Most teacher planners promise one thing: productivity. But teaching it’s also a creative act.
The real question is this: how do you create a teacher planner that actually improves learning, not just gives you a dopamine hit every time you cross off a task?
A good planner protects your time, your creativity and your authentic voice in an environment that often pressures everyone to plan the same way.
Here’s how to build — or choose — a planner that does exactly that.
1. Start with a philosophy: useful, flexible, anti-mimetic
A planner should never force you into someone else’s routines or mimic the trending productivity aesthetics of the moment.
My philosophy is simple:
- Tools must save time: if it doesn’t, it’s nothing more than decoration.
- Planning shouldn’t be rigid, great lessons come from improvisation, curiosity and real-time adaptation.
- Quality > completion: crossing off all your to-dos doesn’t guarantee good teaching. Sometimes it’s the irrelevant things we obsess over that drain time and leave important concepts rushed.
- Be anti-mimetic inside a fixed curriculum. In a national or ministerial program, you can’t rewrite the standards, but you can decide how you teach them. Anti-mimetic planning means structuring lessons around what you believe is meaningful, not what everyone else seems to be doing.
A good planner should help you think, not just remind you what to do.
2. Know your pain points (so your planner solves them)
When I started teaching, my main challenges weren’t philosophical, they were painfully practical:
- Not knowing exactly what to do in a lesson
- Awkward “dead moments” in class
- Arriving unprepared and improvising poorly
- Spending too much time on marginal topics
- Struggling to finish the curriculum
- The worst: realizing I had prepared something twice because I couldn’t find previous notes
If a planner doesn’t prevent these problems it’s just a notebook with dates: your planner must make your teaching repeatable, trackable and improvable.
3. The #1 feature every teacher planner needs: integrated materials
This is the heart of effective planning. The planner must be the place where:
- your lesson plan
- your slides
- your articles or external materials
- your worksheets
- your past notes
- your adaptations
…all live together.
This is where anti-mimetic teaching is born: when you’re not confined to the textbook but can bring innovative, external material into class, and actually keep track of it.
Paper planners fail here, they give you structure but not storage.
A truly effective planner lets you reopen last year’s lesson and say: “I already made something good - how can I make it better this year?”
That’s where real teaching mastery happens.
4. What to avoid: performative productivity
Most planners are full of:
- habit trackers
- “big goals of the week”
- 50-line to-do lists
- mood meters
- stickers (!)
These give a comforting illusion of progress, but teaching isn’t about finishing tasks.
A planner should center your lessons, not your tasks.
5. Paper vs digital: the real tradeoff
I used paper planners for years. I loved the feeling of carrying an object that represented my teaching brain. Paper gives:
- focus
- isolation
- a sense of physical ownership
- fewer distractions (at least in theory)
But paper has one fatal flaw: it can’t hold your materials.
You always end up with PDFs in one folder, printed handouts in another and notes scattered across notebooks.
Digital, if used intentionally, solves this.
Yes, digital means temptations (open another tab, check something, get distracted). But let’s be honest: if our phone is next to us, the paper = focus argument gets weaker.
A professional should be able to resist distractions. And if you can, digital gives you superpowers: integration, reuse, versioning, speed.
6. Your planner’s design should reduce cognitive load
My background in UI/UX taught me this:
When tools are confusing, we blame ourselves. When tools are clear, our mind is free to teach.
Good design in a planner:
- clarifies your thinking
- minimizes decisions
- removes clutter
- reduces bureaucratic feeling
- challenges you with the “blank page effect” (in a good way)
- forces intentionality
And here’s something counterintuitive: we intentionally avoided adding AI-autofill features in Gapfiller.
Why?
Because a lesson written by you is better than one generated passively. AI can help you brainstorm elsewhere, but planning should remain a conscious act.
7. A real case study: the teacher who reduced homework
One of my favorite examples from Gapfiller is a literature teacher who discovered something surprising.
By glancing at the homework overview on a single page, he realized:
“I’m giving too many assignments.”
He realized that writing style can be taught just as effectively with three writing tasks instead of five, as long as the tasks are well-designed.
This is anti-mimetic teaching in action: questioning the habits everyone else follows without thinking.
A good planner makes your decisions visible, and therefore changeable.
8. Gapfiller: my attempt to build the planner I needed
Everything above — my frustrations, my design philosophy, my need for integrated materials — shaped the creation of Gapfiller.
Gapfiller is a digital workspace that:
- stores your lessons AND your materials
- makes everything reusable and improvable
- reduces cognitive load
- supports anti-mimetic teaching
- gives you visibility on your entire teaching process
It’s the tool I needed years ago, and the tool many teachers tell me feels like an “extension of their mind.”
Conclusion: build a planner that thinks with you
Your planner should:
- save you time
- hold your materials
- guide your intentionality
- support your creativity
- help you avoid teaching on autopilot
- reflect your unique voice
- free you from mimicry
If you want to explore a planner built around this philosophy, Gapfiller comes with a free one-month trial. Use it, adapt it, question it. Building a planner is ultimately about building your way of teaching.
And that should always be uniquely yours.
