Hello, friends. Three months is a long time to be gone, and I am glad you are still here.
If we’re connected on LinkedIn, you may have seen me talk about the middle. The TL;DR is that we have successfully moved countries, and, regardless of how many times we have done this before, there is a platitude that bears repeating: transitions are hard and take more bandwidth than we care to admit. We often don’t give ourselves enough grace.
Which leads us to practice by design.
Season two starts today, and it’ll land in your inbox every other week now instead of every week, because I’m giving myself grace. And as a fellow learner and longtime international educator, I know you already get enough email, which is more or less what this first post is about.
So, welcome back, and I hope the school year is treating you exceptionally well!
An article I read this summer stayed with me and had me consider more broadly the state of our digital affairs, as schools and individuals. But first, I want to tell you about an incident that came rushing back as I read it.
Setting a precendent
Several years ago, a parent emailed me late at night. There was absolutely nothing complicated or sensitive about his question: something about a Seesaw login or what have you. It was warm and polite. For no special reason, the principal was copied in his original email, perhaps just so he’d be certain that it would reach me.
I replied all and solved the issue, because it took no more than ninety seconds and it seemed like the decent thing to do. I thought nothing of it.
Until the next morning, when the principal showed up at my office for a chat.
She was generous about it, and she was right in more ways than one. First, she had me consider my own working hours, which I was not looking after particularly well at the time. And then, she said something along these lines: “You just taught one family what time our school answers.”
Ouch.
I thought I was doing my job, and, for all purposes, I was. But that one reply also set a precedent on behalf of colleagues who had never been asked about working after hours.
It’s not a big deal, until it is. And all it takes is being mindful about setting the expectations early on. We’ll come back to this.
On logging off
In We used to log off, data, research, and AI specialist Wira Indra Kusuma touches a nerve: he argues that logging off used to be a verb.
You connected, anticipated the high-pitched screeches, whirs, and beeps of the dial-up internet, completed a task, then disconnected and moved on with your day (or night, or middle of it). The experience wasn’t necessarily designed. It simply came free with the medium.
But products got smoother, and those often annoying pauses got sanded away. The door came off its hinges without much ceremony, or without most of us noticing anyway.
Now, online is not a place you go to. It is a layer you live inside. It clings to the morning, the dinner table, the checkout line, the bed before sleep and after waking. There is no visit because there is no return.
—Wira Indra Kusuma
That sort of explains how we all started reading the inability to stop as a personal weakness, when what actually happened is that somebody removed the exit and did not think to mention it to us.
Don’t you think?
Schools have done this to themselves, too, and not out of carelessness.
Joints and edges
Back in June I wrote a post called Nobody Owns the Seam, about the experience of standing in the joint, or the gap, between well-run offices and departments. It’s a familiar effect not only for the diverse stakeholders of a school, but for anyone trying to navigate the inner paths of a large institution.
Reading this article, though, made me consider the other half of this story, because we seem to have two kinds of seams.
Seams as joints, as in the handoff between two departments, and the perceived gap a family finds itself in. It’s what the June post talked about. These are the ones that need to be tight, well-made, and, ideally, close to seamless.
Seams as edges, as in the actual end of a workday, and the point at which a person stops being reachable. These do not need smoothing over. They need doors, and a way to clearly see them. They ask for seamful designs.
In his article, Kusuma also reminds us of the work of computer scientist Mark Weiser. Back in 1988, he coined a term we are now all too familiar with: ubiquitous computing. Weiser later wrote about how the most profound technologies are the ones that disappear, weaving themselves into all aspects of life, until you can’t pick them out. It’s where seamlessness came from.
Except that, around the same time, Weiser also advocated for seamful systems, where the joints and edges stay deliberately visible, because these boundaries are how people understand what they are inside of and can decide whether to stay or not.
I don’t have to tell you which one is more popular. The clearest example, in fact, is sitting in your pocket and comes in the form of infinite scroll.
Nobody, and especially product designers, wants friction. An obstacle, however small, is more likely to cause lost engagement.
Schools play the same game
While we are not necessarily tracking engagement outside marketing dashboards, our equivalent is perceived responsiveness.
