Looking for ways to improve the way you schedule your tutors and students?

1. 25 Powerful Techniques
for Efficient Scheduling
teachworks.
THE
EDUCATOR’S
GUIDE TO
EFFICIENT
SCHEDULING

2. Scheduling lessons is one of the most frequent administrative tasks
in an education business. This means that even small time-savings
from more efficient scheduling will add up to large time-savings when
multiplied by the number of times you complete scheduling-related
tasks.
This guide provides 25 scheduling techniques that will make your
scheduling process more efficient. Implementing the techniques in
this guide can potentially save you thousands of dollars in labor costs
over a period of years.
Considering the significant savings that these techniques can deliver,
it’s important that you choose a scheduling software program that
includes features that support these techniques. The additional time
spent evaluating software to ensure that it can make you as efficient
as possible is well worth it.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
The Educator’s Guide to Efficient Scheduling

3. F O R M A T
Each scheduling technique covered in this guide is presented in a
consistent format that includes the following details:
1. Technique name
2. Description
3. Estimated time-savings per lesson
To calculate approximately how much time your education business
can save by implementing these techniques, estimate the number
of times you perform the scheduling tasks associated with each
technique and multiply by the estimated time-savings.

4. The Educator’s Guide to Efficient Scheduling
P A G E 4
Click the calendar on the date or time slot where you want to schedule
a lesson instead of navigating to the form for adding a new lesson.
This method opens a form for scheduling a lesson with the date and
time pre-filled saving time on navigation and data entry.
Estimated Time-Savings: 5 seconds
1. Click to Schedule
Place your cursor on a lesson and drag the lesson to a new time
or date. The date and time for the lesson record in the database is
updated automatically in the background. This technique is more
efficient than the alternative of opening a form to edit a lesson,
changing the date and time, and saving the lesson.
Estimated Time-Savings: 30 seconds
2. Drag & Drop

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P A G E 5
Place your cursor over the end of a lesson and drag the end time to a
new end time. The end time of the lesson is updated in the database
in the background. This is much faster than opening the form to edit
the lesson, changing the end time and submitting the form.
Estimated Time-Savings: 30 seconds
3. Draggable Duration
In education companies, most students sign up for multiple lessons
that follow a repeating pattern. Using the repeating lessons technique
allows you to enter the lesson details once and then enter repeat
settings to schedule multiple lessons following a pattern. Look for
scheduling software that supports a full range of repeat settings such
as repeating by date, day of week, day of month, etc.
Estimated Time-Savings: 60 seconds
4. Repeating Lessons

6. The Educator’s Guide to Efficient Scheduling
P A G E 6
If you have a lot of students, teachers, service types, or locations for
your lessons, the ability to begin typing the name of the record and
view a short list of matching results is a huge time-saver. Choosing
software that supports this feature will allow you to use this time-
saving technique.
Estimated Time-Savings: 30 seconds
5. Searchable Menus
Entering a teacher’s availability so that it’s visible on the calendar is
a technique that allow you to find openings in a teacher’s schedule
much faster than referring to information stored in a different place.
This technique is a real advantage when a customer calls to schedule
a lesson and you can quickly find openings without having to call them
back.
Estimated Time-Savings: 60 seconds
6. Availability

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P A G E 7
Viewing a calendar that displays multiple teachers, their availability is
a time-saving technique when you need to find an available teacher
and time for a new student.
Estimated Time-Savings: 2-5 minutes
7. Multiple Teacher
View
Viewing all locations and their lessons on a single calendar allows
you to quickly find available rooms for new lessons. This is especially
useful if you operate a center and book rooms for lessons.
Estimated Time-Savings: 1-2 minutes
8. Multiple Location
View

8. The Educator’s Guide to Efficient Scheduling
P A G E 8
When scheduling lessons, checking for conflicts with a teacher’s
availability, existing lessons or locations automatically is a technique
that helps avoid scheduling conflicts that will need to be corrected
in the future. This saves time versus having to manually look at a
teacher’s availability and lessons on the dates and times of the new
lessons – especially when scheduling a series of repeating lessons.
Estimated Time-Savings: 2-5 minutes
9. Conflict Checking
Using software that allows lesson wages and cost to be calculated
automatically using pre-defined rules is a technique that saves time
by reducing clerical errors and the time required to fix them and it
eliminates the need to look up a price or wage list and perform the
calculations manually.
Estimated Time-Savings: 30-60 seconds
10. Automated Wage &
Cost Calculation

