Three strategies to save hours a week at work as a teacher

Work is, sometimes, a necessary evil. I’m very fortunate in that I love what I do. I get to have a tremendous impact on hundreds of lives every week. I get to take students to places abroad that they might never otherwise get to see. As a teacher, it can be tough when lessons don’t always go your way, but thankfully they’re a dime a dozen.

However, that doesn’t mean that every single working day is a joy. Planning and delivering high quality lessons, marking homework and uploading data to keep track of students’ progress is hard. It would be disingenuous to suggest that anyone can enjoy their job all the time but, the longer you do the job, the better you get at it. You also get better at coming up with strategies to mitigate against working too long or too hard on the little things that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I remember, in my first year as a fully qualified teacher, that I’d be staying up until half 11 most nights trying to plan the best-quality lessons I could. Too often, that was because of spending my time inefficiently.

How times have changed.

I’ve been teaching for 4 years now, and I’ve now come up with 3 key strategies to ensure that you get the most out of your waking hours at work. They’re not ground-breaking, but they’re also not strategies that I’d even considered until a couple years into the job. Now that I use these strategies, I sleep a little easier at night – though that could also be because I’ve finally fully understood how to optimise my sleep. Keep scrolling to avoid wasting your time at work as a teacher.

Then, if they work for you, share them with a friend, since these are strategies that you could, actually, apply to any line of work.

Strategy 1 – always have an agenda

I don’t mean that you should have an agenda in a snarky kind of a way, but you should have an agenda for all of your meetings and for everything that you plan on doing. Without an agenda, you risk talking yourself in circles for hours and not actually accomplishing what it was you set out to discuss.

I would also send out the agenda to your team in advance, giving everyone ample opportunity to prepare. Include a slot for ‘AOB’ (any other business) and you should get through everything. Better yet if you’re able to assign time stamps to each item to be discussed. That’ll mean that everyone will get to plan out their time effectively and will have an acute awareness of how much of their time they’ll be taking. The leadership team at my school do this and I really appreciate the structure for our weekly meetings.

Strategy 2 – FAST emails

You will have heard of the STAR method by now if you’ve been in the productivity sphere for any length of time. It’s a foolproof way of approaching interviews and means:

Situation: What’s happening?

Task: What do you have to do?

Action: What are you going to do to get it done?

Result: What happened as a result of your actions?

Thinking in acronyms like this has made me consider whether there are any acronyms that you can apply to the workplace, especially for structuring emails. I’ve spent far too much time drafting replies, then redrafting, and sending before quickly tapping ‘undo send’ to make any final necessary changes to my emails.

So, I’ve come up with my own way of tackling emails: FAST, since answering emails, from a teaching perspective, should be done as quickly as possible, to let you get on with, you know, teaching.

Fun. In your greeting and in your tone. (usually ‘Hi ____, I hope you’ve been well’ will work. Don’t overthink it, but don’t make it too formal)

Activity: Get to business in your email; don’t hang about with needless niceties after you’ve greeted your recipient, just get on with whatever it is you wanted to enquire about (‘I was just getting in touch to ask/remind/discuss ___’.)

Sign-off: End the email without lengthy goodbyes since you work together and probably already see them every day (‘Anyway, let me know what you think. Have a good day/weekend’).

Time: It’s been 3 days and you’ve still not had a response. Time to follow up with a short second email (‘Just wondered if you received my prior email about…’). For structuring this second email, keep thinking FAST.

The point of this structure is so that you can copy and paste it into any email that you’re going to send while keeping the tone lighthearted. I’ve found in my time that most teachers are happy to keep things casual in an email chain to get to the point, and we tend to save formalities for times when it’s really needed, like when speaking to parents.

Strategy 3 – Second Brain

There is so much literature on the benefits of a Second Brain. I’ve watched countless videos describing the pros of having one, but have never read the books. You can expect this post to be updated when I inevitably read Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain, with a link to my review of it, but in the meantime I’ve linked Ali Abdaal’s review below. In short, the idea behind a Second Brain is that you use it to record any and all of the things that you need to do during a day.

Now, of course, you could do your best to remember everything that comes to mind, but chances are that you’ll forget 90% of these things. This happens because of cognitive overload: you get overwhelmed with new information and can’t process it all. By writing down your ideas in a Second Brain, you’re using your brain for its true purpose – problem-solving and coming up with new ideas – rather than storing them.

A Second Brain needn’t require a Notion template, much to the dismay of 82% of productivity YouTubers. I use my bullet journal to record just about everything that I think of. Doing so gives me the opportunity to tick things off a to-do list all day long, which we all know is super satisfying.

It means that I can spend more time doing things – creative or otherwise – and less time trying to remember what I need to do during the 9-to-5.

Do you have any strategies that save you hours a week? Let me know so in the comments below so that I can pinch them and save even more time in my week.

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