Where we are
I’m back with part 2 of Designing the log off, a short series inspired by we used to log off, a powerful read that left me wondering about the exits we’ve inadvertently removed from our routines.
For today’s more practical piece, we’re focusing on operational clarity and hanging those doors back up… at least at our schools.
But first, we need to identify how many entrances there are, so we can explicitly state when they close for the day. Come with me.
Death by a thousand pings
In many schools, our best efforts to keep everyone informed and engaged quickly turn into channel overwhelm.
We have the learning management system pushing notifications at the speed of light, the social media channels broadcasting our celebrations at any given hour, the school-wide newsletter as well as the individual classroom bulletins sent weekly, the occasional student information system updates, the emergency SMS system, and the rogue WhatsApp groups working 24/7. But perhaps more predominantly than any of the aforementioned, we have our inbox.
Regardless of personal opinions or preferences, these channels were born out of necessity, and trying to turn it all into a “one-stop-shop” of sorts would only add one more platform to the mix. True story.
The challenge that we’re faced with as users, then, is the act and mere expectation of monitoring—or staying up to date—which often comes disguised as keeping informed.
If you’ve been following practice by design for any length of time, it’ll come as no surprise to you that we need a map before we can trace our route. We can’t quite own and manage what hasn’t been audited yet.
Step 1: Start an inventory
My tool of choice for this scenario comes from organizational design, and is nothing more than a good old spreadsheet.
The Communication Channel Matrix
List every single platform where a community member can receive information from, or send information to, your staff.
For each channel, you will define four things:
Purpose: What is this specific tool for? (e.g., Crisis alerts vs. weekly celebrations).
Audience: Who is receiving this?
Owner: Who is actively managing and monitoring this?
Cadence: How often is it used?
This is good housekeeping in the first place, but it also allows you to clearly define ownership, something I walk you through in this video from an earlier post 👇
Don’t be alarmed if you find yourself staring at gaps, especially in the owner column. The complexity of our digital ecosystems often makes this one the hardest one to fill. But once every channel has a name next to it, something else becomes possible: that person or group can also say, or help define, when their monitoring stops.
Step 2: Publish your agreements
Finding out exactly where communication happens at your school gives you a chance to define how it happens.
In the business world, they call this a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which amounts to defined and clearly articulated expected response times. Governments usually publish the same thing as a customer charter or “service standards.”
The core idea is simple: the service provider states, in measurable terms, what level of service the customer can expect. It turns a vague promise (”we’ll get back to you as soon as possible”) into a verifiable one (”we acknowledge every message within two business days”).
Take a peek at this one from the Latrobe City Council, in Australia, which I found while researching this post. It is a properly designed document rather than a wall of jargon-y text, and it actually commits in writing to providing current, accurate, and timely information. Their use of plain language deserves applause 🤩.
There is one more detail worth stealing from the folks at Latrobe City Council: they publish the hours their social media is monitored, which is an actual door, on a channel most of us treat as permanently open.
That level of detail draws an edge on purpose. It is your seamful design protecting the humans doing the work.
Now imagine if your technology agreements, your parent handbook, your website, and every teacher’s email signature stated:
“Our teachers are in the classroom with students during the day. We aim to acknowledge and resolve all non-emergency parent communications within one business day.”
When you publish the standard, you manage the expectation. In the process, you help remove the invisible “triage tax” from your teachers’ shoulders. Going forward, the parent rests easy because they know when they’ll get a reply, and the teacher breathes easier because they are no longer expected (even implicitly) to be always on.
The doors close at five
For the vast majority of emails, a response within 24 hours would be perfectly acceptable and meet the sender’s expectations. Yet, the person receiving the email at 8pm feels an immediate, physiological pressure to resolve it (this user eagerly raises her hand in agreement 🙋🏻♀️).
That pressure isn’t irrational at all. In a caring profession like ours, a parent’s worry about their child doesn’t feel like a ticket in a queue… it feels like a child.
So we reach for a personal fix, and perhaps the most famous one is Inbox Zero. Contrary to popular belief, Merlin Mann, its creator, did not encourage users to ruthlessly solve and delete every item on their inbox. He actually intended “zero” to represent the amount of your brain power that is trapped in your inbox.
Mann was closer to right than the people who turned the method into a bit of a competition. But even in its correct form, Inbox Zero is a survival tactic, and an individual one in a sea of systemic problems. It places the burden of managing the flood entirely on our personal discipline.
Good news: we can dismantle that pressure and support our staff by officially publishing our standards.
A published response-time norm is a beautiful, deliberately placed seam. It is a boundary that says: we care deeply about your child, and to do our best work for them tomorrow, our doors close at 5:00 PM today.
This week’s move
Gather the responsible team at your school and open a spreadsheet to take inventory of the ways a parent can reach your staff. You might be surprised by how many entrances you’ve been leaving wide open.
I look forward to hearing how many doors you manage to close.
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.
Love the term channel overwhelm! The challenge is real.