9. teachworks.
P A G E 9
If you typically include student names in your lesson titles, enabling
the title field be filled automatically with a student’s name is a time-
saving technique that eliminates the need to manually type a student’s
name.
Estimated Time-Savings: 5-10 seconds
11. Auto-fill Lesson
Titles
When scheduling lessons you’ll typically need to set a teacher,
location and service. If you have a lot of students it’s likely difficult to
remember which teacher, location and service you should select for
a particular student. Scheduling software that allows you to assign
default teachers, locations and services for a student and displays
them when you select the student for scheduling solves this problem
-- saving time and reducing errors.
Estimated Time-Savings: 30-60 seconds
12. Saved Defaults

10. The Educator’s Guide to Efficient Scheduling
P A G E 1 0
Allowing your teachers or staff to access the calendar to handle
scheduling for their own students is a delegation technique that can
reduce your own workload or the workload of your office staff, speeds
up the scheduling process and reduces errors.
Estimated Time-Savings: 60 seconds
13. Employee Access
Allowing clients to request their own lessons can save significant
time. Clients will already know their own schedule and can look at
their teacher’s schedule to see the time that works best. Your staff
can then review the lesson details and confirm, modify or decline the
request.
Estimated Time-Savings: 30 seconds
14. Client Scheduling

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P A G E 1 1
A date picker is a small calendar that allows you to quickly navigate to
a date in the past or future without having to go through each week or
month on the main calendar. Using a date picker to jump to a different
date is a technique that speeds up the navigation process for either
finding lessons on a date or going to a specific date to schedule a
lesson.
Estimated Time-Savings: 15 seconds
15. Date Picker
Using calendar filters to view lessons by teacher, location or student
saves time by eliminating irrelevant lessons from the calendar.
Instead of reading through each lesson to find the relevant information
a filter can narrow down your focus with the click of a button.
Estimated Time-Savings: 30-60 seconds
16. Filtering

12. The Educator’s Guide to Efficient Scheduling
P A G E 1 2
When holidays come around, deleting all lessons on a specific date
at once is a huge time-saver compared to the alternative of deleting
each lesson one-by-one.
Estimated Time-Savings: 30 seconds
17. Delete by Date
Entering dates to skip for holidays and other days that your business
is closed is a technique that eliminates the time that you would
normally need to delete manually to remove from the holiday. This is
especially useful if you regularly schedule repeating lessons that may
fall on a holiday.
Estimated Time-Savings: 30 seconds
18. Blocking Holidays

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P A G E 1 3
Enabling automatic cancellation notifications is a technique that keeps
students and parents informed and doesn’t require you to manually
write and send an email to the client.
Estimated Time-Savings: 1-2 minutes
19. Cancellation
Notifications
Enabling an automatic notification that’s send to clients and teachers
when a lesson is changed is a technique that helps avoids students
and teachers from showing up at the wrong time and is faster than the
alternative of manually sending an email to the client and teacher.
Estimated Time-Savings: 1-2 minutes
20. Lesson Change
Notifications

14. The Educator’s Guide to Efficient Scheduling
P A G E 1 4
Clicking an event on the calendar to view lesson details without
leaving the calendar is more efficient than being directed to a page
with the lesson details and then having to return to the calendar again.
Use this technique to save time when you need to find some
information about a lesson.
Estimated Time-Savings: 30 seconds
21. One-Click Details
Using a calendar formatted for a mobile device when you don’t have
access to a regular computer allows you to retrieve the information
that you need much faster. Trying to use a mobile device to view
a calendar that isn’t formatted for mobile is time-consuming and
sometimes impossible.
Estimated Time-Savings: 30 seconds
22. Mobile Calendar

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P A G E 1 5
Using a touch-friendly calendar when you’re using a smartphone
or tablet is more efficient and less frustrating than trying to use a
calendar that’s only designed for use with a mouse. Navigation and
performing actions is faster when the calendar is designed for your
touch-device.
Estimated Time-Savings: 30 seconds
23. Touch Screen
Enabling automatic lesson reminders for students, parents and
teachers is a technique that reduces missed lessons and is much
faster than sending these emails manually.
Estimated Time-Savings: 1-2 minutes
24. Automated
Reminders

16. The Educator’s Guide to Efficient Scheduling
P A G E 1 6
Color-coding helps you distinguish between lessons with different
parameters. Our eyes can naturally find colors faster than reading the
text in a lesson title. By color-coding your lessons by location, student
or teacher you can speed up your ability to find relevant lessons on
your calendar.
Estimated Time-Savings: 15-30 seconds
25. Color-coding

17. Scheduling is one of the administrative tasks that has the greatest
potential for time and cost-savings. By applying the techniques in this
guide to your own education business we hope that you will be able to
achieve greater efficiency and performance.
If you’re interested in scheduling software that is designed specifically
for education companies such as music schools, tutoring companies,
language schools, driving schools, swimming lessons and more, visit
www.teachworks.com
and sign up for a free trial.
C O N C L U S I O N
teachworks.