Preparing, teaching, assessing: three jobs run in parallel. There's a fourth, invisible one, which consists of remembering what you did last year so you don't repeat it identically, only worse.
Here's a structure that holds for a year and serves the next one.
Organizing your lesson preparation by unit
This choice shapes everything else, and it's made at the start of the year.
A single lesson is hard to find again. A teaching unit, on the other hand, has a beginning, an end, a progression and an assessment. It's the unit that makes sense pedagogically, and it's also the one you reuse.
So create one project per unit, or per chapter depending on your subject. It holds the materials, the preparation notes, the exercises, the assessment paper and whatever is still to be done.
| Level | What it carries |
|---|---|
| Unit | Objectives, progression, materials, assessment |
| Lesson | A slot in the calendar, attached to its unit |
| Task | What's left to prepare or to mark |
Syncing your timetable with your calendar
Your timetable already exists somewhere. Retyping it by hand is wasted time, and it changes during the year.
If your school publishes a calendar in .ics format, subscribe your calendar to it: classes arrive on their own and follow room and time changes. The steps are in ICS calendar: subscribe your Flots agenda, and the case of university timetables in syncing your ADE timetable.
Your preparation and your marking then slot in between classes, in the real gaps in your week rather than the ones you imagine.
Scheduling your marking in the calendar
Marking always overruns, for a mechanical reason.
A pile of papers has no visible deadline before the day you hand them back, yet it represents several hours of work. So you put it off, and it lands on a weekend.
The fix comes in three steps. Estimate the time per paper, honestly, based on your last session. Multiply by the number of students. Put that volume in your calendar in several blocks, before you hand out the paper.
8 minutes per paper and 30 students makes 4 hours
An example to redo with your real pace and your real class size. Four hours doesn't fit in one evening: it takes several slots.
Marking in several blocks rather than in one Sunday-night marathon also helps you hold the same standard from the first paper to the last.
Anticipating the deadlines that come back every year
A good part of a teacher's workload is cyclical: end-of-term review meetings, reports, parents' evenings, trips, mock exams, equipment orders.
Those deadlines are set up once as recurring tasks, with a reminder far enough ahead that they don't land on top of you. The setup is described in recurring tasks and routines.
Once they're in place, they stop taking up space in your memory. That's the mechanism described in lightening your mental load.
Leaving a trace at the end of each unit
Without written traces, a second year is just a first year done again.
At the end of each unit, write five lines in the project's note. What worked well. What ran short of time. The exercise that stumped everyone. What you'd change.
Write them while it's fresh, straight after the last lesson. Twelve months later you won't remember the precise difficulty that cost the class twenty minutes, and you'll run into it again.
Finding your teaching materials without hunting for them
Handouts, papers, mark schemes, photos of the board: all of it gets hard to find fast.
Attaching documents to the unit they belong to works better than a folder tree by year. You always look for "the test on linear functions", rarely for "the 2025-2026 folder". How it works is detailed in getting started with documents.
If you also supervise student projects or a club, getting started with projects covers the collective side.
Prepare your year once, reuse it afterwards.
Units, a synced timetable and scheduled marking in the same place.
