Time Management Tips for New Teachers

Get up at 6:00 a.m. Mark yesterday’s test papers. Plan lessons. Coffee, breakfast. Out the door. Teaching. Meeting. More teaching. More meetings. Home. Grading. Planning. Bed. Do it all again tomorrow.

If this feels eerily familiar to you, welcome to the club. Teachers are busy people, juggling the job of teaching with the administration of school life. It’s easy to become overwhelmed as the seemingly endless tasks pile up. But it doesn’t need to be like this. We’re busy, but that doesn’t mean we need to feel busy.

In this article, I’ll share two actionable strategies for teachers that, when used together, can help reduce some of the frenzy of the profession. I’ve used these strategies in my own teaching for years, drawn from the wider world of productivity advice. Although they aren’t a panacea, they have helped me immensely, and maybe they can help you too.

Practice Full Capture

Imagine this: You’re walking to your next lesson, and a colleague briefly stops you to ask if you could, once you get a moment, respond to Jack’s mum. Bumping up against the hundred other things you need to do, this request sits in your mind all day. You keep it alive through conscious effort: “Must not forget to…” And then it just slips away, drowned out by everything else, until the same colleague bumps into you a week later.

The solution is to practice full capture, a startlingly simple insight from David Allen’s productivity system detailed in his book Getting Things Done. The brain hates open loops; it’s made for processing information, not storing it. Open loops can cause background anxiety and lead to forgetting things. Allen explains that the brain can’t really tell the difference between doing something and trusting that it is stored somewhere safe. Writing the task down, as far as the brain is concerned, is the same as doing it.

Therefore, Allen recommends that you have a trusted system in which you can fully capture all tasks. The form this system takes could be anything: notebook and pen, a digital task manager like Todoist or Trello (both of which offer free trials and low subscription rates of $5 per month), a teacher planner, a stack of index cards, or a bullet journal. It doesn’t matter what the system is, the point is to have one. When a colleague asks you to do something, enter it into the system. Open loop closed. It’s incredibly simple, but incredibly powerful: The trick to success is to practice full capture methodically and systematically.

It’s essential that you’re using a trusted system. You need to know that nothing will get overlooked. Endless emails to yourself and a trail of Post-it Notes tacked to your desk is unlikely to work. Here’s how I achieve this. Everywhere I go, I carry a pocket notebook and pencil. Anytime a task or idea pops up, I jot it down. At the end of the day, I review my notebook. This takes 10 to 30 minutes, depending on how busy the day has been.

Anything that’s time-sensitive, like meetings or deadlines, goes into my digital calendar (Fantastical offers a free option and an individual subscription rate of $4.75 per month), but calendars connected to any email platform would work just as well. I enter everything else into my digital task manager of choice, Workflowy (they have a free option and a $7 monthly subscription rate).

Next, I’ll discuss how to resurface and deal with tasks.

Treat Every Task Like a Lesson

The best thing about full capture is that all of your obligations are stored in one place. The worst thing about it, though, is that all of your obligations are stored in one place. That sure is one long list. Actually trying to tackle it could easily lead to decision paralysis and the same sense of dread that the system was designed to fix.

The solution is to adopt what Cal Newport calls “multi-scale planning.” This works according to three time scales, each of which Newport explains in his excellent book Deep Work, as well as his blog, Study Hacks.

Semester plan: At the start of each academic semester, create a loose plan for the semester ahead. Consider your teaching commitments and any significant projects that you’re involved in. Think about what success would look like at the end of the semester and how you would measure it. Think about how your plan fits into schoolwide performance management or strategic goals.

Weekly plan: At the start of every week, look at your upcoming commitments. Are there any significant deadlines that you need to hit this week? Any anomalous events? Any big tasks? Now, consider what you would need to do this week to make progress on your semester goals. Where (and how) can you make space for this? Carve out time in your calendar to do this ahead of time.

Daily plan: To help ensure that you can reliably achieve your goals, it’s also important to have a plan for every day. Each morning, create a plan for the day where you give every minute a job. I use my pocket notebook to do this, and make a list of 15-minute increments in the margin. Next, check your calendar and add everything to your daily plan. This includes meetings and lessons, but also the time that you already allocated to important tasks during your weekly plan.

Whatever you’re left with is free time. Don’t default to reactivity, which is what most people do: a bit of marking and planning, punctuated by near-constant checking of email and Microsoft Teams. Instead, refer to your trusted system and strategize, like you would playing chess. Identify other tasks that would be most productive to work on in the time you have left. Now, treat every task like a lesson. Specify a time to do it and stick to this plan, with total focus and undisturbed concentration, just like you would when teaching. Marking, planning, writing reports, curriculum design—treat them all like lessons. This is what Newport calls “timeblocking.”

As Newport clarifies, timeblocking isn’t about sticking to the plan at all costs, but being intentional with our time. Inevitably, some crisis will unfold that demands our time and pulls us away from the current block. No problem. When you get a moment, just update the plan and sketch out a new timeblock next to it.

It’s important to note that timeblocking isn’t some kind of punitive martyrdom at the altar of productivity. Allocate time for lunch, a break, a walk around campus, or reading. You don’t get points for working every minute, you get satisfaction for being intentionally strategic.

Your daily plan speaks to your weekly plan, which speaks to your semester plan. Each one is underpinned by and fed from your trusted system, which, in turn, is made up of the things you capture. Nothing gets overlooked; everything gets worked on. It doesn’t make our jobs any less busy, but it can make us feel a lot less busy.