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August The goal for checking whether there is anything in my work mailbox that needs attention on most workdays has been working great. I mean, I no longer find myself panicking that I have forgotten to look and maybe someone is expecting something from me. (I mean, everything substantial goes to my personal mailbox, so the entire situation is not as weird as it sounds.) Will keep for now.
For September, I will be doing limit-arcs. I have recently found myself often not enjoying some ARCs as much as I would like but feeling like I must finish them if they are not awful enough to angrily DNF because those were given to me specifically to review. I also have quite a few lined up for the next several months now. But I still often grab something “shiny, new!” just because they are available, without properly thinking whether I can fit that into my reading plans. So this goal is to limit the number of new ARCs I would add to my list over the entire month to just two. It’s set up in a way that I can get the first one as soon as Sep 1 and the second one as early as the mid of the month, but it never reaches the third. (If I got the do-less setup correctly; I haven’t been doing those for a while.)
UPD: I should probably clarify one caveat that I meant from the beginning but didn’t think will matter to spell it out. The idea is to limit the number of ARCs that I request (or click to “read now” if they are open to everyone). I thought about this because a few weeks ago I received my first ever widget at NetGalley (a widget is an invitation to review a specific title that the publisher thinks fits my reviewer profile, while others should request it). But didn’t think I am likely to receive more to have to spell this out. And, obviously, if I get approved on those that I have requested previously, this also doesn’t count toward this new goal, as they are already counted toward all of my other TBR-related goals, even though it’s still iffy whether I’ll get them. These were the caveats that I was thinking but didn’t spell out. What I didn’t know is that I would be given two more widgets over just 5 days since creating this new goal. Of course, I am looking at those invitations critically and not just accepting blindly, but these acts of accepting widgets do not count toward the goal, as the goal is to limit a rather specific behaviour of browsing through the catalog and “wanting” all of those.