Less Stress: Reduce Possessions Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - October 18, 2007July 5, 20101 My name is Joel. I have too much stuff. Most people in the western world have way more stuff than we know what to do with. The thriving success of self storage units is a testimony to this fact. Possessions add clutter We spent all last week looking at steps to reduce stress by decluttering your life. Some people recommend simply ignoring the clutter. That is definitely one valid option. It doesn't work well for me, though. So I strive to reduce the amount of stuff I own that can potentially add clutter, which will in turn increase my stress level. I am not necessarily advocating living as a hermit or social discontent, but I have personally found that simplifying
Less Stress: Reduce Phone Calls Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - October 17, 2007May 29, 20163 I got an email from one of our secretaries yesterday asking me to call one of the other administrative assistants. The message left no indication of why I should call her. I have not yet called her and I don't intend to do so. I have a problem with phone calls. In a world where email has become a standard of communication at work, phone calls are a mere inconvenience Phone calls pose as important interruptions Often they are unimportant or at the very least delayable. At the worst, they are totally unimportant. Phone calls allow someone else to control our environment. I don't answer the phone during class I made the decision my third year of teaching to never stop to answer the phone
Less Stress: Reduce Responsibilities Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - October 16, 2007July 5, 20100 Time is a commodity where everyone is equal. But some people seem to do a whole lot more with their time and others seem to do a whole lot less. But we all stay busy. The problem is that some people choose how to fill their lives and other people allow their lives to be filled. It's so easy to get into the trap of agreeing to do everything that anyone asks us to do. Ever wonder why it is the youngest teachers who end up doing the most work in many schools? It's because the experience teaches us that our class suffers when we take on too many responsibilities. Basic time management List your responsibilities Prioritize your list,
Less Stress: Reduce Paperwork Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - October 15, 2007May 29, 20160 One of the biggest drains on my energy is paper clutter. One of the biggest drains on the environment is trash. For these reasons, I try to do everything I can digitally rather than with paper. I am so used to having so much paperwork, that I forget what it would be like without it. I went to school to be a band director, not a clerical assistant, but there are entire days where all I do is office work while another director teaches my class. Fundraising, returned progress reports, ARD forms, absence notes, hall passes, schedule change forms, field trip requests, receipts, deposit slips, you name it, I have it. Oh yeah, the students also occasionally turn work in too! Here's
Less Stress: Declutter Your Car Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - October 12, 2007July 5, 20101 If we've been following the stress reduction tips so far, we now have a clean desk at work, a clean computer desktop at work and home, we have begun to organize our email habits, and our house is beginning to look nicer. All of those things can be great, but if we have a 30 minute commute to and from work each day, a messy car will only take away from those efforts. I have a 5 minute commute, and when my car is messy, it bothers me. Keeping the car under control is a pretty simple process of simply bringing things inside after each trip. As with everything this week, the problem comes in actually establishing those habits. Other
Less Stress: Declutter Your House Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - October 11, 2007July 5, 20101 Well, this is one of my weakest areas. I have my work environment very organized and neat, but my home is not. Part of my problem is that I know what to do and how to do it, I just don't seem to find the energy after working 11-16 hour days to come home and do it. And in the marching season, many of my weekends are taken up traveling out of town to football games and/or marching competitions. During the rest of the school year, I am generally pretty good about it, but still not perfect. Why is a clean home important? Again, the same as a clean desk provides peace of mind, so does a clean home. The goal is to
Less Stress: Declutter Your Inbox Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - October 10, 2007July 5, 20100 We now have our Desk and Desktop under control. But how do we keep them under control? Better yet, how do we keep from having too much stuff coming into our lives that we allow to become clutter? Email Inbox Something that many teachers can't seem to figure out is how to archive their old emails. Instead, they just leave them all in the inbox. I was at an inservice and the presenter apologized to one of the other teachers because she had been gone for a few days and overlooked the teacher's email because it got lost in the shuffle. She didn't get around to it until two weeks later. That's just plain inexcusable! So how do we avoid
