If I were to write a book about productivity for educators, this is the book I would have written. She shares many of the same strategies that I use and the same strategies that I share with my faculty.
My first impression of this book is that it’s a handbook, a guidebook. It reminded me of many of the handbooks that I had in the military. They were a smaller size. This one happens to measure 5 by 7 inches and it has 270 pages. She arranged this book into five parts along with the introduction and conclusion. Each of these parts has subsections, which vary in length. These parts are:
- translating intention to action
- facilitating communication
- finding, curating and sharing knowledge
- leveraging technology towards greater productivity
- keeping current
What’s This Book About?
In her introduction, she outlined her purpose, and basically, it’s a guide for online instructors who wish to be more productive. She emphasized that the purpose of being productive was in her words, so we can be more fully present in our teaching and other parts of our lives.
This is not about becoming robotic and increasing productivity so we can create more widgets and do things faster and increase our workload, but rather this is in line with what Michael Hyatt says in his book, Free To Focus. You are implementing productivity so you can get back more time so you can use that time in a more quality way. You’re not trying to increase quantity, but you want to increase quality.
Translating Intention to Action
Stachowiak started out by focusing on setting and achieving goals. As educators, we have goals for our classes, committees, and tenures. We need systems to help us achieve our goals.
She discussed setting long-term goals and then breaking them into manageable pieces. These manageable time periods begin with a term or a quasi 12-week year. The period is further broken down into two-week sprints. What are the things that you can do in two weeks that will get you closer to your goal?
Other strategies discussed in the book included email and calendar management, which are in line with David Allen’s Get Things Done strategy. Your email inbox should not be your to-do list. Also, using your calendar will help you find more time in your life if you are disciplined.
Facilitating Communication
What we have learned from the research is that meaningful conversations with students will lead to more student success and engagement. In order to do that, we need to be more effective in how we communicate.
As Stachowiak noted, communication can be a real-time suck if you do it one-on-one. Not every conversation has to be one-on-one. When possible, encourage group discussion. You can create a Q&A discussion forum where all students can ask questions and supply answers. If you supply an answer, you only have to do it once and everybody gets the answer.
Templates are another strategy that Stachowiak focused on. You can speed the process of providing a thorough reply when you start from a detailed starting point. I keep a folder of crafted responses for the classes I teach. I then enhance them based on the group of students I am teaching. One can speed this process further by using a tool like TextExpander.
Another strategy that Stachowiak shared was addressing pinch points as they occur in your class. When something needs to be tweaked in your class, do it immediately rather than wait until the end of the term or beginning of the next term. That will make course rollover much easier.
Finding, Curating and Sharing Knowledge
In this section, Stachowiak talked about developing personal learning networks and personal knowledge management systems. She wrote a bit about Harold Jarche’s personal knowledge management systems and the idea of seek, sense, share. Seek, sense, share is where you go out and find knowledge, try to make sense of that knowledge, and then how to share it back out. I have written about this before.
Leveraging Technology Towards Greater Productivity
This is about using technology and strategies to be more productive. Stachowiak shared here strategies and tools for batch processing, developing checklists, creating workflows and streamlining grading processes. When Stachowiak discussed workflows, she indicated that she uses forms and automation like IFTTT, If This Then That, to process the information she collects from the students. She is also an advocate for using TextExpander to help get back more time. I am a huge fan of this program. I’m a huge fan. Using it for one grading session alone saved me nine hours of work.
Keeping Current
This is really focused both on your online classes but in your life. As far as the online classes go, you want to keep your courses current so that you are able to roll them over with the fewest adjustments. One of the strategies Stachowiak recommended was make the courses as date-free as possible. Try to make your course a little more generic so that it rolls over a lot easier.
When possible, serve your content from the cloud. Stachowiak mentioned that she uses Dropbox. I’m a fan of Google Drive for serving content for my courses. I can make an edit in a document and immediately, it’s updated across all my courses. I’m a fan of that.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I definitely think that all educators should benefit from reading The Productive Online and Offline Professor. Wonderful book. It’s packed with solid strategies to get more time in your life.
Additional Reading
- Book Review: The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More With Less
- Book Review: Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
- Book Review: Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less
- Book Review: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
- Book Review: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
- Book Review: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
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