Apace of Change

by Damian Bariexca, Ed.D.

Archive for the ‘Organization’ Category

I’m Damian Bariexca, and This Is How I Work

I’ve been a huge fan of Lifehacker for years; it was one of the very first blogs I started reading.  Recently they’ve been running a series called “How I Work”, in which they ask “heroes, experts, brilliant, and flat-out productive people to share their shortcuts, workspaces, routines, and more.”

Since my invite to contribute to the series must have gotten lost in the mail, I’m going to indulge my geekery here and tell you everything you never cared to know about my workflow.

  • Name: Damian Bariexca
  • Occupation: School psychologist, professional development consultant
  • Location: Perkasie, PA
  • Current Primary Computer: Dell Latitude E6410, running Windows 7
  • Current Phone: Sprint Nexus S 4G, running Android 4.1 Update, 11/27/12: Sprint HTC Evo 4G LTE, Android 4.0.4
  • I work: Feverishly, and often on the run

What apps/tools/software can’t you live without?

Evernote, Dropbox*, and Google Apps are my holy trinity.  I have made no secret of how much I love Evernote, for its organizational power as well as its ubiquity of access – I can get to information in my account on any of my own computers, on anyone else’s via web access, or on my phone.  Evernote syncs all of my text notes, PDFs, documents, and other files for work, graduate school, and my personal life, in one location.  Dropbox has replaced my “My Documents” folder as my default file storage system; again, I can access my account from any computer with Internet access, and my files are synced instantaneously across my primary laptop, my family desktop, my old my wife’s netbook, and my phone.  I use Google Apps for email, calendar, document collaboration, mobile phone service, RSS reader, and photo manager at home, and I also use many of those same apps at work.  My Child Study Team has started to focus especially on Google Calendar and Google Docs as our primary methods of organization and collaboration – using these tools beats the hell out of having multiple versions of meeting schedules and spreadsheets floating around via email.

Beside ease of access, using these three services gives me a sense of security in that I’ve got all my work (plus over ten years of family photos) backed up off-site in case of fire/flood/etc. at my house.

Honorable mention:

  • Lastpass: Online password manager
  • PDFill: For watermarking, redacting, merging, splitting, and otherwise futzing with PDF files
  • VLC: Media player that plays just about any file type you can throw at it
  • Remember the Milk: Dynamic to-do list manager; allows users to create rule-driven “Smart Lists” (see my write up on RTM here)

What’s your workspace setup like?

I can work anywhere (that’s kind of the point of being mobile) as long as it’s CLEAN.  I don’t even mean “washed” clean, I mean “clear” clean, organized.  In my home office I have a nearly 6’x3′ IKEA desk with very little on it besides my monitor, keyboard, scanner, and a few souvenir glasses that hold pens and flash drives.  My desk at work is similar.  Recently I’ve been doing a lot of blogging and grad school work right on my living room sofa and coffee table.  I like big, open spaces whenever possible.

I find that characteristics are more important than specific spaces in that I can adapt to a greater range of environments as needed.  My job keeps me on my feet and out of my office more than one might imagine, so in addition to work email (which gets pushed to my phone), most folks I work with have my mobile phone number and can call or text if they need me.  Between my phone and, to a lesser degree, my work laptop, I can make any space work in a pinch.  It almost makes having an office redundant.

What do you listen to while you work?

Nothing.  I love all types of music, and I’ve been a musician for most of my life, but I’m not one of those people who can plug in and work productively to music or TV.  I need it to be quiet, especially if I’m writing.

My commute, on the other hand, is when I like to listen to music (I can fit my entire digital music collection quite comfortably on my 80GB iPod Classic) and podcasts (my favorites at the moment are Savage Love, Practical Principals, Real Time with Bill Maher, and This American Life).  I’ve also just started dabbling in audiobooks.

What’s your best time-saving trick?

Keeping my inbox empty and my email/Evernote archives well organized definitely saves time when looking for information.  When emails come in, I read them and decide whether they can be a) deleted (general info emails, all-staff emails that don’t apply to me), b) archived (just need to be tucked away for possible future reference, or c) acted upon.  Only emails that fall under that C category stay in my inbox, and even then, only until I have completed the action (even if that action is just a reply).  I have separate email folders for every student on my case load, plus others for various other committees and categories.

Of course, we are still using Outlook.  Once we move our primary email system over to Google Apps (fingers crossed!), I’ll be cross-labeling and archiving like a fool.

Some people prefer to only check email once or twice a day, but I find myself being more productive if I can receive the request, act on it, and get it out of my thought process.

Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can’t you live without?

I don’t know if they’re gadgets per se, but I’m going to say my Fisher Bullet Space Pen and Rhodia Memo Pads.  They both fit comfortably in my front pocket, and when you’re on the go (as I often am in my building), sometimes it’s just quicker to jot a note down on a piece of paper than to unlock the mobile phone, wait for the note app to load, wait for the keyboard to respond… and if your battery is dead, you’re really out of luck.

What everyday thing are you better at than anyone else?

Between the way I keep records, calendar appointments, and to-do lists, I am probably the most organized person I know.  I have to be, because my memory is spotty at best, to say nothing of my attention span.

Any other interesting tidbits/hints for your readers?

In my next post, I’ll take you inside my tech “go bag” – as more professional obligations keep me on the road, it has become my trusty mobile command center.

Feel free to take this format and run with it on your own blog!  Who are you, and how do YOU work?

 

* This is a referral link to Dropbox – sign up and install Dropbox on your computer through that link, and we both get an additional 500MB of storage!

 

brb dissertating

I haven’t been able to blog as regularly as I like lately thanks to a number of factors, but a meeting I had the other night with my doctoral internship adviser spurred me to get back on here this evening.  In reviewing the goals I set for myself in my leadership plan back in September, we discussed blogging as a tool for both reflection and networking.  In the course of our discussion, I realized I haven’t blogged about my progress nearly as much as I planned to, so here I’ll outline a few quick status updates as well as some reflection.

Updates:

  • Chapters 1 and 2 of my dissertation are more or less in the can.  In my program, we start writing our dissertations in the first year, write Chapter 3 in the second year, then conduct our research and write the final chapters in year three.  After two grueling-but-ultimately-successful Disciplined Inquiry courses (read: Statistics), I submitted the first two chapters of my dissertation on distributed leadership in K-12 schools.  The feedback I have received has been overwhelmingly positive; I have some minor cleaning up to do, but I was fearing anticipating having to make much more significant revisions.
  • I wrote Chapter 2 in December, had hip surgery around Christmas, then wrote Chapter 1 in January-February.  That was probably the most intense, trying 3-month period I’ve had in a long time.
  • Coursework otherwise has been manageable.  I actually enjoyed my stats assignments, and understood the subject matter better than the last time I took grad-level stats in 2008.

Reflections:

  • Although it can be stressful rushing out of work exactly at 3:45 to race down to Delaware to arrive shortly after 5, I’m finding Friday to be an oddly optimal day to have night classes.  It’s not like I ever go out on Fridays anyway, and there’s no need to get up early and go to work the next day. 🙂
  • The cohort is much bigger than I thought it would be (30+ people), but I’ve started to develop some nice friendships within the group, and we’re all generally a supportive bunch.
  • The 7-week course cycle definitely pros and cons.  I really like cycling through the different courses so quickly (my interest wanes after a while; so sue me), but that also compresses the timeline for completing assignments.  With Cub Scouts one night a week, class one night a week, and, up until very recently, physical therapy two nights a week, what little free time I had left over had to be devoted to writing.  There’s very little wiggle room, which is incredibly stressful.
  • My cohort is comprised of students from three concentrations: organizational leadership (OL), higher ed leadership (HL), and K-12 leadership (EL; that’s me).  I am one of the few EL folks in a class of mostly OL and HL folks.  Everyone’s great, but I’m getting a bit antsy waiting to get to some real K-12-specific courses (and, more importantly, assignments that deal with K-12 leadership issues, not the general, broad leadership stuff we’ve discussed so far.  I know that will come next year, but I’m ready for it now!

I’ll spend an upcoming post outlining some pertinent points from my dissertation, so be sure to grab some popcorn for that one.  Hopefully I’ll have time to post again before another month goes by!  Til then, back to work…

Shifting My Sharing

Despite the periodic blog posts heralding the death of RSS, I remain a huge fan of the syndication format (not familiar with RSS?  Check the wiki).  I have been an avid user of Google Reader for nearly five years now, and I use it daily to aggregate and read, at last count, nearly 200 blogs, education-related and otherwise.

Until recently, one of my favorite features of Google Reader has been the ability to “share” (read: publish) interesting articles to my own personal RSS feed, which I cross-published to my Twitter account and on a sidebar feed on my portfolio website.  Additionally, Google Reader users could subscribe to each other’s Shared Items feeds right in Reader, which was a great way for me to read the posts my friends found insightful or useful without having to rely on Facebook or Twitter, where they would be too likely to be overlooked due to the high signal to noise ratio.

