During the week, you should simply follow your Weekly Plan, which includes all routine and schedulable tasks. It should also include an allowance to cater for disruptions. This allowance is embedded in the tasks called Ticks-and-Twos, Tens, and of course X-Time.
Your non-teaching activities therefore break down naturally into two piles:
a) Routine and scheduled tasks: these entries on your Weekly Plan will deal with things like lesson-planning, assessment, regular meetings etc. Most teachers will find that these represent the important parts of the week, with direct major benefits for the students they teach. You must strive to follow your Weekly Plan rigorously and achieve what you set out to achieve. Among these routine tasks will be your Daily Check.
This typically involves physically visiting any collection points or other active sources (if this isn't clear, read more here.)
This is a while-the-kettle-boils task, typically involving a quick scan of e-mail and answerphone, and dumping stuff (mainly paper) into your Personal In Tray from your staff room pigeon-hole, or in-tray
As far as possible, we should add items to our Ticklist from a small set of sources. Our Weekly Plan will show when each of these sources is processed - frequently in our Daily Check. For example, you may empty your staffroom pigeon-hole every second day around 8 AM. Most of the contents of the pigeonhole will get dumped into your Personal In Tray.
b) Disruptions: we will be dedicating most of the rest of this section to a discussion of disruptions, which are managed via our Ticklist. Remember, everything 'to-do' goes on the Ticklist and nowhere else - yellow sticky notes are for leaving notes for other people. We add everything to our Ticklist, and then - once a day we process our Ticklist. We process a Ticklist at the time marked Ticks-and-Twos on your Weekly Plan.
Processing a Ticklist is very important in TM4T and merits a section of its own - here.
The rest of our non-teaching work will be done in our non-teaching lessons, or in other timeslots that we have identified in our Full Timetable. For general tips about non-teaching lessons, click here.