey offers this advice for honing your grit:

You either think your way into new behavior, or you behave your way into a new way of thinking.

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For people pleasers, he shows you how to say no:

I am swamped right now. Can you get help from somebody else?

I won’t be able to get to this for a couple weeks. Is this something you need immediately?

This work isn’t of particular interest to me.

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Here’s what he recommends for us prisoners of the moment:

Making a conscious effort to dig deep daily into at least one task–as uncomfortable as it may be–is how they can strengthen this muscle of effectiveness.

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And much more along these lines. His advice is practical and useful and, for the most part, feels do-able.

One of my favorites is for the self-server, whom he enjoins:

For the things you hate doing, do your best to offload as much of the task as possible.

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Caposey follows that with instructions for how teachers can make students email their families with grade and project updates, obviating the need for the self-server to complete this hated task.

When our intrepid author moves from coping mechanisms to solutions, he acknowledges that they will be longer term, but potentially higher leverage. Examples include meditation for prisoners of the moment, accountability structures for the work avoidant, etc.

The sheer volume of advice, and the focus on practicality, makes it unlikely that an educator could read the book and not take something useful from it.

The Difficulties with Triage

As I alluded to above, absent are workable scaffolds for supporting one’s self or others in prioritizing. A motif that emerges in the book is captured here in one of the coping mechanisms he recommends for prisoners of the moment:

Create visual reminders to maintain focus on the most important thing. This one is simple. Get creative or artsy or just write on a big piece of butcher block paper and hang it somewhere in your classroom or office: Is this the absolute most important thing I could be working on to achieve my goals?

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Focusing on what’s important is a consistent message, but how does one choose what’s most important, and how do you help others choose?

And choose we must. Constantly.

Here’s a concrete example of one such decision: should I plan tomorrow’s lesson, or spend an hour after school listening to a student share about why they can no longer sit with a certain friend group at lunch?

That student certainly deserves a listener and maybe, in some cases, really needs one. But if this happens with some frequency, deadlines get missed and lessons don’t get planned.  And yet, what if the large organizational goal is ensuring that every child receives what she or he needs to reach their full potential? Can’t lesson plans wait? How can I tell this kid to go home?

School leaders and teachers face these questions all the time.  They attempt to balance the delivery of sufficient support, care, and attention to an individual student, particularly one with substantial support needs, with designing and cultivating a supportive environment for all students.  And, at least in my experience, they receive insufficient help in making good choices.

And that’s just one subset of time-and-effort questions educators ask. They’re constantly juggling whether to use their time finding an authentic audience for students’ work, providing feedback on student work themselves, calling home to report on successes, planning interventions for struggling students, or etc., etc.

So again, here’s hoping Mr Caposey, or another equally ambitious and qualified person, addresses this challenge next.

Three Ways to Use It

All that said, I’d recommend sharing Caposey’s book with your staff, or even your students. Here are a few ideas:

• study groups: issue the self-assessment. Form groups based on the responses; each group examines the relevant chapter and individuals commit to trying one coping mechanism and working toward one solution. (see this old but good article on study groups for more info)
• book club: add this to the list for teaches. Pitch the book by having them read this post 🙂 (lots of additional teacher book club ideas here)
• challenge option->school re-design: students, families, and teachers design around the question of what innovations, structures, and supports could make the clock less tyrannical and school more conducive to human beings flourishing. Use the self-assessment as a starting point for empathy interviews. (d.school design process primer here)

Finally, before you comment, have another look at the image at the top of this page, taken in Alaska late one evening in early July. At that time of year, the sun sets and rises at the same time, almost as if time has stopped. Maybe post that photo next to your sign asking whether this thing I’m working on right now is absolutely the most important thing, for balance.