Smartsheet for Task and Project Management

I recently started to use Smartsheet for helping to manage my tasks, duties, and projects. I found an existing template from them and am using it pretty much as-is. Our college has been using Smartsheet for a couple of years now and it’s been very good overall.

My template features a pretty standard array of fields:

  • Task
  • Category
  • Status
  • WBS No.
  • Assigned to
  • Start Date
  • End Date
  • Duration
  • % Done
  • Comments
  • Predecessors
  • and the standard Smartsheets Conversations (comments), Attachments, etc.

This tool replaces what I had been doing previously. Not long after the start of COVID, I was overwhelmed with work. I don’t mind juggling, but I didn’t even know what I was juggling at that point. My previous system wasn’t working for me so I switched to using hidden, free blocks on an alternate, private Outlook calendar. This helped me to block off time for what I needed to do without cluttering up my main calendar which is shared.

Back to Smartsheet, I’m still able to get a good view of what I need to do and manage everything decently. I’m a visual person, so I’m mostly missing out on the graphical view of a calendar with blocks for time to work on projects. That’s been OK so far. I do have the Gantt feature for larger projects, but I still don’t use that view much. It’s mostly useful for the dates.

Outlook Scheduling Polls

I’ve started to use Outlook Scheduling Polls more as I’ve started to see others using it. It’s very convenient because it’s embedded within Outlook, but it is very clunky to use. There are a number of reasons why it’s just not living up to my needs.

  • No way to enter descriptions which are critical for me in sharing links to meeting notes, full-range of connection options to Zoom meetings, etc.
  • No easy way to find the polls. I have to search for past emails to find the “view all polls” link.
  • Counter-intuitive creation of events. You have to actually find a time slot to being with and start making a meeting and then select the polling feature for that meeting to initiate the poll.
  • Limited meeting length options. Our College’s defaults are 25- and 50-minute meetings. The polling tool doesn’t allow for these durations
  • Maximum of 4-hour meetings. While not used often, I need more flexibility.

Microsoft, please expand your features and design this for a greater selection of your user base! Microsoft has always been behind the wave of current UX practices.

Hosting a TiddlyWiki

I’ve been working on migrating our guide for learning designers to a tiddlywiki to improve usability and up to now, it was OK if I stored the file on my personal server. We’re getting to the point where it’s best if multiple people have access to editing the file.

Fooling around, I’ve discovered that it is possible to host the page in Canvas!

I’ve tried other options such as OneDrive, SharePoint, and Google Drive but none of those work. I’ve asked our IT group if we could have access to a server and am awaiting word back from them.

Perhaps Canvas is good enough for now. It would be great to get autosaving activated, if that’s even possible. I’m also not sure about multiple people making simultaneous edits. I don’t think that would go well so version tracking would be very valuable.

Dev/Rev Planning

Dev/Rev Planning Process

Dev/Rev = New Course Development and Course Revision Projects

For the past four to five years, I’ve been assisting with developing processes for our College to improve our Dev/Rev Process. While I am an Assistant Director, that title is rather misleading as I am relatively low in the organizational hierarchy of the College. This is relevant because I wouldn’t have been able to make the progress I have to improve things for the designers, which includes myself, and the faculty if I didn’t have the support of my Directors and the Faculty and Administrative leadership of the College. We still have a lot of work to do together but I am happy for the progress we have made.

The presentation above is a distillation of a more detailed process flowchart.

https://app.diagrams.net/ was a huge find as it is a powerful, open-source option for creating diagrams. I really enjoyed working with this software.

Return to Campus

Our office is returning to campus in mid-August. Our directors have wisely scheduled time for us to meet to have a chance to work through our transition. It will not be easy and it should not be something to be rushed. The director of our office, Lisa Lenze, shared these two articles with us to consider as we make this transition.

