Systems

One of my favourite reads of the past few years was The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. Gawande is a surgeon, but has written a lot about systems, how we get better, and efficiency, especially within the health care sector.

On Wednesdays, we have a half-day of school and spend the second half on professional development. Yesterday, we watched this TED talk by Gawande, and talked and came up with a pre-school checklist.

So now, as we enter school, we have four items on our checklist.
1. Enter the hall and pick up photocopies for the day.
2. Write and prepare the blackboard for the day (agenda, date, attendance)
3. Prep materials required for the three slots
4. Prep tech for the day

As Gawande mentions, one of the most important functions checklists is to include some of the simpler things that are easily forgotten. Tech is a good example for our class. Every day we use laptops and speakers for songs and videos. It’s usually a short period of time, but on more than a few occasions, we’ve been running speakers during class between rooms, in a slightly haphazard and inefficient manner. Today, there was none of that.

A checklist is in essence a system. We need systems to help reduce decision fatigue and stress, so that we can be more successful and efficient. Today’s checklist was great because it forced me to develop even more systems.

As I was preparing my materials for the day, I organized my materials by the time slots (Math, Co-curricular, then English), and BAM, another system created.

I’ve always struggled with organization, but once you get started, it’s amazing how efficient you can really become. And the level of stress reduction is amazing. Every day for the first six months of my TFI fellowship, the last 10 minutes were a struggle because I hadn’t planned a way for my kids to leave class. One day, I drew a line and that became the system. Every day, students would sit in SMART position then leave on the line as they were called. One decision less to make, one system down, and a 10-15 minute exit procedure every day went down to just 3 minutes. 12 minutes of extra learning time for my kids!

That’s why we need systems.

Just a short note to close – It’s wonderful to be a small startup, to test and tweak and refine these systems easily, something I’m going to talk about more in the next few posts.