When I think back to my own schooling, I realize that nobody taught me note taking. I was just told to “take notes.” Nobody taught me how to annotate a text. I was just provided a highlighter. Nobody taught me how to prioritize tasks, create a smart homework schedule, manage all my obligations and so on.

As a result, I stumbled through high school and college inefficiently… or at least certainly less effectively than I could/should have. Often, I procrastinated until I had to “crash” study for tests… or pull an all-nighter to deliver the goods I owed. (I am a night owl anyway, but staying up until 5:00 am was so common in my life for so, so, so many years that to this day, I can still burn the midnight oil in a way that is almost unnatural. Or so my wife swears.)

All of that changed when I became an AVID teacher. And read Covey. And then recognized that my inability to be efficient and work intelligently was preventing me from achieving so many of the personal and professional goals I longed to attain.

Before AVID, Covey and all the others who have contributed to my conscientious re-framing (let’s be honest, I have gulped down a ton of books on this subject area), I was an inefficient wreck. I guess this is why I use the term re-framing. I needed to re-frame the way I worked top to bottom, keeping what did work well and tossing what didn’t.

Nowadays, of course, I am a lot of unspeakable things but being “an inefficient wreck” is not one of them. I write, speak, blog, teach, and so on. Is it a lot? For sure. However, my life is not characterized by chaos, which is totally ironic because before I recognized I needed to re-frame the manner in which I worked, chaos was the operative word.

It’s almost as if I did not know how to operate

from any other perspective than under the gun, late for a deadline and so on.
Of course, I loved to lie to myself as well and tell myself that, “Hey, you
work better at the last minute anyway,” and things like that.

It calls to mind a line Mark Twain once said: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

But what I really wish, when I look back, is that

someone would have taught me some of the core principles of smart work habits
and efficiency back when I was still a minor. I mean, somewhere, between 4rth
grade and 12th grade, it really would have been nice to learn things
like Cornell note taking, time management, prioritization, and the law of
procrastination. (i.e. it’s stressful, quality often gets sacrificed and the
sense of joy in doing the work is torn asunder by the need to meet a deadline,
come hell or high water.)

It’s like catching an airline flight, in a way. These

days, I always try to be an extra ½ hour early. Why? Because I used to be the
type of person that would try to cut it razor thin and make it to the gate, “just
on time”.

Of course, every moment of the journey to the airport,
going through security, and getting to the gate was a hellish and stressful “race
against the clock” event which made the entire experience tremendously “tense”.
With the extra half hour these days, I am relaxed, I have a buffer and, if there’s
a hiccup in my arrangements, things don’t go nuclear.

And if I am there a half hour early, I can read,

write, make a relaxed phone call and so on. Really, I don’t ever find that I
have wasted any half-hours. And the gray hairs on my head that I did not cause
to sprout, well… it makes it all worth it.

I just wish I wouldn’t have had to go to the school
of hard knocks to learn this stuff… and if school would have taught me these
things, I would have been much better off.

Then again, who wouldn’t?

New Year’s Eve is — and always has been — one of the most over-rated holidays on the calendar for me. Perpetual disappointment. (Actually, is it even an official holiday or is it just riding the coattails of Christmas in some way?) And while I am totally a night owl and will happily stay up chatting about most anything with folks until 3:00 a.m. if the topic/company warrants it — yep, been know to do it on school nights, too — getting obliterated, counting backwards from 10 to 1 and then pretending that I wished I were in Times Square watching the ball drop live, well… it’s just not my thing.

Times Square in January at midnight is cold and people are drunk. Mobs of people are drunk. Mobs of tourists are drunk. Call me old, but unless you’re a pick-pocket, being immersed in mobs of drunk tourists is, well… over-rated to say the least.

For me, my New Year always revolves around a school calendar anyway. That’s the true sundial of my life.

The approach of September is when new life feels as if it is about to bloom in me. There’s the back-to-school shopping I try to do in late August. (Often it goes like this: I know I should really get a new shirt or two but screw it, I don’t wanna go to the mall — so I am going back to Staples because, truth be told, school supply shopping brings me glee and in a hundred years it’s not gonna matter anyway).

There are the can’t really sleep the night before school jitters I still feel even though I’ve been at this so long my wife is bored with my, “I’m nervous about tomorrow, what if the kids don’t like me” neurosis.

I mean, face it… I could list a hundred little things that only a teacher would get. Essentially, I love the routine, the “plans”, the projects, the books, the conversations, and so on that swirl through my head this time of year. My life revolves around this calendar much more than it revolves around a January 1. I mean if I never saw another ball drop in Times Square (on TV or live — done both), I don’t think I’d really feel like I was missing anything in life. But if I didn’t have that, “it’s the first day of school next week, oh how I don’t want summer to end but oh how I’m excited to get back into the classroom again” inner conflict going in my life, I’d feel empty.

Lost.

I don’t even know if I could function without this sort of educational bio-rhythm. It brings order to my world. January 1 isn’t when the year starts — it’s when the year is about 42% over.

The year starts right about now and only the suckers who are forced to actually work “real jobs” don’t know it.