This past fall, however, Google saw fit to remove the sharing function (the generic nature of which allowed users to publish to just about any service) and replace it with a “Share to Google+” button (which forces users to use their social networking product to share stories).   This turned an incredibly powerful, relatively open publishing platform into yet another walled garden, a move I (sort of) understand from a business standpoint, but one that frustrated me immensely as a user.

Despite Google’s shortsightedness, I’ve still been able to rely on RSS to help me concoct another solution for when I want to share interesting articles from my Reader.  I have repurposed my Delicious account to be my surrogate Shared Items feed.  If you would like to read the articles I find interesting, you can now find them at Delicious.com/damian613 (or if you use RSS too, subscribe to the feed).

So what happened to the existing items in my Delicious account, the special education/school psychology related bookmarks (that I also published to my portfolio website)?  Simple – I moved them all over to Diigo (RSS feed), with tags intact.

If you’re interested in either my shared bookmarks in special ed/school psychology or the blogposts I share periodically in the areas of technology & education, please feel free to drop by my Delicious & Diigo accounts, or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feeds (while the format is still alive!).

TL;DR: Moved some of my public stuff around:

Progress Report: One Year Later

Last July I described how I used online mindmapping program MindMeister to organize my then-overwhelming mishmosh of personal and professional goals neatly into academic years.  Now that the 2009-2010 academic year is drawing to a close, I thought I’d publicly review (because I’m nothing if not accountable) whether or not I achieved each of my goals.

Conduct county/state PD workshops: Sort of.  I applied, but ultimately was not chosen, to run some county-level PD workshops this year.  I was, however, asked to run two sessions at the New Jersey Education Association’s Technology Integration Conferences this spring.  Prior obligations prevented me from attending both, but I was able to make it to Trenton a few weeks ago to speak with a group of teachers about Google Sites.  I’m told it went well. 🙂  And in that vein…

Present at NJEA 2009: Yes!  Every November, the New Jersey Education Association hosts its annual convention in Atlantic City over two days.  Last summer, I submitted two proposals for the convention’s “High Tech Hall”, hedging my bets that one would be accepted and the other, not.  To my surprise, not only were both accepted (meaning I was “on stage” for eight straight hours the first day of the convention!), but I was also asked to come back the second day to do a one-hour workshop on wikis in the classroom.  It was a phenomenal experience (I wrote about it here and here), and I’ve already submitted more proposals for Convention 2010.

Attend two psychology conferences: Achievement unlocked!  I attended a presentation in King of Prussia, PA in September on Asperger Syndrome and the New Jersey Association of School Psychologists Winter Conference in Jamesburg, NJ in December.  While I mostly write here about educational technology, I am still a school psychologist for several hours out of the week, and I find far fewer online PD resources in this arena than I do for general ed classroom teachers.  One notable exception to this is the National Association of School Psychologists, who has an entire hub of online resources, including RSS feeds of info, blogs, and online webinars and presentations for which I can receive continuing education credit hours towards my national school psychologist re-certification (thanks, NASP!).  Beyond them, however, I haven’t found much (but am open to suggestions if you have any!).

In a related vein, I also had the privilege of attending a talk by renowned education law guru Perry Zirkel, who came to my school to address an audience of special education teachers and Child Study Team members from Hunterdon County.  An unexpected PD bonus, to be sure!

Get an iPhone: (OK, so they can’t all be lofty goals.) I’d lusted over the iPhone since the day it came out, but in the weeks leading up to my current contract expiring, Sprint introduced a new Android phone, the HTC Hero.  I ended up sticking with Sprint and purchasing the Hero shortly after it came out – the Android market is easily competitive with the iPhone App Store, and my monthly payment is still significantly less than what it would be with AT&T.  I love my Android phone, and can’t see myself going back now.  I didn’t technically achieve this goal, but I’m quite satisfied with how it turned out nonetheless.

Get published: Yes and no.  At the time of goal-setting, I had envisioned writing an article and having it published in an academic journal.  That hasn’t happened YET (but watch this space in the next year), but I am proud to announce that I will have two short stories published in upcoming anthologies by Kaplan Publishing.  The Teachable Moment is available from June 1, 2010, and includes my story “Alleviating Shakes-Fear”, about my experiences teaching Shakespeare’s works to high school students.  My second story, “The Ick Factor”, will appear in One Size Does Not Fit All (available from June 29, 2010), and presents my feelings on the importance of a visible GLBT presence in school curriculum.  As noted in the agreement I signed with Kaplan, I retain the copyright to my stories, and will be publishing them here as well over the next month or so.

