December 9, 2025

The week after Thanksgiving was packed, which is in part why I'm posting a few days late. Everything hit at once on December 1st – Monday, December, the first workday after a holiday – and we had an overly full week. Things are getting done, but slowly.

A few things that have been helpful:

In writing about how I felt attacked by alarms and notifications, I realized that most of my alerts are mirrored across devices. This is absurd, and I turned almost all mirroring off. Only some alerts are now sent to multiple places, and others have been shut off entirely. I feel much calmer already, and while I'm glad I realized this, I can't believe it took so long.
I’ve been enjoying my low-key daily puzzles (sudoku, a mini crossword, and quartiles). They're constrained, and low stakes logic puzzles are fun in a vaguely algebraic kind of way.
I received a very low-key craft advent calendar that’s also been a nice little 5-minute pause per day. I have a few bigger projects that I’d like to work on, and I’m hoping to get some time to start over the weekend — and if not, over the holiday break – but making some tiny thing every day is good.
I made a reading schedule — sort of like slow reads, but not for books that are particularly long or dense. I decided to work through some of my TBR pile in a slow and intentional way by splitting them into about 50 pp/night. So far I’m doing this for nonfiction, and I’m really enjoying it. Fiction hasn’t been quite as organized! And I tend to read it more quickly. But the nonfiction has been good for my brain, as has the time offline.
Along with this, I’m continuing with my little notebooks. I’ve tried Bullet Journals a couple of times in the past, and they never stuck, and my digital planner isn't a good fit for my current schedule and activities. I've started my own version of a BuJo in a tiny notebook, and the small format is making all the difference. I didn’t realize that the form factor was one of the biggest sticking points for me for paper planning. I like to write in A5s, but I can’t stick them in my pocket, and what I need most is a quick and easy way to get things out of my brain and documented. I have another tiny notebook to log lines and brief responses as I read. I’ll expand on these in a larger notebook or transfer to Zotero at some point when I’m at my desk, but I like having a non-smartphone way to capture things. Fewer temptations to doom scroll. Fewer opportunities for distraction. And having a pen in hand helps me think.
The week was pretty social, too — dinner with friends, movie night at our place, — and we still managed to squeeze in some soccer games.

Mostly, I’m feeding my brain and giving it some focused time. Now I need to figure out a better approach to some of the writing that’s been simmering…

I realized today that I had my public defense three years ago, and I haven't completed a long project of my own since then. I've read and spent time with interesting works, and of course there was the whole move and settling in and all of that – but I'm restless. And that restlessness is building.