My New Teacher Productivity Secret: Mini-Batching
One of my biggest secrets in lesson planning is not much of a secret. Anytime I’m talking with a fellow teacher, or a graduating students asks for advice about becoming a teacher, I can’t help but bring up batching.
It has been the single most helpful tool in helping me stay ahead of my lesson planning and helping me keep my sanity. But recently, I’ve discovered what I call mini-batching.
If you don’t know, “batching” is a term used to talk about grouping task together. In his book, The 4-hour Work Week, author Tim Ferris popularized the idea of batching. He illustrated this idea using the example of laundry. When we do laundry, we don’t wash each individual item of clothing after we’ve worn it. That would be ridiculous. Instead, we wait until we have a pile of dirty clothes exploding from our laundry baskets, then run the washer with a full load. When we run errands, we also implement batching by grouping those tasks together. If we need to go to the bank, run to the grocery store, pick up a prescription, and drop off dry cleaning, we’ll try to arrange all of those into one afternoon, instead of spreading out those activities over several days. It’s more efficient to wash all the dirty sock at once or do all the errands together. The same goes with batching your work tasks.
I started implementing batching days about a year ago. Rather than have my focus scattered as I tried to grade homework, make lesson plans, and respond to student messages, I designated one day for each of these tasks.
Lately, though, I’ve still felt a bit confused and overwhelmed about all the work I have to get done this semester.
Introducing “mini-batching.”
I realized “making lesson plans” was still too broad of a task. For my listening class, each week, I need to listen to the audio in the textbook, choose which recordings to use, come up with questions and answers, choose vocabulary words, decide on a speaking activity, make a homework assignment, find and download a video, and wrap it all up in a pretty PowerPoint. I was switching between audio files, vocabulary lists, YouTube videos, homework records, and PowerPoint all for one lesson.
So instead, I decided to break down my batching even more. One afternoon, I go through all the audio files and choose the ones I’ll use for the next month of lessons. Another time, I can create the questions and answers. During another planning session, I can scour YouTube for videos I can use in lessons throughout the next month. Then next time come up with homework assignments, etc.
I used to have this idea that I need to build a lesson from the ground up, from start to finish, before I even thought about the next lesson. But not only does mini-batching help me create more cohesive lesson plans, because I have past and future lesson plans in mind, I’m also saving so much more time by avoiding switching between different tasks.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, struggling with getting things done, or looking for a way to feel more on top of you work, take a look at your tasks and see if any can be broken down even more to mini-batching tasks!