Okay, here comes my first derailment on the no-excuses challenge.
This semester I am teaching four literature classes, so a lot of reading is planned. A few days ago, I started adding lists of what I need to review, reread, or read from scratch[1] to my TBR system. While I could have added all of them at once (7+ thousand pages) and derailed this goal for the entire amount at once, I thought this would look discouraging, visually annulling my previous progress on this goal. So I deliberated and chose a middle-ground strategy: I only add the items as I purchase them, check them out from a library, or start to read them if they are freely available (out of copyright or e-book to keep for good with my library accesses) or pre-owned — the same strategy I’ve actually used forever to feed this goal, but now it’s accompanied with “dummy entries” of those that don’t count yet, just for pages-per-week planning.
Anyways. One can see from this graph that I purchased a few ebooks for this purpose a few days ago, which ate most of my pre-existing buffer. The red above the line on that same day is for a title that I ordered but later that day realized the order didn’t go through, so I removed it from the count. Now, today the derailment is because two more items for this purpose came in hard copies, plus I am starting a reread on a pre-owned one. If I zoom out, this derailment doesn’t look like undoing all of the previous progress, which is for some reason of value to me. Although it might have made sense to derail for the entirety of the reading load at once, as I might be setting myself up for additional derailments throughout the semester for reasons that all could have been accounted for at once.
(The no-derailments challenge is going well! I read a bunch of titles for it in January while I wasn’t yet busy with this teaching load, so that I’d be good to go for a while now that I need to focus on what I read along with my students, not discovering books from new countries. The buffer will carry me for a couple of months, and by then my teaching load will be half as much in the second half of the semester)
Because assigning only texts I am familiar with is boring! ↩︎