18: Spending Time to Save Time
A brief pause, a big announcement, and your invitation to shape what comes next.
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Here’s a human-recorded audio version with Chief Voice Officer Kirk McDavitt. Hit play, or keep reading below.
Where We Are
Before anything else: I want to hold space for our colleagues and friends navigating difficult, uncertain times right now as a result of the distressing recent events in the Middle East. Many of you are making tough decisions, or watching from a distance, worried about the people you care about. I'm thinking of you. This newsletter is a small thing, but I hope it continues to be a useful one.
On that note, you may have noticed practice by design went quiet for a couple of weeks. It wasn’t because I ran out of things to say, but because I was (finally!) finishing something I’ve been building behind the scenes. (More on that in a minute.)
Stepping away from the weekly rhythm gave me space to reflect on something that’s been nagging at me since we wrapped the Beyond the Org Chart series: the tension between knowing a system needs attention and finding the time to actually fix it.
The Math Behind Spending Time to Save Time
You feel this, right?
You know your onboarding docs are outdated. You know your weekly newsletter template could use a rethink. You know the way parents submit concerns has devolved into a spaghetti path of forwarded emails and “just checking in” follow-ups.
You know all of this. And you’ll get to it... eventually. After the accreditation visit. After graduation. After summer. After.
Here is the guiding principle I return to in every conversation with school leaders:
Time spent examining a system is never wasted. It’s a down payment against every future headache that system would have caused.
Fifteen minutes mapping how information actually moves through your building. Twenty minutes auditing a single communication pathway. An afternoon asking, “Why do we do it this way?” about a process everyone assumes is fine just because no one is complaining loudly enough.
That’s not extra work. That’s the work that makes everything else lighter.
A principal recently told me she spent a single morning mapping her school’s parent inquiry flow. She discovered that a routine question about dismissals was bouncing between three people, generating separate email chains, and taking two days to resolve a thirty-second issue.
With her team, she fixed it in an afternoon. They built a simple FAQ page, added a QR code to their pick-up/drop-off area, and redirected the inquiry form. The whole project took maybe three hours.
That was eight months ago. Her front office estimates they’ve saved over 200 hours of staff time since.
Three hours invested. Two hundred hours recovered. That is the math of spending time to save time.
And honestly, that’s what everything I write in practice by design comes down to. Journey maps, service blueprints, invisible system audits... they’re all variations on the same principle: stop long enough to see what’s actually happening, and you’ll find the fix faster than you think!
Introducing The Clarity Sprint
Speaking of spending time to save time, I have news. The Clarity Sprint is officially ready.
For those who’ve been following along, this is the complete, self-paced workshop I’ve been building from the Design for Clarity series. It takes everything we covered and turns it into a facilitated 60-minute team experience.
Choose Your Track
I built this workshop with three distinct audiences in mind: Senior Admin, Comms Leaders, and Middle Leaders/Teachers. When your team dives in, they’ll choose the track that best fits their role.
📦 What's Inside the Workshop:
An interactive, video-embedded slide deck: Four distinct sprints (The Invisible Network, Visual Hierarchy, The Mobile Audit, and Plain Language), all guided by video instruction built right into the deck. You don’t need to be an expert to run this—just press play, keep time, and give your team space to do the work.
A facilitator quick-start guide: Exact scripts and pacing tips so you can walk into the room feeling prepared, even if you’ve never run a workshop before.
Emergency artifacts: Three hyper-realistic, jargon-filled “dummy” communications so your team can practice editing (just in case someone forgets to bring their own examples).
Could AI do this for you?
Of course. But, ultimately, this protected hour is all about learning to communicate better and adapting to the times—an exercise everyone can learn more from.
A Note on Pricing
I’ve made this pay-what-you-want, from $0 to whatever you feel it’s worth.
If you have a PD budget and want to support the mission, your contribution is genuinely appreciated; it’s what allows me to keep building resources like this.
But if you don’t have the budget right now, take it for $0 and go make your school’s communication better. That is the whole point!
Not sure if it’s for you?
I’ve made the introductory video for Sprint 1 (The Invisible Network) available for free. Watch it, share it with your team, and see if the lightbulbs go on.
Duration: ˜3 minutes
Coming Next Week: The Offboarding Series
Now, for what’s ahead.
I’ve been thinking about offboarding for a long time, especially having recently been on both sides of the transition: creating the departure checklists, and then actually having to use them myself. And when I talk about offboarding, I don’t mean the exit interview or the farewell parties. I mean the actual systems—or lack thereof—that determine what happens when someone leaves your school.
Think about it: schools invest weeks onboarding new staff. Orientations, welcome binders, campus tours, buddy systems. But when someone leaves?
Usually, it’s a rushed handover. A shared drive folder that may or may not contain anything useful. A hearty “good luck!” from someone already mentally checked out. And ultimately, a new hire who spends their first three months trying to decode which processes lived entirely inside their predecessor’s head.
Offboarding is the communication design problem almost nobody talks about. And in international schools, where staff turnover is a structural reality, the cost of getting it wrong compounds year after year.
Starting next Wednesday, I’m launching a new series on designing offboarding systems that protect institutional knowledge, support the people leaving, and set up the people arriving.
But I want to build this one with you. Before I write a single word, I want to know what matters most to your experience.
Quick Poll: The Offboarding Gap
Have a specific story?
Hit reply and tell me:
What do you wish your previous school had done better when you left?
Or what did you walk into at your current school that made you think, “How did no one write this down?”
I will literally read every reply and build the frameworks around your real experiences. This series is yours as much as it is mine. Let’s design it together.
It’s good to be back. I missed this.
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.