The deputy principal's 47-tab problem

I spent a Tuesday morning shadowing a deputy principal at a regional secondary school. By recess she had 47 tabs open. I counted twice. None of them were unnecessary. All of them were a sign of something.

Here is the rough breakdown. Six tabs were attendance-related: the daily attendance feed, the week-long pattern view, the unexplained absences alert, the parent communications log, the late arrivals, and a single student's case she was building. Eight tabs were for staff matters: the leave board, the duty roster, two separate departmental SharePoints, two tabs of policy documents she was cross-referencing, and the HR portal. Five were for the Year 12 cohort she was coordinating: the timetable, the assessment moderation sheet, two Google Drive folders, and the VTAC reference. The remaining 28 were a mix of email, calendar, ticketing, learning management, finance approvals, four state-level reporting tools, and a long tail of single-tab tasks she had opened earlier that morning and not yet closed.

She was not a chaotic person. The opposite. She was the most organised person at the school. The 47 tabs were the visible expression of the operational complexity she was carrying every day. None of which she had been hired to do. All of which had to happen for the school to function.

The interesting question is not how to reduce her tab count. The interesting question is what would change about how the school runs if she had ten tabs instead of forty-seven. My experience is the answer is rarely "she gets two extra hours a day". The answer is usually that she has the cognitive room to do the parts of her job that actually require a deputy principal. The conversations with struggling students. The disciplinary follow-ups that require care. The instructional leadership work that has been getting squeezed out for three years.

If your school's leadership team is spending its days as the integration layer between disconnected systems, you have a structural problem that will not be solved by adding more leadership capacity. You have a problem that needs to be solved by reducing the number of systems they have to integrate, by hand, in their head, every day.

The schools that have made real progress on this haven't done it by hiring an operations manager. They have done it by being explicit about which questions live in which system, ruthlessly removing the systems that don't earn their place, and accepting that "having the data in three places to be safe" is a more expensive choice than they had previously realised.

I went back to that school six months later. The deputy principal was down to a usual working tab count of around fifteen. We hadn't done anything dramatic. We had retired three platforms that no one was really using, consolidated two reporting flows, and rebuilt one workflow so that the answer lived in the original system rather than in her email.

She told me the most noticeable change wasn't the time saved. It was the calm.