Making room

On a Thursday in June 2023, at 8:30 in the morning, a board presentation I was building got moved up by three business days. I know because I was logging my week in 30-minute blocks for a class assignment. The log says I was still working on it at 3 a.m. Friday. It also says I had two discussion posts due that night, one for each of the two courses I was taking at once.

That was the first course of my doctorate. It was called Program Orientation, and it was eight weeks of learning how to read research, write in APA, pick a research topic, find a mentor, and figure out whether my life had room for three more years of this. The assignment that mattered most turned out to be the time log. I didn’t know that until I reread it this fall.

What the grid showed

I rated every half hour of one week as high, moderate, or low effectiveness. My best hours were at home, alone, with no alerts. My worst were conference days and airport days, which were busy and produced almost nothing. I was least productive on the weeks I traveled, which was about one week a month. None of that surprised me. What was useful was seeing it laid out. The home days had roughly twice as many productive blocks as the travel days.

In the narrative that went with the log, I sorted everything I do into three buckets, a habit I picked up years earlier. I call them A, B, and C.

A tasks are maintenance. Email, the house, feeding the dogs, the standing meetings. They keep life running, they have to get done, and they never go away. B tasks make something a little better: the gym, a project meeting, a small fix at work. C tasks are the ones that change how you work or live. They are rare, they take real time, and nothing forces you to do them. The doctorate was a C task.

The conclusion I wrote was simple. If I wanted room for C, I had to offload A. Not do A faster. Offload it. Document the process, hand it to someone else, and accept that it takes a while before the time comes back.

I wrote that in 2023, when offloading meant finding a person. Three years later, a lot of the A tasks in that log are work I can hand to an AI tool in the time it takes to describe them. Email triage, meeting notes, the first pass at a status report, the tournament rosters. The math changed. Clearing A tasks used to cost a hire or a sacrifice. Now it is mostly a setup cost and a habit. That is more room than anyone has been handed in my working life, and the open question is whether we fill it with C tasks or let A grow back.

The same grid, in a school

I have thought about that paragraph more than anything else I wrote that term. It is the smallest version of the idea that runs through the whole degree and through my job.

When a district rolls out a new platform, the teachers it lands on are already at full A load. Their maintenance work alone fills the day. Coverage is eating their planning period. There is a new curriculum, a new evaluation rubric, a new login. The rollout is a C task, a change in how they work, dropped on top of all of it. When it stalls, the explanation is usually resistance.

A teacher’s maintenance load is the same kind of work as mine: parent emails, sub plans, reformatting a lesson for the third platform this year. Much of it is now offloadable too. A rollout can arrive with that room already cleared, or it can arrive assuming hours that aren’t there.

I don’t think it’s resistance. I think nobody cleared any A tasks first. People don’t resist change. They run out of room for it.

The question I wrote down in week two

The other thing I wrote that term was a short paper on career goals. I had just started at Bluum, and my job was enablement. I described it at the time as not just training people but getting them to adopt what they were taught into their operating rhythm. Then I wrote one sentence about what I wanted to study long term: how leadership affects the adoption of processes, tools, and change.

Three years later that is still the question. The dissertation ended up in a school instead of a company, with teacher retention instead of tool adoption as the measure. The setting changed. The question didn’t. Adoption is adoption.

In my last reflection for that first course, I wrote that I wished I had spent 15 or 30 minutes a week writing down how the concepts connected to what was happening at work. I didn’t do it then. This series is me doing it now, three years late, one course at a time.

Next: Leadership Theory, where I wrote a literature review about leading through chaos while living in some.