Imagine your typical prep period. Do you take some deep breaths, relish the calm that’s settled over your space, chat with a colleague, eat a snack…and then look at your to-do list and wonder where to start?
Certainly prep can be a chance to press “pause,” but it is also one of the few times in the work day that an educator experiences time autonomy – the ability to choose what to do and when to do it. For many of us, though, the sheer number of tasks on our to-do lists feels overwhelming and “What-should-I-do-first?” paralysis costs valuable minutes during prep times.
Why Tune-Up Your Prep Time?
It’s difficult to bring a playful energy to your teaching when your to-do list feels unmanageable and when you can’t make meaningful progress on essential tasks during your prep time. The more thoughts you have swirling in your mind, the less able you are to focus on being present in the teaching moment.
Luckily, there’s a simple and powerful approach that can help you make better use of your prep time and tame your to-do list – task batching. As teachers, we often think that we’re professional multi-taskers, but, in fact, science tells us that task-switching can cost us up to 40% of our productive time.1 Applying a consistent, task-batching routine to your non-teaching time at school helps minimize task-switching and increase efficiency.
What is Task-Batching?
As teachers, we wear many different hats – curriculum planners, communication coordinators, professional colleagues, student cheerleaders, the list goes on and on. Switching between those various hats requires a significant mental shift – I need to be in a totally different mindset when I’m creating signage for an upcoming Family Engineering Night than when I’m organizing and gathering materials for next week’s lessons or sending an email home to celebrate a student’s success.
Task-batching is an intentional approach to structuring your to-dos so you can minimize the inefficiencies of task-switching. You may already be doing some task-batching, such as organizing your materials that need to be copied so that you make only one trip to the copier. Task batching becomes an even more powerful productivity tool when we use it to create an intentional routine and a streamlined structure for prep time.
3 Steps to Implementing Task-Batching
STEP 1: DETERMINE YOUR BIG BUCKETS
Find your to-do list and grab a magnifying glass – it’s time to dig for patterns. The first step to task-batching is understanding your recurring to-do list items and identifying some broad categories of tasks. This will vary according to your role, but some possible “Big Buckets” that could encompass multiple to-dos are parent communication, scoring, advance planning, meetings, lesson prep, creating activities, completing required documentation, etc. As you look at your to-do list, try to find a set of distinct Big Buckets that together feel like they represent most of your essential, non-teaching job functions.
My Big Buckets are:
1. Professional Development
2. Scoring & Student Feedback
3. Next Week Prep
4. Future Planning
5. Loose Ends & Next Week Planning
6. Meeting with My Colleagues
STEP 2: ASSIGN A BIG BUCKET TO EACH PREP
Now that you’ve identified your Big Buckets, you can use them to create a prep time routine. Create a blank template that shows your prep periods in a week and assign one Big Bucket to each prep time. With some of my buckets (Hello, Scoring & Student Feedback!), I know that they exceed the prep time I have for the day, so I’ll assign it to a whole day, knowing that I’ll focus on that arena before and after school as well.
Some things to consider as you map out your prep time plan:
- Which Big Buckets encompass the most tasks? The fewest?
- Do you have more prep time on some days than others?
- How do your own energy levels ebb and flow during the week? (I know I won’t be an efficient future planner on a Friday)
- How does your school calendar impact your available time? There are lots of Monday holidays, so I intentionally chose Professional Development for Mondays since PD is often less time-sensitive (though not less important) than the other Big Buckets.
STEP 3: ESTABLISH A RHYTHM
With your Big Buckets assigned to a day of the week, it’s time to take the approach for a spin. I spend a few minutes on Fridays organizing my tasks for the following week onto my teaching Trello board, where I have a special section in each day’s list that designates my Big Bucket category. With my tasks sorted, I know exactly what I’ll be doing each day during my prep time and can also prepare myself in advance to be in the right headspace for each day’s category.
Like anything, task-batching in this routine way can feel awkward at first, but push yourself to stick to your designated schedule. After a few weeks, you’ll find the routine becomes automatic and your to-do list starts to shrink.
TROUBLESHOOTING & TIPS
- Too many to-dos don’t fit in a Big Bucket
Analyze these loose to-dos to see if there’s any common thread between them. Then re-evaluate your Big Buckets to see if there’s a way to give these tasks a home. A one-off to-do that doesn’t have a clear place is OK, but many are a sign that you may have missed a key part of your role. - The random, time-sensitive to-do
If a task pops up that isn’t in your assigned Big Bucket, try to find another time in the day to do it, rather than derail your plan. Also, ask yourself if it’s truly urgent. Don’t be afraid to delay completion of a to-do that isn’t actually urgent – it took me a while, but I’ve learned that many to-dos that arise can typically wait until the next day I focus on the Big Bucket it falls under.
- Ignore low-hanging fruit → emails, social media, etc…
Try to avoid having one of your Big Buckets be emails or social media (even if it’s teaching-related!). These are rarely the essential tasks that you need to preserve your big chunks of time to accomplish. (Read more about my approach to email.)
THE BOTTOM LINE:
Task-batching continues to accelerate my prep time productivity. With a predictable rhythm to my week, I not only am more efficient at accomplishing my to-dos, but also find myself with more energy to bring a sense of play to my classroom.
1 https://www.apa.org/topics/research/multitasking
To-Do List Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay