Protect some hours from the inbox entirely.

Correspondence expands to fill whatever time is not defended in advance.

An inbox checked continuously is a machine for fragmenting attention. Each glance costs more than the seconds it takes, because the return to real work is slow and never quite complete. Planning, marking and the thinking that makes teaching good all need continuous stretches, and those stretches are the first thing correspondence eats, because messages feel urgent and preparation feels postponable. It is not, it is just quieter about it.

The workable pattern for most educators is batching: two or three defined windows a day, and closed in between, with a known route for anything that genuinely cannot wait. Batching is faster in absolute terms as well as better for concentration, because you are in the same mode for twenty messages instead of context switching twenty times. Most things that feel urgent at ten in the morning are perfectly well served at one in the afternoon.

Defend at least one protected block a week for the work that has no deadline attached and therefore never wins an argument with an inbox. The rest of the job will not offer you that time; you have to take it. And be honest about the trade you are making when you do not. An inbox at zero and a lesson thrown together on the way to the room is not efficiency. It is a choice about which part of the job gets your attention, made by default rather than on purpose.