Teachers ask us how to fit more in. For me the more useful question is what the week already costs — because until that’s on paper, adding to it is guesswork.
And in my experience most teaching weeks were never designed. They were assembled.
A slot came up and you said yes. Another one, and you said yes. Each decision was sensible on its own, and nobody has ever sat down and looked at the whole thing at once.
Which is how you end up with four venues, three evenings, two school runs, and a Tuesday that only works if absolutely nothing goes wrong.
When to use this
- When you’re setting next term’s dates
- If a week that looks fine on paper keeps leaving you flat
- Before saying yes to a new slot
- When you’ve noticed you dread one particular class and can’t say why
The question underneath
The costs that break a week are almost never the teaching.
Do the arithmetic on one week
Take a normal week and write down, for every class: the class itself, the travel each way, the setup, the planning, and the flat hour afterwards when you’re no use to anybody.
Most teachers find one slot where a sixty-minute class occupies four hours of the day, pays the least of anything they do, and sits in the middle of an afternoon it cuts in half.
That slot isn’t a scheduling problem. It’s the whole problem, and it’s usually invisible because it’s been there for years.
Automate, delegate, eliminate
Three things you can do with anything that isn’t teaching, and only three.
Automate it. Bookings, reminders, payments, the message you send every new student. Anything you type more than twice a month is a template you haven’t written yet.
Delegate it. Not everything needs you. The accounts, the flyers, the person who could open up on a Thursday. Delegating feels like an expense until you price your own hour properly.
Eliminate it. The hardest and the most useful. The class that costs four hours and pays for one. The venue forty minutes away with six people in it. The commitment you took on in 2019 for reasons that no longer apply.
Run everything through those three, and what’s left is teaching.
There’s no standing still
One thing I’d hold onto. Teachers often describe a quiet period as treading water.
You’re never treading water. While a week sits unexamined, the venue changes hands, the timetable moves, the class that always filled stops filling. Everything around you is moving whether you are or not — so a week left alone isn’t holding steady, it’s drifting.
That’s not a reason to panic. It’s a reason to look at it once a year on purpose, rather than only when something breaks.
The one thing that makes a week survivable
Slack.
Not a lighter week — a week with somewhere for a problem to go. The fragile week isn’t the full one. It’s the one where a cancelled train, a sick child or a double-booked hall takes the whole day down, because there was never a gap anywhere in it.
If every hour is committed, you don’t have a schedule. You have a sequence, and sequences break at the first interruption.
Action steps
- Map one real week, including travel, setup and recovery. Not what you intend — what happened.
- Find the slot that costs the most and returns the least. There usually is one.
- Run three non-teaching tasks through automate, delegate, eliminate.
- Leave one gap you don’t fill. Protect it like a class.
Related resources
- What an hour of your teaching actually costs
- Who do you work for?
You may map it and decide the week is fine as it is. Some are, and plenty of teachers have looked and changed nothing. Just map it before deciding, because the slot that’s costing you is nearly always the one you’ve stopped seeing.