Most teachers have a rough sense that lesson planning takes too long. What they don't have is a clear picture of exactly where the time goes. When we asked 40 early-access teachers to log their prep time across two weeks, the results were detailed enough to be uncomfortable.
Not because the totals were shocking, but because of what was driving them.
What the Tracking Revealed
Participants logged time in four buckets: building lesson content from scratch, adapting existing materials, sourcing and formatting resources (worksheets, slides, handouts), and administrative steps like standards tagging, rubric creation, and filing into their school's curriculum platform.
The average across the group came in just over six hours of prep per week. That number alone isn't surprising. What was surprising was the breakdown: roughly 40% of that time was going into the sourcing-and-formatting bucket, which most teachers had mentally filed as "quick tasks." Finding a video that matches the lesson objective. Reformatting a worksheet from a colleague into the school's template. Adjusting a slide deck from last year to reflect this year's class reading level.
These are tasks that feel like five minutes each and add up to ninety.
The Copy-Paste Trap
A pattern stood out among teachers who reported the highest prep times: they were doing substantial original work even when they didn't intend to. They'd pull a lesson plan from a shared drive, read through it, realize it didn't quite fit their class, and spend 45 minutes modifying it into something that looked mostly like the original but was close enough to justify the time.
One 4th-grade teacher in Texas described her planning workflow as "starting from a template that I then basically rewrite." The template provided structure, but the cognitive work of deciding what went in each section was happening fresh every single week.
Teachers who reported the lowest prep times weren't necessarily spending less time thinking about their lessons. They were being more deliberate about which thinking happened once versus which thinking happened weekly.
Where Time-Saving Efforts Go Wrong
A lot of planning efficiency advice focuses on building a personal library of reusable materials. Collect good resources, tag them well, find them quickly next time. That's sound in theory. In practice, the materials library becomes something most teachers manage imperfectly and then semi-ignore. Files accumulate in folders named "good worksheets 2024" and finding anything specific requires excavating through years of saved PDFs.
There's also the freshness problem. A worksheet saved from two years ago was written for a different class, maybe a different curriculum sequence, possibly a different version of the state standard. Using it requires a judgment call about how much adaptation it needs, and that judgment call is where the time quietly disappears.
What the Fastest Planners Did Differently
Among the 40 teachers, those consistently in the bottom third for prep time shared a few clear habits. First, they had strong mental scaffolds for their lesson type. A reading comprehension lesson for a 5th-grade teacher had a known architecture: vocabulary pre-teaching, text introduction, reading strategy instruction, guided practice, independent practice, closure. The scaffold wasn't rigid, but it meant filling in a known structure rather than reasoning from first principles every week.
Second, they were more comfortable with "good enough" on the first draft. Teachers spending the most planning time were often making small refinements to already-solid lessons: a sentence reworded, a question reordered, a slide adjusted. These refinements sometimes improved the lesson. Often they didn't.
Third, efficient planners built differentiation and scaffolding in during initial planning, not afterward. Teachers who planned a "main lesson" and then created modified versions for students with IEPs or for extension work were, in effect, doing the design twice.
A Narrower Claim Than It Might Seem
This is not an argument that teachers spend too much time planning or that careful planning is wasted effort. Some of the highest-prep teachers in the group also produced the most detailed, well-scaffolded lesson plans, and that work showed in their classrooms. That kind of planning is worth exactly what it costs.
The argument is narrower: a meaningful portion of prep time, for most teachers, goes into tasks that don't require the judgment and expertise only a teacher can bring. Formatting, sourcing, administrative tagging, routine structural decisions. Reclaiming that time doesn't mean cutting corners on the thinking that matters. It means spending that thinking where it actually matters.
The Lever That Moves the Needle
When we looked at which interventions produced real differences, the clearest pattern was this: teachers who started with a strong structural draft spent significantly less time on "building the container" and more time on "filling it with the right content for this specific class." The container work, once done well, transfers. The content work is always specific to the lesson, the students, and the week.
Separating those two kinds of work, and treating the container as a reusable asset, is the most consistent lever we saw across the 40 teachers in the study. It's also the principle behind how Teacher's Buddy approaches lesson planning: structural decisions handled once, so the teacher's time goes toward the part that only they can do.
If you haven't audited where your own prep time goes, two weeks of honest logging will tell you more than any productivity system can. The patterns are usually not what you expect, and they're almost always fixable once you can see them. The 40 teachers in our early access group who did this found that the act of tracking alone changed how they approached the next planning session, because they could see clearly which part of their time was producing the most instructional value and which part was just occupying the hours.