As a teacher, you tend to have the same courses year after year. I have 5-6 courses I repeat in various shapes and forms. To keep them fresh, they need to be updated every year – new materials, purge stuff that has gone stale or didn’t work, and so on.

My problem is that as soon as I have finished teaching a course, I completely forget about it until the next time (normally a year later), and then have to scramble to update things and find new literature. While you are teaching the course, you notice things that don’t fly, but then you forget the details.

The hack, of course, is simple: Write next year’s course documentation as you are teaching this year’s course. For instance: I have a detailed syllabus (written as a Google Doc) for my course GRA834 Business Development and Innovation Management (which I last taught in the fall of 2016). The syllabus is largely the same from year to year, but when I start teaching the course, I make a new copy of document (as the figure shows, the whole course folder), and fiddle with it after each class. For stuff I will have to change later, I make a note to myself, inserting the text “zxzx” which I can search. When the course starts next year, I simply make the edited documents available to the students straight into It’s Learning (the course management system we use at BI.)

Not exactly rocket science, but the hack is doing this as you start teaching. Much less hassle the next year…

(PS: You can do similar things with presentations and other stuff: My eminent colleague Hanno Roberts has a hidden slide in the back of all his presentations, where he writes notes to himself about what he will need to change the next time he gives it.)