My first post-Covid conference showed me we need to prep for the campus return

  • This article was written by Flower Darby and it’s a great coincidence because she just met with the LDSC 2021 attendees as our keynote speaker!
  • “This has been a taxing time” – and differently for different people. The pandemic has been utterly devastating for some and a relatively minimal impact for others (according to them). While those who have not been affected as seriously as others would probably not be offended if you were to approach them more carefully, it can be a challenge to determine the range and breadth of impacts for an individual.
  • “we must acknowledge the weirdness… acknowledge the trauma”
  • “be prepared to extend abundant compassion and grace” – and for me that includes understanding those who have chosen not to wear protective equipment and are not caring of those that have chosen to do so. In addition, while I held some apprehensions about the vaccines in the early days, I am trying to understand those that still choose not to get the vaccine when there isn’t a pre-existing medical situation.

Return To Work Anxiety? You’re Not Alone.

  • “we have collectively adapted to the disruptive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic” – what behaviors have I had to evolve to thrive? Be patient, try to understand, act safely, learn to communicate in different ways, learn to implement technology in new ways.
  • “Create space for processing and sense-making” – this is something I will need to work on.
  • “Don’t ignore warning signs of distress” – this is something else I will need to learn how to do better. I often focus on the work and have to remember the human experience and why that is more important.

2021 UPCEA SOLA+R

I attended my first UPCEA conference. It was the first fully-remote conference I’ve attended since the pandemic started. I’ve joined a couple of other online conferences on an ad hoc basis, but this was the first that I registered for in advance and set aside time for.

The conference was well structured with synchronous Zoom events and pre-recorded presentations with live chat. Both worked great for different reasons. The best pre-recorded presentations were more organic and conversational. The nice thing is that all of the sessions were recorded and published to YouTube. I’ve included a few of the sessions I attended below.

The session I took away the most from was the keynote. There were a lot of great questions for me to reflect on and some new topics to consider moving ahead in my leadership role.

  • “I commit and disagree” is OK, we need to challenge ourselves
  • We need to inspire through creating a personal vision: where do I see myself and my team in 3 years? What is happening around you in this vision?
  • How do you get out of constraint thinking? Project your vision forward. Paint a picture looking back.
  • Humble Inquiry: “It takes discipline and practice to access one’s ignorance” – Schein
  • Directing vs. Engaging
  • Offers: Recipient “I offer to…” What concern of theirs does the offer address?
  • People do not remember what you said or did, but they remember how you made them feel.
  • What do you want others to remember about you?



I didn’t get to watch Annie and Stevie’s presentation during the event and wanted to include it here because I do intend on watching it. They are both awesome, so I’m sure this will be a great presentation.

Take time to reflect

This is a quick reminder to myself that it is incredibly important to take a few minutes to reflect and document on my work in a timely basis. I was just asked to reflect on an event back in November and while I remember the event, if I hadn’t made a brief post, I would have lost a lot of the benefits of going through the training. I am working in so many areas that it is easy to lose track of details and progress. I should be capturing reflections and action items after every event. I do a good job of that in my meetings, but cannot forget my training/development opportunities as well.

Last post of 2020 and You Say, “Tomato,” I Say “Pomodoro”

COVID Pandemic–what a year and what a year to come. Right now globally, we’re looking at the highest infection and death rates that we’ve ever seen. I hope humanity can try to agree on protecting one another from this horrible pandemic.

I close out 2020 with something new. Perhaps the start of a New Year’s Resolution of sorts. I’m going to try out the Pomodoro technique to work more effectively. Meetings often drive the structure of my work day. That could make it difficult to complete multiple Pomodoro’s back-to-back, but I’m not really concerned about that. I plan to use this technique on whatever time I have.

I’ve only just start using it and can see how it will improve my ability to focus, manage stress, and get more done. I already have a timer that I’ve customized for work and break sessions. I’ll return to share how this has impacted my work.

Until then, happy holidays to you and best wishes.

iPad Only?!

Updates: see the comments below this post…

Two days ago, I took my work laptop into the shop for warrantee work on the keyboard. Since then, I’ve been doing almost all of my work on my iPad. I have a personal iMac that I could use, but mostly as an experiment I wanted to see if I could use my iPad for work. It’s generally been a success.

