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Foreign. I'm David Henson and I serve as Campus CIO for Bolden Networks for Higher Education. Welcome to Control Alt Lead when people ask me, what should I be working on today? What they usually mean is, what's the thing that actually matters? Beneath the meetings, the emails, the dashboards, and the sense that everything is urgent all the time, Higher Ed has a unique way of filling our calendars while quietly starving our sense of progress. We show up, we stay busy, we solve problems. And yet, at the end of the day, it can feel like nothing really moved. So today I want to talk about how to work in a way that creates leverage, not just motion. This isn't about productivity or life hacks. It's about choosing work that compounds, especially for those of us in technology, infrastructure and leadership roles, where the impact is often indirect and delayed. If you remember nothing else from this episode, please remember a good day isn't measured by how much you handled. It's measured by what you improved. Let's talk about how you can make that happen. First, work on one thing that makes next month easier. Higher education runs on recurring friction. The same questions, the same confusion, the same workarounds that everyone pretends are temporary but somehow survive for years. Today is a great day to eliminate one of those. That might mean documenting a process that only lives in someone's head. It might mean cleaning up a workflow that breaks every time a new person touches. Might mean fixing a small system issue that has been annoying you just enough to ignore. As a cio, I've learned that the most valuable work is often invisible at first. Nobody applauds when a process becomes clear. Nobody sends a thank you note when a system stops being confusing. But those are the changes that quietly buy back time and credibility. Here's a simple rule to if a change saves 10 minutes three times a week, then it's worth doing. Today at one of my schools, we modified our provisioning process for new student accounts by simplifying the number of steps needed to move data between our student enrollment System and our ERP, saving close to 30 minutes every time we ran our provisioning scripts. Those saved minutes compound over a semester, over a year, over a career. Second, invest in one relationship that quietly matters. Higher Ed doesn't move at the speed of technology. It moves at the speed of trust, approvals, funding, alignment, adoption. None of those happen because the idea was perfect. They happen because the relationship already existed when the idea arrived. So today, invest in one relationship. Not networking, not a formal meeting. Just maintenance. That could be a short check in with a faculty member who's been skeptical of it in the past. It could be a note to a campus partner explaining what you're working on and why it matters to them. It could be offering help before anyone has asked for it. In my experience, the most effective leaders in higher ed are not the loudest or the most visible. They're the ones who consistently show up as reasonable, prepared, and helpful. That reputation gets you grace later, when things go wrong. And things will go wrong. Third, finish one outcome you can point to by the end of the day. What's one of the hardest parts of administrative and technology work? It's invisibility. Projects can span months. Decisions almost always require consensus. Progress is incremental. If you're not careful, days blur together. So today, define one thing that can be finished that might be a decision, even if it's a provisional one. It might be a draft sent out for review. It might be a recommendation written down, even if it's not yet approved. It might be narrowing a messy problem to two viable options. The key is this. By the end of the day, you should be able to say this moved forward. That sense of completion isn't trivial. It's how you protect motivation in a system that overwhelmingly withholds feedback. Fourth, do one act of professional self protection. This is the part no one trains you for. Higher ed is RA remarkably good at rewarding people who quietly absorb everything. We say yes. We fill the gaps. We take on work that technically belongs to someone else because we care about the institution. And over time, that simply becomes expected. So today, protect yourself. Once. That might mean saying no or not now. It might mean pushing back on scope creep. It might mean clarifying ownership so that a problem doesn't automatically land on your desk. This isn't selfish. It's sustainable. Burned out leaders don't serve campuses well. And boundaries aren't a failure of commitment. They're an essential condition of longevity. Fifth, spend 15 minutes, the future version of you. Not an hour, not a retreat, just 15 intentional minutes. Read an article about a trend affecting your role. Write one bullet point for your annual review while you can still remember the impact. Sketch an idea you have been postponing because it's not urgent. In our technology and infrastructure roles, it's easy to become reactive. The future only gets attention when it breaks into the present. Those 15 minutes are how you stay ahead instead of merely catching up. What does a good day actually look like if you zoom out? A strong, professional day in higher ed usually includes three things. One system improved. One relationship strengthened, one outcome completed. And that's it. Not everything and not everyone. Just those three simple things. Some days will still be chaotic. Some days will be consumed by things you didn't choose. That's just the nature of the work. But if you consistently aim for leverage instead of volume, something shifts. You start to feel less like you're surviving the institution and more like you're shaping it. A final thought, especially for you technology leaders. As a cio, I've learned that our job isn't just to keep systems running. It's to make the institution more capable tomorrow than it was today. That means choosing work that reduces friction. That means investing in trust. That means finishing things even when perfection is impossible. And it means remembering that leadership in higher ed is a long game. Progress is often quiet, impact is often delayed. But it's 100% real. So if you're wondering what you should be working on today, professionally, here's your answer. Work on what compounds. Work what lasts. Work on what makes the next day easier for someone else. That's how real change happens on campus. And that's leadership worth doing. So pause for 10 seconds and ask yourself, what's the one thing that you'll do today? Thanks for listening. I'll see you soon. This week's episode uses an AI voice clone trained upon hours of my natural speaking voice. While the voice you hear today is cloned, the words, thoughts and ideas here are 100% my own.