In this article, I’ll revisit 10 of my 25 Tips For Less Stress that I have found to be most helpful for me over the last two weeks or exponentially heightened stress. Christmas is coming, and with is seems to be incredible stress for a lot of people. Perhaps it’s because I am not married and have no children, but Christmastime has ...

This may well be the first time I have written about my teaching life without really setting out a solution or providing much helpful information. Let me know what you think. Last Friday, the other band director I work with had a mile stroke. He is recovering and is at home resting now. The doctors told him to not return to work for six weeks. As ...

I have decided to compile all of the articles from my series 25 Tips For Less Stress into one handy ebook. The Instant De-Stress Handbook is completely free to download. To get your copy, simply subscribe to my RSS feed. A link to download the ebook should appear at the bottom of the feed every [...]

This past Tuesday, I took a day off of school. This is not normal for me, and I even had to fight my urge to go up to school and make sure things were running smoothly. I even drove up to the school and chose not to get out of the car. Why? Because I had [...]

We come now to the final chapter of our 25 Tips For Less Stress. This is perhaps my favorite one of all. Without this decision, you cannot have a stress-free life. The key is to choose to have fun at work. No matter what industry you work in, if you love your job, you will be [...]

I wrote a couple of days ago about a plan to reduce the amount of papers that you take home. Preferably, that number will approach zero as your systems get refined. That is NOT the focus of this entry. The goal here is to truly liberate you from your job. The story goes: A senior monk and [...]

How much time is wasted in classrooms around the world each day? How much time is wasted in businesses each day because employees are not diligently using their time? As I’ve written before, I view squandered time at work as being equivalent to stealing from the employer. One of the best ways to avoid having to [...]

I rarely take work home any more. I used to do it all the time. Then I noticed something. I rarely got any work done at home, and I felt guilty about not getting it done at home. I also realized that when I didn’t take work home, I didn’t fall too far behind when [...]

Each morning when I come into the band hall, there are always a handful of students who come to drop off their instruments before school. Often they will come in and stand around talking. Because our custodian runs the vacuum each day and doesn’t fix the chairs after he finishes, the entire classroom has to [...]

I love reading. I don’t do it nearly enough, but I still do love it so. I find that many people don’t read a single book after they graduate from high school. As teachers, we are also supposed to be lifelong learners. We should be desperate to learn about more and more stuff. I find that as [...]