Building a second teaching-prep brain with Omnifocus

I have finally found the solution for collecting thoughts I have about teaching a class "next time" when I'm teaching it "this time" or when I'm not teaching at all. 

In the bad old days, I'd write ideas down in notebooks or scraps of paper or in files on my computer, and then I'd not remember to look at them when it would be helpful to do so. These would come up when:

  • I was reading an article or listening to a podcast and getting good ideas for the reading list or classroom activities.
  • I was marking the students' work and realizing which aspects of writing I needed to teach more explicitly—or find some supportive resources for them.
  • I had just given a lecture that was a bit too short/too long/too detailed/too loose...and needed to note that somewhere so as not to do it again next year.
  • I got helpful feedback on students on what they found too tough/too easy.
  • I was at a conference and learned something new.
  • Colleagues shared some clever assessment idea with me.
  • I heard a great example that would fit well in a lecture or exercise.
...and so they'd end up in all sorts of places.

For a while, my best friend was our Virtual Learning Environment, where I could put a hidden note in the relevant week-page, to be found and acted upon the next time I got to that week. But that fell apart when my university moved to a new VLE with a different structure. (Also, because of the faff of getting into the VLE, only some of the good ideas got to it.)

The solution, it turns out, is Omnifocus. Not so surprising, since it's been my solution for everything in the past few years. 

Here's what I do: 
  • The moment anything comes into my life that's relevant to teaching a particular module, I stick it into my Omnifocus inbox.
    • This is super easy. If I'm listening to a podcast, I just share it to Omni from my phone. If I get a relevant email, I forward it to Omni and it goes in the inbox. If I have an idea while walking around, I dictate it to the inbox. 
  • Then, when I have a moment to sort out my inbox, I put the in a project called '[Name of module] next time'. These live in a Future Teaching folder. 
  • Then, or at some future point, I'll tag it with a week label or 'before semester' label. 
  • When it's time to teach the module again, I change 'next time' to the relevant year. Once the semester is going, I'll start another project for that module 'next time', where I'm collecting notes based on this year's experience of the module. So, there will be a project related to that module my Teaching folder, and another in the Future Teaching subfolder.

Here's an example. I last taught Semantics in Spring 2023, and I'll use these notes when I teach it again in Autumn 2025. (It would have been nice to show you screenshots from a time when I was both teaching and collecting material for 'next time', but the teaching semester is not conducive to writing blog posts about organizational matters.)


It's one thing to write things down, and another to use them. Here's where the tags come into their own.  Since I've tagged everything with an approximate time for thinking about it, I don't need to set precise dates for thinking about these things just yet. When I get to the point where I am planning my week 2 teaching (once when I'm doing the 'week 2' page on the VLE, again in week 0 or 1), I go to the 'tag' view and consider the things I've written. If I think they're still worth doing, I'll do them or set a deadline for doing them. Here's what Autumn 2025 week 2 looks like so far, with all the modules I expect to be teaching:



(Clicking on the notes icon on the right side will give my full notes for any of these items—e.g. 'reading about Johnson' has a link to a potential new reading.) 

If, when reviewing these items,  I give them deadlines, they'll show up in my daily to-do list at some point. 

But I also put into the to-do list a repeating weekly item for each module. So, if I need to post my Semantics lecture by Monday, I'll put 'prep Semantics lecture' on Thursday or Friday, repeating weekly. Then I can have a quick peek at the relevant week-tags as well, and either tick them or drop them.


I used this process fully for the first time last year, and it worked beautifully. So, I am sharing as part of my Omnifocus-proselytizing mission. 

And having shared this, I can tick the last thing off today's sitting-in-an-airport-for-8-hours to-do list: