Teachers: counting the planning and grading hours done at home
· 6 min read
Most teachers cannot say how many hours they work at home, because the planning, grading, parent email and paperwork happen in scraps: after dinner, before school, across a Sunday afternoon. Each scrap feels short, so the weekly total is always a surprise. Your own number is easy to get, though. Let your Mac record the evenings for two weeks, add the work done on paper, and you will have a figure you can actually act on.
Why the home hours are so hard to see
School hours are visible. There is a bell schedule, a class list and a building you leave at the end of the day. The work that follows has none of that. It has no start signal and no end. It happens on the couch with a laptop, at the kitchen table between other jobs, in the twenty minutes before a meeting.
That shape defeats memory in two ways. Short sessions get rounded down to nothing (“I just answered a few emails”). And the long sessions, like the Sunday spent building next week’s unit, get remembered as a one-off even when they happen most weekends.
It also defeats the usual tools. A timer is useless for work that starts when you open the laptop “just to check something”. By the time you realize you are planning, you have been planning for forty minutes.
Decide what counts before you measure
Settle what goes into the number first, so it means the same thing every week.
Count: lesson and unit planning, building slides and handouts, grading and written feedback, parent and colleague email, the school’s learning platform, report card comments, student support paperwork, and any professional reading you are expected to do.
Count separately: grading on paper, phone calls with parents, and anything else done away from the computer. This is real work, but a computer record will not see it. Work that happens away from the Mac, and why the record misses it covers simple ways to fold it back in.
Leave out: reading for pleasure, even when it is about teaching, unless your school counts it.
Measure two ordinary weeks
One week can mislead. A report card week or a quiet first week of the semester will skew it. Two ordinary weeks give a much steadier figure.
- Set a closing time after your usual evening session. If you tend to finish grading by ten, set it for half past ten, so the whole evening lands in one record. How to set a closing time for your workday and keep it is useful if you have never had one.
- Let the Mac record which app is in front. No timers, no categories, nothing to remember while you work.
- Keep a paper tally for off-screen work. A sticky note on the fridge: “Tue, 40 min paper grading.” It takes seconds.
- Add up each day from the record plus the tally.
This is cleanest on a Mac you use only at home, such as a personal laptop. If one laptop goes to school with you, the day’s record includes the school day as well. That is still a useful number, since it shows how much of the whole job happens at a screen, but the home share is harder to separate. In that case, weekend days are your cleanest home measurement.
Privacy, because students are involved
Teachers are right to be careful about any software running on a computer where student work, grades and names are open. Ask exactly what a tracker records before installing it.
Punchcard records app names only. It never sees window titles, document names, URLs, keystrokes or what is on screen, so a student’s name in a file title or a grade in a spreadsheet never enters the record. It asks for no macOS permissions at all (no Accessibility, no Screen Recording, no Full Disk Access), needs no account, and contains no networking code, so nothing leaves the Mac. The record is one file in your own Library folder, and “Burn the roll” deletes it whenever you like. At the closing time you set, it prints a receipt of the day, itemized by app with a day total.
If the Mac belongs to the school, check the school’s rules before installing anything. A personal Mac is simpler.
Reading the number
After two weeks you will have a stack of receipts and a tally. A few questions turn them into something useful.
What is the weekly total? Add the home hours for each week and compare them with what you would have guessed before measuring. The gap is often the most useful part of the exercise.
Which app is the biggest line? If the browser dominates, it is often the learning platform and email rather than planning. That points at a different fix (batching parent email, fewer check-ins on the platform) than “plan faster”.
Where does the weekend go? The week roll Punchcard prints on Sunday puts the whole week on one sheet, so a weekend of planning is hard to overlook. The Sunday roll: a weekly review you will not skip covers reading it in five minutes.
Which task grows to fill the time? Grading tends to expand into whatever time exists. A fixed block with a hard end, measured, will tell you whether a stricter limit costs quality or only hours.
Putting the number to work
A measured figure is useful in three places.
First, for yourself. It is much easier to protect a Saturday when you know the week already held a real, counted number of home hours. The number turns “I should be doing more” into “I have done enough this week”.
Second, in conversations about workload with a department head or a union representative. “About this many hours most weeks, measured over two weeks” carries more weight than “it feels like a lot”, and it keeps the conversation on facts.
Third, for planning next year. If report card season doubled your evenings this year, you can see it coming, prepare comment banks early, and plan a lighter week around it.
Questions
Does this track what I do inside each document? No. It records app names and time, and nothing inside the apps. It cannot tell planning from grading when both happen in the same app; your tally can add that detail if you want it.
Will it record my students’ information? No. Only app names are recorded, never window titles, file names or screen contents, and nothing leaves the Mac.
Is it free to try? Tracking never expires and the first seven receipts are free, which covers one full week. For the second week of the measurement you would need the license: $9 once, for two Macs, with a 30-day refund.
What if I plan on an iPad or phone as well? Punchcard has no iPhone app and only sees the Mac. Add a rough figure to your paper tally for anything done on another device.