This little story tells in great detail how an efficient teacher - Mary - handles an e-mail about GCSE results.
Mary deals with the e-mail itself in ten seconds flat.
She processes her e-mails at the usual time, during her morning coffee break. She had noticed the subject line in her inbox when she glanced through her e-mails before school: Minutes of Meeting on Expected GCSE Results - it didn't say 'urgent' so it didn't get opened. Now, though, Mary double-clicks to open the e-mail, reads 'see Minutes-of-meeting in attached document' and double-clicks to open the document. Mary has already opened her word-processing software, so the document opens almost instantly. If she hadn't done this, the document might have taken a while to open.
She glances at the bottom left hand corner of her computer screen and sees 'Page 1/5'. The minutes of this meeting would take too long to read now, so instead Mary closes the document and simply drops the entire message into her Hot Stuff folder. She jots down an item on her Ticklist: minutes of GCSE meet and writes a T next to it.
Even without reading the document, she has categorised it as 'Tens' - it will take more than one minute to read, so it won't get read now during coffee break, and it will also take more than two minutes, so it won't get read during Ticks-and-Twos. So that's it till after school. Mary does Ticks and Twos after school.
She has quite a few items marked with a T on her list, and several of them involve reading documents. Mary decides that she is going to use X-Time; she will tackle her Tens at home this evening. Why at home? Because Mary prefers to do her reading in a warm, well-lit, neatly-laid out work-space; and her study at home is much nicer than her classroom, and the chair is more comfortable. She will do three or four bits of reading in 30 minutes at home with a cup of tea and a biscuit.
At home in the evening, Mary reads the minutes. She finds that she has three actions: (i) to identify borderline 'C' grade students and e-mail a list to the school office (ii) to make proposals to her head of department on additional tuition for borderline students and (iii) to identify what additional revision materials are needed for next year. The first two actions need doing immediately; the third is for next year.
Mary looks at her Weekly Plan and sees she has a free period the next day, when she was intending to do Year 8 marking. The GCSE actions are more important, so she decides the marking has to be time-boxed. She hand-writes T on her Weekly Plan next to Year 8 Marking to show she will be doing Tens during that lesson, and adds two items to tomorrow's Ticklist: e-mail borderline C list to office (T) and write one-page proposals for GCSE tuition & give to HoD (T). The third action is less urgent, and Mary's time is very short at present, so she opens up her Yearly Plan and types an entry in April 'ID GCSE revision material see e-mail 3 Nov Re 'Expected GCSE Results'.
The Key Point
It is important to understand what Mary has done here. She has acted as her own XA.
She has separated the routine administration tasks - the e-mail and the reading - and done them promptly, without fuss, batching them together for efficiency. In her 'own-XA' role, Mary has developed tiny time-saving skills and habits - opening her word-processing software before she tackles e-mails, and automatically checking the length of a document before she starts to read it. She has not used up her precious 'free' lessons to do this unskilled work.
There are clearly things wrong in Mary's school: the computers are too slow and the documents too verbose, but Mary has decided that she is not in a position to change these right now, and she does not get distracted by them. She has identified the real educational tasks involved, those with real value to her students, and she is planning when these need to be done - at a time of her choosing, when she can give them her full attention.
Most importantly, she has prioritised her work, based on the educational outcomes involved, and what is best for her students. In the real world, sometimes the Year 8 marking doesn't always get done as well or as quickly as it might - sometimes it doesn't get done at all.