Here are the sources which you should use in TM4T - these and no others; etch this list on your heart:
1. Your Weekly Plan
Your Weekly Plan (which is mostly copy-and-pasted from your Yearly Plan ) should be the main source of work in your non-contact time. All your lesson-planning, meetings, assessment work, and key school events should be listed there. You should occasionally remind yourself that no matter how persistent and demanding the other claims on your time, there will be very few emergencies which are as important as the work already on your schedule.
2. Your Personal In-Tray (PIT)
This needs to be big enough to handle everything in your teaching life.
This may be a traditional, A4 office in-tray, but for many teachers, this means a sturdy, lidless, plastic crate, clearly labelled with your personal ownership. Why a crate? Because for most teachers, their daily inbox does not consist of a tidy pile of A4 stationery. It consists of, well... stuff. All kinds of stuff: a DVD boxset, an odd football boot, a stationery catalogue, a broken stapler, and of course various letters, memos, minutes etc. These all require you to do something - they are all sources of work - you should treat them all the same.
This simple point occasionally causes alarm in teachers. They are reluctant to consider that some status-laden items (a letter from an important parent) should share storage with a less exalted item (Kylie's lost hockey sock). However, at this stage, they are all of equal status: items awaiting processing.
Unless there is specific reason to behave otherwise, your default action on receiving a new piece of work, or possible-work, during the course of your teaching day should be as follows: Put it in the crate. If it is important, additionally note it on your Tick-list (see next item).
Later in the method we will discuss how to deal with (or process) your PIT, but for now you need only be aware of two key points: your PIT must act as a collection-point for any work which appears in you pigeon-hole, on your desk, or anywhere else; second, you will clear your PIT(ie empty your crate) every single day.
This simple idea is extremely powerful: at a stroke you have removed a host of distractions, decisions and disruptions from your day. You do not do anything, other than put things in your in-tray; apart from that, you focus on the important stuff: teaching.
For an example of this principle in practice, read here.
3. Your Tick-List
In physical terms, this should be a cheap, hard-backed A4 notebook with wide-lined pages. Your Tick-List should be the main way of processing interrupts - tasks, issues and ideas which occur to you during your working life.
Later in the method we will discuss how to deal with (or process) your Tick-list, but for now you only need to be aware of two things: firstly, your Tick-List is carried with you everywhere - it never leaves your side, it acts as a collection point for work which appears on notice boards, on post-it notes, and anywhere else; secondly, your Tick-List must be processed every single day, without fail. This task - processing your Ticklist should always be done using an XA mindset. If that phrase is gibberish to you, read here.
4. Your E-mail Inbox
You should have one e-mail for work. Elsewhere on the website (***) we will discuss how to process your e-mails, but for now we are just aiming for one e-mail inbox. Frequently G-Mail, or a similar system, can be used to suck in e-mails from other clients and present them in one list. However, a lot of the hard work must be done inter-personally. This means telling friends and colleagues that you don't review or respond to tweets, texts, pokes or messages during the working day, unless they are routed via your one e-mail account.
5. Your Portable Pending Tray
This source is optional, and will not be needed for many teachers. If you are peripatetic (for example, if you teach on more than one school site, or if you change classrooms frequently during the school day) your Personal In-Tray should remain in one place, and each day you should routinely collect work from other sources (faculty office, staffroom) and dump it in your In-Tray for processing.
However, there are items which you may want to process during the course of your day (ideally small paper items) and to carry these you should designate some physical space as your Pending Tray. This may simply be the back-page of your A4 notebook, or you may need a canvas shopping bag (clearly marked with your personal ownership).
These four or five physical items should represent the only sources of significant work in your non-Teaching day. There is, however, one other important items worth mentioning.
A. Your Notepad
In physical terms, this should be the same A4 hard-backed notebook which is used for your Tick-List and may be used for your Portable Pending Tray. However, it is important that you realise and remember that it serves a different purpose. Its purpose is that you do not write anything down anywhere else during the course of the working day: no post-it notes, no jotting pads, no white-boards. It is also important that you have one notepad, and only one.
Now.. this is all helpful practical stuff. Let's do some theory so we don't get carried away. Read about types of sources here...