A new year is a great opportunity to get organised and get on top of things partway through the school year. The first few months of school can be a whirlwind, so the winter break is a good time to start fresh and really settle into the year. Everyone has different systems and different ways they like to work, but we’ve got a few tips for getting organised as a teacher that will hopefully be helpful to many of you!
Grab an Annual Planner
You may have one of our Teacher Planners already, or just a planner that runs through the academic year. But depending on your role, you may want one of our new annual planners too! If you’re struggling to manage the work/life balance, you could use an annual planner exclusively for your personal life, to encourage you to manage that life admin and block in some downtime. You could also use it to manage other areas of your work, like if you’re a subject leader or a member of the Senior Leadership Team – keeping that work separate from your teaching duties in a different planner might help to keep it all straight in your mind. Our annual planners have a vertical weekly layout with 8 blank boxes per page to use how you choose, as well as a dashboard and notes page for every week. Find them here.
Use stickers!
Stickers are a really fun and visual way to organise the inside of your planner and highlight important tasks or events. They’re also a great shortcut if you want to add a bit of colour and fun to your planner but you’re not naturally artistic! We have lots of stickers available, find our planner sticker books here, as well as Plan With Me Packs which have a mix of stickers, washi tape, and patterned papers in the same theme. We know a lot of our community like this side of things as a fun, creative outlet, but there are also really functional benefits too. You can use stickers to highlight important events that may impact your teaching day, things to remember or note for the week, or the most important To Do items. You can also colour coordinate tasks and events according to whether it’s to do with teaching or an additional role, or use it to delegate some tasks to a teaching assistant. We’ve got a whole blog post all about how to use stickers in your teacher planner, so you can read that here.
Managing the Dreaded To Do List
As a teacher, there’s always a never-ending list of tasks. Let’s face it – you’re never going to have an empty To Do list. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find ways to manage it! There’s space on our weekly planner pages to write a To Do list for the week, which is ideal for jobs that need doing throughout the week, like refreshing a display or inputting some data. But we also find it helpful to have a daily list as well. This can include all those little jobs that really keep your classroom ticking, like printing, marking, tidying, and responding to emails. We have daily To Do List Pads just for this – they even have space at the top for 3 top priorities for the day.
When you’re busy, writing your to do list can easily feel like just another task and may feel like you’re creating more work for yourself. But it really pays off! To Do lists can help you to stay organised, so you don’t forget anything that needs doing. It can also help you to batch similar tasks – for example, if you’re going to print worksheets for the afternoon, you can check your To Do list and see if anything else needs printing while you’re heading to the printer, and this can save you a little time. We also find that writing everything, even the smallest task, can really help with motivation. As you tick things off, even small things, it really helps to build momentum and make you feel you’re working your way through everything. Be functional and practical with your To Do lists – check your planner for anything going on that day so you can see what’s pressing, and at the end of the day make sure to move any tasks that still need doing to your next daily list.
Write it all down
Schools are busy places, both inside and outside of your classroom, and there’s so much going on. It’s easy to think ‘I’ll remember that’ and then…suddenly remember it when it’s super inconvenient. So we’re a big fan of notepads! Sometimes you need to make notes, think of ideas, plan a project, or just jot something down, and your planner isn’t always the best place for it – as much as we try to give you as many different kinds of organisational pages as we can! But for when you just need somewhere to write all the extra bits, we’ve got you covered too. We’ve got A5 notebooks that fits perfectly into the inside pocket of a planner, as well as hardback A4 notebooks with lots of different kinds of notes pages. If you're also a fan of notepads and you tend to write a lot, we've also got B5 lined notebooks which give you lots of free space to write whatever you need. Stick to the golden rule: write it all down!
