Skip to main content

Is organisation key?

 Today I have learnt that if I want I can be a reader. I have updated my list of books of 2023 and I was really impressed. I have managed to read around 3k pages last year… a good average I suppose for someone that works full-time, with a house, a husband, two kids and a dog, without a support system always available. Of course the majority of the time I read is when I have either my parents or my in-laws around, but this year I have managed to organise myself in a way that I could read a little bit most of the days. 

But you might be asking yourself how I manage to do that. I will share some of the things I do… 

Plan/Cook my weekly meals

Whenever I can, I will use some time of the weekend to plan the meals for the Week. Most likely, I will batch Cook on Sunday. I will sit (or better stand) for around 2 hours and Cook 5 different meals. I have some ready-made menus I have bought from @cozinhamoderna but I usually adapt it. Doing this saves me around 1h30m everyday, as I just need to heat the food and voilá. 

Have my lesson planning done the Week before. 

This academic year, I have decided that I would not bring work home, unless it was an urgent matter. The only thing I do at home is Plan my Week ahead. I sit on Saturday/Sunday morning and I organise the entire Week. I create a folder with the worksheet I have to print so on Monday I just print all of them at once. 

Of course that now and then I have a last minute change and have to adjust, but that system has helped me save a lot of time. 

Include my kids in the house chores. 

Besides having them organise their uniform the evening before and their own snacks in the morning, they fold and put away their own clothes. I do the laundry two or three times a week, but only on the weekend they have to put them away. This saves me precious time everyday.


What about you? Do you have any systematic way to save time? What for do you save time? Are you being efficient in your life? Let me know in the comments below...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Strategic Planning.

When planning, one thing we must think about is where we want to be at the end. Once we know our destination, we can plan how to get there. To plan the journey, we need to understand where we are starting from. You might think I’m talking about planning lessons and teaching our students, right? Actually, no. I’m thinking about you, teachers. If you're not happy with your current job, it's time to make a change. You need to plan for this change. No one should just jump into new adventures without planning. That would be careless. So, let's go back to the beginning and think again. If you find it hard to go to work, if you don’t want to get out of bed to face your boss or that difficult colleague, or if you're tired of using the same workbook again, you should look at what’s wrong. Why is this happening? The first step is to think about where you would like to be. What is the perfect scenario that would make you get out of bed happily and go to work? Write it down, say it...

15 songs right here, right now!

  I know how difficult it is when your coordinator or director comes to you saying that you will have to change your whole planning and the way you plan to a new methodology or teaching philosophy… You just think right away that all you had planned and taught until that moment will become rubbish.  When someone comes and proposes that directly, or tries to sell you a new course, in a way, your brain takes the same path. Unless you already know a lot about what the other one is trying to sell, you will most likely try to divert from it. You won’t buy it. With that in mind, I want to propose one thing to you, that don’t know a lot about my work yet, to get to know it. Because, yes! I want you to change your lessons so you are less overwhelmed, but I would never consider your experience and previous teaching rubbish. I know how much you already know and how much effort you’ve put into becoming the teacher you are now. So I thought that an ebook, with 15 songs accompanied by strat...

Dear teacher

  Dear teacher You are probably back in the classroom a few days now and I bet you already thought that you need ideas to make your students more engaged in the lessons, that they don’t focus when you are giving them the instructions, that they are not learning the content you are sharing with them, etc. I am not going to promise you a magic trick that will make them do all that, but what I can do is help you understand how to change some things about your routine in the classroom and as a result, those things will most likely cease to happen. As Eric Jensen, Ph.D. says, “Using music is an excellent way to influence or change the states of your students, to help with those transitions, or bring them back from a break and let them know it is time to start something new.” When I moved from music teacher to classroom teacher, one thing that I struggled a lot with was to have my students transitioning between tasks without having to tell them a hundred times what to do and where to go....