This shows up as parent satisfaction scores, as retention numbers, and as the reputation that travels through a small community in the click of a (WhatsApp) button. It’s also felt through that invisible triage tax I wrote about earlier in season one, too.
In our best effort to solve this, we remove every bit of friction we can for families, causing it to land somewhere else as availability demands of a member of staff.
Just think of our digital ecosystem for an example: the learning management system that immediately pushes every update a teacher makes to parents, or the portal that pushes whole-school messages to the community, or the WhatsApp group that was born of good intentions and that nobody can now switch off, or the email app that effectively brings the school into personal lives 24/7. Add to that the demands of our globetrotting parent body spread across time zones, and you’ve got yourself a fuller plate than anyone cares to admit.
We know these were hard-thought decisions made to answer specific needs, yet the edges slowly disappeared. The doors got taken off, one by one.
Here is where it bears repeating this publication’s main belief: this is not a people problem. Our colleagues are not undisciplined, and they do not need another webinar on resilience.
They are working inside a building with the exits taken out.
We’re all in the same building.
It is unsurprising then that hard stops, or the lack thereof, affect us all individually, regardless of policy and good intentions.
I do it myself. I check email a million times a day, toggling between tasks like a pinball ricocheting across a screen. I read things I’ve already read twice, simply because my brain was still untangling whatever mess was waiting in the previous tab. I’ll unlock my phone with a clear purpose, only to find myself aimlessly refreshing LinkedIn or Instagram.
Do we ever log off? Clearly not.
But Kusuma’s article illuminated something even more important for me: We treat constant screen time as a character flaw, forgetting that the platforms, and our current mindset about communication in general, have been built without an emergency exit.
Screen-proof
What has been helping me be more aware of my behavior is watching my friend Maci Nazzarini build a movement called Screenproof. Maci spent years as an educator—both stateside and internationally—before moving on to entrepreneurship around digital wellbeing. What I appreciate about her recently launched initiative is that the goal is not about being screen-free, but screen-proof. We can still use social media, text our friends, and binge-watch that show on Netflix. What Maci is after is simply not letting screens fill in every in-between moment by default.
So one small thing I’ve been doing since moving to a place near the beach is to take daily walks there without my devices. Watch included.
It’s helped me to design seams where there weren’t many anymore.
There is a window, and it is open now
Personal anecdote aside, here is the part that matters to school leaders.
Norms set in the first few weeks and harden by half-term: what time people answer email, which WhatsApp group forms and sticks, and who ends up in it, how quickly a parent—or a colleague, for that matter—learns to expect a reply, whether messages from leadership tend to arrive late at night…
Very few of these things get decided. They just add up, and then at some point they become how we do things at this school. But we can still do things about it. The year is soft, and the time is ripe for a thoughtful discussion regarding stop times.
This week’s move
Explore adding microboundaries to your routine, as a leader and as a human being: tiny friction points designed to keep you from sliding from one context into the next on autopilot.
Separate when you work from when your work arrives.
This, I now realize, is what that awkward morning with my principal taught me: you are entirely allowed to work at ten at night. The time you work is nobody else’s business.
But what is everybody else’s business is the timestamp.
A message sent at ten at night teaches whoever receives it what hours this school runs on, whether you meant for that to happen or not.
The simplest tool you can adopt is the scheduled send. Every mail client has it, and it costs you a couple of clicks at most. It doesn’t ask you to change your personal rhythm or judge when you feel productive; it simply places a small, generous seam between your late-night flow and someone else’s schedule.
What is coming
This is the first of two posts on designing the log off.
Next time will be more practical, tackling response-time norms as a published service standard, and the channel inventory that has to come first.
But before you go on with your day, in the spirit of camaraderie and research, tell me: What time does your school actually stop being reachable, and who decided that? And what time do YOU stop? Have you been able to make seams that last? I look forward to learning and growing with you this school year.
Systematically yours,
About the Author:
G (short for Gitane) is co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at EKG Collective, helping international schools turn communication complexity into systematic clarity. Learn more at ekgcollective.com.