Less Stress: Declutter Your Desktop Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - October 9, 2007July 5, 20100 Yesterday, we began decluttering our desk. Today, we will declutter our desktop. One of the things that drives me crazy is when I install a new program and it leaves all sorts of icons on my desktop. It also drives me crazy when I have all sorts of popup notifications in my Windows taskbar telling me everything that I don't need to know. These are nonurgent situations presenting themselves as though they were urgent. It disrupts my life and it's something that I finally decided to put a stop to. I am not going to attempt to reinvent the wheel on this one. I have found some great articles that thoroughly go through processes for getting things organized. What
Less Stress: Declutter Your Desk Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - October 8, 2007July 5, 20104 I have written about having a clear desk before in passing, but here is a little bit about why to do it as well as how to do it. This is a real picture of my half of the office at work. Imagine coming to work each morning and having a nice, calm, clear workspace. Do you think it would help jump start your work day? I know for me, I am able to get to work, sit down in my (clearly uncomfortable) chair, and relax. We've all read the sign atop a messy desk: "A Clean Desk Is The Sign of a Diseased Mind." That is an excuse given by people who don't want to bother with coming up
A Recipe For Less Stress Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - September 29, 2007July 5, 20100 In preparing for my month-long series on 25 Tips For Less Stress, I realized that I left out a few key ingredients. If you follow all 25 tips listed, and leave out the foundational ingredients, you will still be under intense stress. If you follow the tips with little success, you may actually be under more stress at trying to figure out why they don't accomplish their goal! So today, we will look at the very first and most essential elements of a stress-free classroom. I have written on each of these issues at great depth previously. Below each ingredient are links to four of my articles that address this very issue. I also went to Google's cool Blog
25 Tips For Less Stress Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - September 29, 2007July 5, 20102 Download the entire series in e-book format here This school year has been remarkably stress-free for me. As a middle school band director working with the non-varsity group, this is unheard of. I have come up with a list of 25 things I have done that have helped to make this happen. During the month of October, the busiest month of the year for people involved with Texas marching bands, I am going to spend each weekday writing very briefly on one of these tips. The articles will be much shorter than my normal articles, but they will be consistent. Drink Water Wake Up Earlier Eliminate Junk Food Increase Healthy Foods Kill Your TV Declutter Your Desk Declutter
New Teacher Survival Kit General by Joel Wagner - August 3, 2007August 5, 201620 We’ve all been there. The beginning of the first year of teaching can be daunting, to say the least. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. First year horror stories abound. The number of teachers who quit after the first year or two of teaching matches or exceeds the number of teachers who stick with the profession. My theory is that teachers leave the biz for lack of knowledge. College only can do so much in preparation. We hear of how much better student teaching was back in the day than it is now, and how poorly prepared prospective educators are these days. There may be validity in that, but lamenting these things doesn’t solve problems.
Rethinking The Systems Music Education by Joel Wagner - July 25, 2007July 5, 20100 I have spent much of last week and this week with one of the high school band directors thoroughly analyzing our marching fundamentals for the high school band. Though this really doesn't apply directly to what I do during the school day as a middle school band director, the process we have been through to rethink our entire marching system can be applied to a lot of things that I will do in the classroom this year. I think it can also be applied to your world as well. The Process So what exactly have we done to make these changes? Here's a basic outline. At the end, I'll show how it will apply to my routine, and see if
Habit 1: Communication Habits Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - July 9, 2007May 29, 20163 This is the first in a series of articles entitled 5 Habits of Highly Effective Teachers. Communication Procedures Without question, one of the most essential elements of any good relationship is clear and open communication. As a teacher, practically everything that we do in the classroom is communication in one sense or another. With this in mind, it becomes evident why communication procedures are the most important skills for us to develop. I have previously written regarding some positive ways to communicate with others. This article is well worth the reading. However this time, we'll look at some procedures that can be set up that will facilitate greater communication. The first step to more effective communication is to eliminate unnecessary informational inputs from your life.
Clarity Leads To Organization Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - June 15, 2007July 5, 20100 In my last post Organization Leads To Sanity, I wrote about how I personally get organized at work. In this post, I am going to give some pointers that I have and that I plan to begin implementing that will allow anyone to get and stay organized much more easily. These tips apply both to the physical workspace as well as the digital workspace. I am going to spend the next few weeks implementing them in my home as well in an effort to bring me a greater sense of purpose in everything I do. Declutter I touched on this one recently, and I seem to touch on it frequently, because it is vital. Eliminating clutter will