In industry and commerce, a huge amount of effort and research is devoted to operations management and - in particular - to job design. In order to be an efficient, stress-free teacher, it will help if you understand at least some of the topics involved in these disciplines. In essence 'operations management' involves designing how an organisation can do its work in the most efficient way possible. Of course making an organisation efficient doesn't mean that life is always pleasant for its employees - and organisations tend to more effective if they are staffed by happy bunnies. Efficiency may demand treating jobs as 'processes' and workers as 'resources'; it is likely to involve division of labour (job specialisation) and work measurement (time and motion) as well as technology and change. In order to counteract the effects of this, operations management therefore also focuses on 'job design', seeking to make each job or role as rich and motivating as possible.
To a teacher, some of this might sound pretty grim: soulless, dull and downright repressive. Rest assured: I don't advocate running schools this way. I do, though, recommend that you understand some of the key principles, and apply them to yourself, to your own tasks, in order to work more efficiently with less stress.
There are two particular aspects which frequently demand attention and analysis: processes and data. In the context of teaching, 'processes' simply means 'what we do'; in particular, what we do outside our classroom teaching. The meaning of 'data' is more elusive; it involves thinking about the individual pieces of information that we deal with in our non-contact work: each student's name, each test question, each lesson activity, etc. In all organisations, individual pieces of information (data) are routinely collected together in data structures: registers, test papers with specimen answers and mark schemes, lesson plans and resource folders. In order to be efficient and effective in an office environment - remember this is what your non-teaching work involves - you should ensure that your data is structured in as efficient a way as possible. In practice, this involves several common sense rules:
have as few data collections as possible (for example, don't keep your own little phone book in the office - use the school directory)
try to keep data in one place only; this means that if it changes, the change is done just once. TM4T is quite rigorous in this regard, and seeks to reduce and re-use the number of places that information is stored. For example, if you have a seating plan for every class, why have a homework attendance record as well?
store data electronically. Always. Paper is so nineteen-eighties.