March Madness: Getting to Done

Okay, it's the first day of March, and I have a crazy idea and a challenge: Can we create a blog post for every school day during the month? That's 23 posts. And that's madness.

But, I think we can do it. We have lots of ideas from Friday's Professional Learning Day, from our February trip to Ohio eTech, and from our recent reading.

We're currently reading Seth Godin's Linchpin. Great read!

Godin writes about "shipping," that is, moving from thinking, talking, planning, resisting, etc etc to DONE. Now I know that it's true in education that we are always "in process," and that we don't always see results right away. BUT, it is true that there is always an end-of-the-day or end-of-the-project, that is, there are lots of things that we CAN get done.

Godin shares Bre Pettis's Cult of Done Manifesto. Here it is is list form (you can see it in graphic form, here):
 1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
 2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
 3. There is no editing stage.
 4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
 5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
 6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
 7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
 8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
 9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

So in the spirit of getting it done, let the March Madness begin. 

M.E.