Not surprisingly, there are a few things I cannot do.

  • I logged in with my personal iMac to view a course assignment that featured the WC Peer Eval tool. It is an antiquated tool and would not run in Chrome or Safari on my iPad.
  • I’m limited by what I can do in the Smartsheet app, so I have to make sure I’m using it in Safari.
  • A number of the hot-keys do not work the way I expect, so I’m not as fast performing a number of functions I’m used to.
  • I use my iPhone for Zoom, mounted on a stand above my iPad because the built-in camera on my iPad has me “looking down” at everyone. My camera also cuts out whenever I switch to a different app during a meeting to do things like update or view the meeting notes.
  • I’ve lost the ability to keep a large array of items in my clipboard. Having an app to do that on my laptop saves me a lot of time on certain tasks. Thankfully, the MacOS ecosystem allows me to copy something on my iPhone and paste it immediately onto my iPad without having to do anything.

I am surprised that the smaller screen really isn’t a big problem, but I’m used to working around that. Unlike many of my peers, I haven’t used an external monitor once since we switched to remote work back in the spring.

Using the College’s virtual machine also helps because it allows me to access a “full desktop” right from my iPad.

What’s the purpose or benefit? Well, I have a lot more confidence and knowledge of being able to work remotely with very little while not having to sacrifice any productivity.

Questions about Designing Teaching for Inclusion and Diversity

I attended a workshop yesterday for IST faculty called “Inclusive ADDIE” and at one point, we were asked the following questions based on what we had learned so far.

  1. How would you design a student group project for one of your classes?
  2. How would you handle dividing students into groups?
  3. How would you revise the content, examples, resources?

I don’t feel like I had great answers based on what I had learned. I started with what I would do without particular thought to inclusion and diversity.

  1. How would you design a student group project for one of your classes? Start with learning outcomes, then decide upon an assessment and rubric if needed, develop directions that includes all the required references to relevant learning content, review my content for accessibility.
  2. How would you handle dividing students into groups? I don’t think I would change. I prefer to form groups based on the order that students made submissions to the first, low-stakes assignment of the course. Having said that, if this were a WC section I would also try to account for timezones.
  3. How would you revise the content, examples, resources? I would look to make sure that I am considering minority groups at least ⅓ of the time in all of my examples, content, and assessments. This one, I took directly from the content of the workshop.

After listening to some other participant’s responses, I copied or added the following:

  1. How would you design a student group project for one of your classes? Provide reminders to class guidelines related to etiquette and group work. We have or can find these guidelines, but I wonder how inclusive and diverse those guidelines already are?
  2. How would you handle dividing students into groups? I didn’t have anything new to add here. Teaching through the WC, I do not get to know the students enough to be able to assign groups in ways that account for inclusion and diversity. I don’t think that’s how groups are formed in the real world, so why should I try to make accommodations in my class? I believe that my role would be to try to address issues around inclusion and diversity if they present themselves. I realize that is a slippery slope because if I am not openly addressing inclusion and diversity through out the course, how will my students know that I will address those concerns when there is an issue in the class. How will students even know to be mindful of inclusion and diversity practices in my class? Perhaps I need to develop a resource for faculty to help us provide guidelines to students about working in groups in ways that are inclusive and diverse? Teaching from the WC course template for the class I teach, I’m not sure we have much information about best practices for students working in groups. Perhaps I need to start there and include universal best practices in that resource from the start.
  3. How would you revise the content, examples, resources? I believe Jon Hughes mentioned to create group assignments with roles to allow for individuals to have a voice. This reminded me of Col. Jake Graham (ret. USMC) group work assignments where he will assign students different analytical roles depending upon the scenario/exercise he’s provided them. Dr. Lynette Yarger reminded us of something Dr. Alison Murphy shared with faculty during her McMurtry Excellence in Teaching and Learning Award presentation: create something for an under-represented community and through doing so, you will learn more about that community.