Attend EduCon: Did it.  I only live an hour’s train ride away from Chris Lehmann’s Science Leadership Academy, so now that I’m done with grad school (for now) and my kids aren’t babies any more, I really had nothing preventing me from going.  I had wanted to attend since the first EduCon in 2008, but circumstances were such that I wasn’t able to make it until the 2010 event this past January.  I only attended one of the three days, and you can read my thoughts on my time there here.  Deven Black and I also recorded an episode of EdTechClassroom with Karen Chichester & Burt Lo in which we discussed our respective experiences at SLA (check it out here!).

There are two other goals on that list of a more personal nature that I can’t go into here, but I will say that one is in process and the other one has been intentionally deferred until next summer.

These certainly aren’t the only things I’ve done in the past year, but these were the major goals I wanted to make absolutely sure I hit (or at least made progress on) since last summer.  Would I have achieved them had I not recorded them and periodically referred to the mindmap?  Perhaps; it’s impossible to say, really.  All I know is I did write them down and I did achieve almost all of them… and yes, I’ve already started looking at my list of 2010-2011 goals and working hard to make those dreams realities, too.

We’re always setting short- and long-term goals for our students, but are you doing it for yourself?  We all have ideas of what we’d like to do, but have you taken the time to think 6-12 months into the future, put pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard!), and make those intentions a little more concrete?  Perhaps most importantly (and terrifying), are you sharing those goals with anyone else?

Tools of the Trade: MyEmailReminders.com

Since the demise of one of my favorite Web services PingMe was announced, I’ve trialed many different SMS/email reminder services, and finally decided on the aptly-named MyEmailReminders.com.  In my last post, I spoke to the potential value of such a service for students (and occasionally-absent-minded school psychologists).  Here, I’d like to take you under the hood of MyEmailReminders, but first, my standard disclaimer for whenever I write about specific services: I have no connection to this service whatsoever other than as a satisfied end user.

Getting Started

All you need to sign up for the service is an email address.  If you wish to use the SMS reminder feature, you’ll need your mobile phone handy as well, as you’ll be sent a confirmation code via SMS.  This is important if you plan on using this service with more than one phone (e.g., a spouse, multiple students, a student’s parent, etc.) – you can connect one account to multiple phones, but you must have each phone handy in order to get the confirmation code.

Existing Reminders

Upon login, you are presented with a list of existing reminders.  You can choose to view these as a list (see below) or on a calendar.

While this is fantastic for reminders you set to repeat, the list can get cluttered if you don’t manually delete those one-time reminders (“pick up eggs and bread on the way home!”).  If you don’t see yourself pruning your list every so often, you may want to opt for the calendar view.

In list view, you’ll also see the frequency you’ve set for each message (more on how to do this in a bit):

Setting a New Reminder

Click “Add” on the upper right-hand menu to add a new reminder.  You’ll see a pretty self-explanatory set of text boxes:

I don’t categorize my reminders, but some folks may wish to do so.  Note the warning: if you have your reminder sent by SMS, only the “Title” field will be sent.  If it goes to email, you’ll also get whatever you type in the “Description” field.

Setting the Delivery Date

MyEmailReminders gives you several options for setting one-time-only and repeating reminders.  For something like a homework reminder, you may choose the fifth option down and check off every weekday.  Another example: I have yearly reminders set for the first days of March and December that remind my wife and I to make appointments to get our cars inspected.

Setting the Delivery Time/Method

Here’s where you decide if you want your reminders sent via email, SMS, or both.  As you can see from the options, you can choose any time of day (in 15-minute increments), and you can also have reminders sent prior to the event.  You can check off as many or as few of these boxes as you like.

Add Another Recipient?

You can send reminders to multiple recipients.  Anyone you designate can receive reminders via email, but as I noted above, only registered mobile phone numbers will receive SMS reminders.  As you can see from the screenshot, I’ve registered my wife’s phone so she can receive the occasional SMS reminder as needed (er, not that you ever need it, honey!).

After these steps, just click the orange “Add Reminder” button at the bottom of the page, and you’re all set!

Epilogue

As I explained last time, I like the idea of email- and SMS-based reminders due to the relative ubiquity of access and platform agnosticism.  Anecdotally, I can speak to the benefits I’ve derived from these reminders – in fact, sometimes the simple act of setting the reminder was enough to make me remember what I needed to!  If you use a similar service, or if you decide to start as a result of reading this, please leave a comment and share your experiences!