The paper addresses teachers´ use of their professional time. With the support of two studies -focusing two "invisible" parts of teachers´ work - we aim to situate two grounded theories about the work of teachers in the age of insecurity. Our attempt is to determine what happens during teachers' recess periods and the effect these interspaces might have on the daily work. We also focus on the work done in teachers' non-regulated hours. The results from the studies show that uncertainty, in different forms, has encroached on the territory of teachers work, leading to a constant sense of unfinished business. In the first study this leads to the disappearance of interspaces in the daily work and feelings of constant public appearance - of being "on stage". When the off stage positions, here referred to as Goffmans' back regions, are lost the situation leads, at the same time, to the teachers neither having the possibility of controlling the existence and borders of their public appearance, that is - the professional content - nor the possibility of creating personal interspaces, where the necessary conditions for forming and upholding the official façade, as well as the team, are at hand., According to these results, mastering the back regions plays a decisive role in experiencing control over the working situation as a whole. The second study emphasises teachers' apprehension of work as a never-ending story. Teachers seldom feel a sense of completeness which, according to our results, leads to a constant mental alertness. This condition is handled by different teachers in different ways depending on what they direct their attention towards. A 'good enough', activity-oriented attention yields thoughts as creative companions, while a 'not enough', success-oriented attention yields thoughts as intrusive bonds. This latter mental condition of free- floating anxiety is becoming more common to teachers and can be seen as a result of an increased intensified and individualised working situation.The present findings indicate the differences in how teachers handle these changes and provide a more elaborated explanation of how recent changes in working conditions has affected teachers apprehension and work performance. The results also point to novel means to understand and re-frame reasonable and sustainable working conditions for teachers