Getting organized starts with keeping track of things I have to do.

Part of making sense of my first year involves learning how to get organized. I've been Googling on this, and reading other teacher blogs about organization. One interesting blog talked a lot about this system GTD, which I'd never heard of. I followed a couple of hyperlinks from that blog to learn what GTD was. One of the links was a review from Business Week magazine, which included an excerpt from the book GTD, or, Getting Things Done. Herewith an excerpt of the excerpt, and some ensuing thoughts.

Excerpt from David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD):

• First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through.
• Second, you must clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to make progress toward fulfilling it.
• Third, once you've decided on all the actions you need to take, you must keep reminders of them organized in a system you review regularly.
  

Interestingly, one of the big problems I had this year had to do with what Allen calls "the collection bucket". There was so much incoming stimulation, all of it new, from daily attendance to specials and SpEd support scheduling to information about those stupid “leadership teams” that the principal valued so much. In addition, there were curriculum materials, lots of planning stuff, and completed student work to review, assess, and file or return. (This latter one I never got ahold of, and seldom reviewed any work the children completed other than the formal monthly Math tests and the quarterly Writing prompts.) Then there were classroom management papers: current class lists, bus lists, Emergency information to update. Holy ***, it was overwhelming! 

I needed a reliable collection bucket, started out with my planning book as a central place for everything—kept a current list in it, and tucked essential papers in there too. When I lost the book a month or so into school, I was in a panic. Found it a couple of weeks later, but in the meantime had diversified into multiple collection buckets - a folder here, a clipboard there - and never really got it back together right through the end of school, the it here being a central place where I kept track of everything for which I was responsible. Without a reliable collection bucket, I knew I was on shaky ground. But the volume of incoming stimulation was so strong, I never felt able to get out from under it and create some kind of solid base from which to work.

This is one of the areas where, perhaps, having had a mentor would have made a big difference. As it is, I have a couple of thoughts: One is that I’ll never have a year so overwhelming. Now, I’m familiar with the range of what is expected and comfortable with many of the tasks. Secondly, in the absence of a mentor’s guidance with this, I have the opportunity to learn the hard way. As long I don’t give up, the hard way offers the greatest potential for discovery and problem solving. If I have a job in the fall, I have to have a central tracking system, even if it's not the most elegant system. I have to use one place, consistently, to track what needs doing.