The Tool Belt #4: How to Crush Your Busywork (as a Camp Director)

This is The Tool Belt, the newsletter that helps camp directors work smarter, not harder.

We’re the Dunkaroos of newsletters (remember those?) - short, sweet, and fun to snack on.

Today’s estimated read time: 1 minute, 16 seconds

🧨 How to Crush Your Busywork at Camp

Here at The Tool Belt, we’re all about efficiency and effectiveness.

Efficiency allows you to get the same work done with less effort.

Effectiveness means you’re working on the right things.

I can’t help you with effectiveness (too specific to you), but I can guide you becoming more efficient.

Because I’ve noticed something about camp directors - when faced with a challenge, often our instinct is to just work harder.

Call it an engineer’s mindset or just plain laziness, but I’ve always wanted to work smarter instead of harder.

In order to do that, you’ve got to take a hard look at your task list. And you’ve got to figure out two things:

1. What are the boring things (not using your skills, not worth your attention).

2. What are the repetitive things (predictable, follow a pattern).

If you can find things that are both rote and boring in your day, then you can get rid of them (though automation, delegation, or elimination).

Here’s a personal example from last week:

One of my wife’s jobs at camp is to update our website with the list of donors to our scholarship fund.

In the past, this meant going line by line down a spreadsheet and updating the webpage by hand (anyone can do it, takes a long time).

This task meets our definition for working smarter, so we can automate it.

I broke out my code editor and wrote a script to handle the conversion (CSV → HTML) for us. Writing it took less than an hour and saves 3-4 hours of work per year.

My process definitely looked like that one scene in The Social Network:

Anyway, this isn’t really about writing code - it’s about training yourself to notice these kinds of tasks. The things that suck your time and ignore your skillset.

Ultimately, it’s about spending time on what matters at camp (the people, amirite!).

So, today - take a look at your list and pick a few things to streamline.

We’ll be back next week to talk about how to use a certain tool to level up at camp.

🔦 Tool Spotlight: Campfire Player

The Campfire Player was designed with summer camp in mind. It’s designed to limit screen time for kids - it has no cameras, browsers, video, or social media. Just a few essential music apps (Spotify, etc.). The Campfire Player gives children the music they crave without missing out on camp.

⛺️ Around the Campfire

A post from the Camp Pro Collective Facebook group about options for temporary staff housing:

🤣 The LOL Lodge

Until next time,

Peter “Talent Show Terror” Elbaum