As far as possible, you need to understand in advance - at the start of term - what problems you are going to face during the academic year. These will be your major risks of stress. Some teachers are scornful of this notion - they don't own crystal balls to predict the future, do they? However, most teachers admit that, with hindsight, they could have anticipated a lot of the issues that actually happened. Planning to avoid stress is important in teaching.
So: spend a little time discussing and considering what the key challenges of the year will be. In many schools, 'student behaviour' is mentioned, so that will be used as the example for the remainder of this section. However, the same principle applies regardless of what issues you identify.
The TM4T method asserts that time-management is one of the principle challenges facing teachers in UK secondary schools. Some practicising teachers, however, will be flummoxed at this assertion, and will assert that there are many issues of far greater importance than time-management. For example, many teachers might nominate 'student behaviour' as the key contemporaray issue which needs to be tackled, and those teachers would rank 'behaviour' of much more importance than time management. it is important to understand that there is no contradiction here - this view dovetails perfectly with the topics and perspectives on this website.
'How?' you may ask. 'How does do time-management techniques relate to behavioural issues, and how can they help with student behaviour?'.
In order to answer this, you might ask an expert on behaviour management (I confess that nobody on the TM4T team qualifies). There are many experts available and many good texts with guidance on what to do, though inevitably, the advice varies. There is one thing, though, that does not vary: all of the actions which are recommended take time, and a lack of time is one of the key reasons why good practise is not always adopted. In fact, when challenged on why they have not followed expert guidance - collegiate meetings, differentiated work, tactical seating, scripted responses, behaviour logs etc - one of the commonest reples is this: “I just don't have time for all that ; I'm too busy”. In other words, poor time-management does not cause poor student behaviour, but it prevents teachers from taking the necessary steps to tackle or pre-empt it.
It is therefore vital that when you are drawing up your plans at the start of the year, you explicitly allocate time to deal with real-life issues that you are likely to face, and 'behaviour' is likely to be one of them.
If the link between time management and behaviour and stress isn't clear, consider this: Imagine that we asked 100 teachers, in the context of behaviour management, which of these two things is most important...
A. Knowing what to do
B. Having time to do it.
… you might expect that a lot of teachers would answer 'A' (on the grounds that you can always do at least some of what is needed), almost as many would say 'both' (on the grounds that A is useless without B, and vice versa), wherease very few would answer 'B' (it isn't much use having plenty of time if you don't know how to use it).
However, in terms of stress, B is arguably more important than A. B-without-A allows a teacher to experiment, research and consult. A-without-B implies constant frustration. One of the reasons that 'A' might be a more popular answer than 'B' is that - in many minds - it comes first; that is we need to know what to do before worrying about how much time is needed. If we are using TM4T, however, the opposite is true: we need to start off by allocating time to research, plan, design, implement and monitor our behaviour management practices.