Beating Teacher Burnout: Spend Less Time on Planning

As a teacher, stress comes with the job, especially when you are an early childhood education-focused teacher. It is common to feel exhausted and start to feel detached from the enjoyment of building the future generation. However, this teacher burnout doesn't come only from the children. The whole environment is stacked against you. Planning and documentation consume your afternoon when you should be relaxing and preparing for the next day. This physical and mental depletion is making almost one in three educators leave within the next few years ^[1]. But the solution comes from understanding how you spend your time and saving time on planning without compromising quality.

You are not imagining the teacher burnout

Recently, in a survey of 2300 early educators, around 45 percent mentioned their struggle with burnout ^[2]. It is not about the motivation or effort of the teachers. Those who are passionate about their work can still feel burnout when they are surrounded by a growing pile of workload every day. As a human, there is only so much you can do in a day before becoming overwhelmed. So you need a proper analysis of your workload and to strategically analyse it to overcome your stress.

It is not the children; it is the paperwork

People are often surprised to learn that the time they spend with the children is not wearing them down; rather, it is the preparation and the paperwork that go along with it. Researchers have also found that the extra tasks, the planning, and the assessments are the reasons for stress, not the teaching itself ^[3]. The OECD survey of international early childhood educators also found the same pattern ^[4]. The documentation and administrative work are among the reasons for stress in this job and contribute to teacher burnout. Among these, planning is the main issue that takes up most of the time. In fact, it is the one most closely linked to long hours and teacher burnout. The next thing to look into is how those hours are actually spent.

Where the hours really go

In 2025, a study at the University of Sydney actually put numbers to how much time children are getting from teachers ^[5]. Educators spend around 2.5 hours a day of focused time with the children, which is a cause for concern, as almost three-quarters of the time is not spent on the primary purpose of the job. Creating plans from scratch, administrative and documentation work, and endless meetings take up most of the important working hours, which should be spent with the children. Much of this extra work is often done at home. The study also found that around three in four educators spend nine unpaid hours a week working on planning and admin tasks. This extra administrative and documentation work follows you over the weekends, and on Monday you have to start creating plans for the week again. If you look closely at your working routine, you will find you are stuck in this loop, and every one of these issues can be narrowed into simple solutions.

How to spend less time on planning

Reuse instead of rebuild

You cannot skip the administrative work or disregard institutional guidelines. However, you can optimise your time in planning your workload starting this week. Starting from the blank page is the most expensive habit of the job. Plans are not a one-time use; they should be created with reusability in mind. Instead of rebuilding, you should maintain a planning bank and tailor it to the needs of your children.

Document only what is required

Much of the documentation can be skipped or further optimised. Not every minute needs to be documented; only focus on matters most for the child's meaningful development and progress. You need to learn to avoid self-imposing an excessive documentation load.

Use the right tool

There are many teacher planning tools out there that focus on the schools. The key thing to remember is that you are an early childhood educator, so your children's needs are different from those of students in older grades. The right tool focuses on early childhood education and adapts to the children's age and requirements. The AI lesson planner that is made for early childhood educators understands your needs and the children's needs and creates reusable plans. Elina is exactly this type of tool: you guide it to reshape and draft plans from your personal teaching style, so you don't need to start from scratch and save time on lesson planning.

Every small change adds up to saving your time. As you start to build your own working loop, you will eventually notice the improved performance and increased productivity. For example, teachers using AI for weekly reports save around six hours, about six weeks across a school year ^[6].

Quick summary

Teacher burnout is not a sign that you are not meant to be the builder of the next generation. It is a sign that your work has become too heavy. You are limited by your capacity as a human and restricted by institutional rules. But you can still control how you optimize your working time, including reusability, less documentation, and utilizing the right tools. Start with a small change this week and see how much more efficient you become when you spend more time with the children. If you want to try out Elina for drafting your next week's plans, it is free to explore.

References

1. Ng, Rogers & McNamara (2023), Issues in Educational Research 33(1). https://www.iier.org.au/iier33/ng.pdf
2. Teaching Strategies survey of 2,300 early childhood educators, via K-12 Dive (2022). https://www.k12dive.com/news/early-childhood-educators-experiencing-high-burnout-stress/633709/
3. Jerrim (2020), Teacher workload and well-being. https://johnjerrim.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/working_paper_workload_wellbeing_november_2020.pdf
4. OECD (2025), TALIS Starting Strong 2024. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/results-from-talis-starting-strong-2024_20af08c0-en.html
5. Harper, McGrath-Champ & Wilson (2025), The Australian Educational Researcher (University of Sydney). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13384-025-00847-z — see also https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2025/07/16/childcare-educators-spend-less-than-30-percent-of-time-in-focused-interaction-with-children-research.html
6. Gallup & Walton Family Foundation (2025), Teaching for Tomorrow. https://nextgeninsights.waltonfamilyfoundation.org/resources/how-ai-gives-teachers-time-back/