Opening thoughts:
Juuust gotta get through the exams…
Though I did want to talk a bit about the new fine print I put on one of my goals to define it a bit more! So maybe I’ll add a section about that…
New goals:
- /showerbyten - A replacement for my “bedtime” goal below – the thing that most often stops me being ready for bed on time is the need to go and shower etc etc. I usually shower and brush my teeth right before bed, so okay, what if I’ve already done it? So we’ll see how this goes.
Changes to existing goals:
- /bedtime - This was a New Month Resolution experiment and I don’t think it worked well, even though I kept up with it. Not the right lever to pull.
Musing on fine print:
I have a few goals which all work synergistically toward the same end: stop my backlog of owned and unread books growing exponentially. In theory the goal is to reduce the backlog, but I’m not super worried about that in and of itself – I’m more worried about all the great books I already have that I’m not reading.
So I have /toberead (overall backlog) pushing me to work on my owned-unread books backlog, /2025books (books bought in 2025 and not yet read) keeping me reading what I buy fairly quickly, and /2025backlog (books read that I owned before 2025) all pushing me to read older books and not buy more new books than I can sensibly read. It’s a bit like a very elaborate version of Danny’s “isolate the backlog” strategies.
The problem was that this weekend I had a book-buying spree that I was pretty sure had the potential to derail me on /2025books, and I felt like I was maybe cheating in not cataloguing it right away (even though I never do). So me and my wife worked out some fine print for it, which is public so you can check it out there, based on what I actually do when the goal doesn’t exist vs what we think would be actually self-defeating behaviour.
Oh, and I didn’t derail on the new goal. I had to start three books on the day I catalogued the books, but that’s fine – I’ve finished them all already, and they were really good, especially Paul Koudounaris’ Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs.
Closing thoughts:
Just gotta get through the exams…