Nobody will think you’re lazy (probably) — how I work smarter

I can’t say this is true for the outside opinion of the teaching profession, but it’s certainly true within it — teachers are not a lazy bunch. The obvious downside of this is that, well, we’re busy. The less obvious downside is that it often feels like you should be busy, which either makes you feel stressed that you’ve missed something or you start making yourself look busy. Now I might be preaching to the converted on EduTwitter as we’re all doing extracurricular school ‘for fun’, but I want to get all of my ‘non-teaching’ jobs done as quickly and efficiently as possible, and this has given me my weekends back.

At the moment, teachers are all using new systems that they probably haven’t invested a lot of time training themselves in (and that’s understandable). You’ve probably developed a few habits in your day-to-day working that you now do pretty automatically, but are they the quickest? This goes for non-online school too — are our working habits the quickest they can be? Just to be crystal clear, I’m talking about the outside-the-classroom jobs, not finishing my 60min lesson in 15mins. The most immediately obvious method to solve a problem or do a job isn’t always the quickest, but we tend to see the job, get the job done and, having practiced that method now once, use that method again in the future without really thinking too much about it. A lot of the time, this doesn’t really matter because you’re only doing the job a small number of times, so there’s not a lot to be gained by thinking much more about it.

But if we’re going to regularly do a task or one task requires us to do something repeatedly (and a lot of times at that), then it probably makes sense to pause and think about alternative methods that could save us some time. If I do a job a few times, and it’s one of those jobs that doesn’t take long (couple of mins here and there) but I know I’ll do it a lot (like, more than a couple of times a day on average), then I invest some time thinking about a quick way of doing it. Sometimes these are just mindless shower thoughts, or thoughts on the drive to school, but sometimes it’s a bit of googling or watching some tutorials/workshops. The plan is to gain back any initial time expenditure (in spades) by turning yourself into a ruthless, task smashing machine (and then remembering to turn off that persona again when you need to interact with humans).

So, if you stop reading now, the general tip is occasionally think “can I do this quicker without doing it worse?” and don’t just carry on doing things this way because you always have done.

Some of the things I do are (I’ll add to this over time):

• Batching — when I’ve got a lot of similar jobs, I save up a bit of time and do them all together to not waste time swapping between jobs e.g. setting assignments in Teams or checking which classes did homework or logging test results. I’m sure this is a general business rule, but I heard about it in an episode of the Office (US) and that’s just as valid a source as any, but more difficult to reference (The Office, Season 9, Episode 3, Andy’s Ancestry (2012), NBC, October 4th)
• 2min rule — this sounds like it flies in the face of the last rule, but it doesn’t. If I’ve got a small job that I won’t have multiple of, and it’s short, then I try to do it straightaway (link). This stops you wasting time thinking and stressing about little jobs you need to do later on
• Emails — I send the same emails all the time. So I have a ‘blank version’ that I keep in my drafts for every different type of email that I frequently send. I try to follow the batching and 2min rules wherever possible with emails too. I flag emails that I genuinely have to come back to and delete on sight a lot of others. MAIL MERGE.
• Equip yourself for copy and paste — a bit like with emails, I have a word document of ‘things that I type a lot’ like instructions that I add to the description when scheduling live lessons, or things that I frequently write in the comments to assignments. I have a lot of word documents for similar stuff to this on my desktop.
• Train yourself in the programs that you use every day — Like actually do a short course or watch some YouTube or read some instructions. There’s loads of really useful stuff that I never would have picked up from just ‘being a teacher’. Powerpoint (slide master and having a powerpoint of ‘common stuff’ on my desktop), Excel (don’t get me started on nested IF statements over vlookup), Word (actually setting up the Heading, Subtitle buttons and using them), and all of the school admin systems.

And maybe everyone does this, but nobody ever says anything about it, except the occasional life hack that spreads like wildfire (which makes me think we don’t all do it). But that’s a problem too. If I just saved myself a load of time, I should probably share that with my department. But here’s my question to you — people seem to find it kind of irritating when you share this stuff with them in department, like you’re cheating, or telling them they’re doing a bad job. But it really isn’t that. I totally understand why we end up doing the things the way we do them — we’re just trying to get our jobs done and faffing around doing a course in Excel seems like just another job. But you’ve got to speculate to accumulate right? And then you can spend all that saved time writing blogs about… wait… hold on…