Organizational & Filing System: Reaching Your Teaching Potential

Why You Need to Be Organized

Even if many of your teaching tools are in an electronic format, if you don’t have a way to organize yourself, your mind will feel cluttered. It’s the nature of this information-overload world. Having a simple organizational system in place can provide you with:

  1. Quick access to practical teaching resources.
  2. The raw material you need to transform what you’ve learned into teaching that inspires, informs and supports your students.
  3. A natural way to turn your teaching tools into offerings such as workshops and retreats that encourage pre-registration and increased revenue.
  4. A way to avoid overwhelm.

A Simple Process

Here you’ll find a process for organizing your teaching support tools. There’s nothing to buy and no software to learn. Simply take our process and incorporate it into your own systems.

  1. Use any technical platform you wish. We use email folders — a super simple approach that works just fine.
  2. Create folders using the categories we provide (below). This is a long list so as to cover the bases for all the types of information that teachers of different backgrounds and experience levels might need. Just choose the categories that you personally need and delete the rest.
  3. As you come across materials you wish to keep, whether or not you take the time to read them now, file them in the relevant folder.
  4. To file notes or tools that you have in a different format, forward them to yourself via email. You can forward web links, notes or quotes, scanned documents, articles or any other items you wish to keep. Now they can be filed with everything else.
  5. If an item covers multiple topics, send a duplicate to every relevant category. For example, if you want to keep an article that provides teachings on the anatomy of the core and also on Plank Pose, file one copy in Core Anatomy and another in Core Strengthening Asana.
  6. When you’re ready to update a teaching plan, or to create a class or workshop, refer to the appropriate file. It’s amazing how much more effective it is to focus on one topic exclusively, consulting multiple sources. Your ability to think holistically and creatively will be greatly enhanced.

Filing Categories

For a list of categories you can use as a guide for your filing system, download this Word document: Organizational Files. Following is a list of the categories from the Word document, but here we also provide links to member support on each topic. (We’ve been using this system since 2011 so we’ve gathered up a lot of organized teaching material!!)

Philosophy

Energy & Subtle Body

Anatomy & Physiology

Pranayama & The Breath

Asana General

Asana Details

More Teaching Topics

Teaching Plans

See also: Your Class Builder plans

Teaching General

The Business of Teaching

Safety & Adaptations