What you need first is an electronic calendar of key school events, supplemented with any important departmental dates, and your own non-teaching duties. Virtually every school has one, frequently in table form. Ideally you want a spreadsheet, compatible with MS Excel.
This may seem an offbeat way to start setting up your time-management system (TM4T). However, if you invest this effort at the start of term and establish one spreadsheet - one single document which shows you exactly what is happening tomorrow, what is needed next week - well, with all this information in one place, life will be much, much easier when term is in full swing.
Now, just about every secondary school in the UK has a calendar like this, but - just in case - detailed instructions - and downloads - can be found here.
Probably the most important technique when planning these school-wide events is called Time Shift Planning. Read about it here. It is extraordinarily simple to do, and if you can master the straightforward disciplines involved, you can radically alter your working life. This technique is based on two simple facts:
1. The vast majority of the important events in a school year are decided a long, long time in advance. These include things like exam entry deadlines, student reports for each year-group, Parents Evenings for each year group, coursework hand-in dates for KS4 and A Level courses, course option choices, mock examinations, etc. In a large school, there are a lot of these events throughout the year.
2. These dates for these key events are invariably published by the school right at the beginning of the school year, typically in Calendar form, and made available electronically. You can download a copy of this calendar, and simply delete any events which do not affect you.
So, here is what you do: Time Shift Planning involves carrying out the following steps for each of the key events/dates in the school calendar:
Step 1: Decide what you actually have to do in relation to the event. For example, if there is an entry in the Calendar that says ...
28 May - Year 8 Parents Evening
… you may decide that you are going to have to make appointments with your Year 8 students, provide a photocopy of your completed appointment sheet to the school office, update your classroom displays and prepare brief feedback for their parents.
If you are a Newly Qualified Teacher, or still in training, you may very well gaze in despair at the school timetable, muttering phrases like 'what on earth is Cake Day?'. For you, there is an important extra step here - interview someone and find out what these mysterious events mean in practice. Read how here.
Step 2: Create a new deadline in your own Yearly Plan, at least one week before the original date. Using the previous example, it might read...
21 May - DEADLINE - Year 8 Parents Evening preparation complete.
Step 3: This is obviously the hard bit: you must keep to that deadline. You can be sensible (for the Parents Evening example, you'd probably put the wall-displays up at the last minute) but as far as possible you will do absolutely everything by this revised date. This means that you need to work quickly; the fact that in reality you have plenty of time should not prevent you from getting routine work out of the way as quickly as possible
Why is this important? Because (using the example above) the period between 21-28 May is a stress-zone, when the administration staff will be finalising arrangements, and the leadership team will be ensuring everyone is ready. There might be announcements in staff meetings, e-mail reminders, and notices in the staff-room. There will be competition for resources: a queue at the photocopier and a shortage of sticky-tape.
You want to stay outside this stress zone; to be able to totally ignore this flurry of activity and anxiety - not just for this deadline, but for every deadline, throughout the school year. You will ignore every 'school' deadline - that is; for each 'school' deadline you will have your own personal deadline date, one or two weeks earlier. These you will not ignore, you will do your utmost to achieve them because they are yours; yours and nobody else's. You will have no-one but yourself reminding you about them, and no-one but yourself to blame if you miss them.