I read a lot. Like. A lot a lot. And most of it is through an app called Readwise Reader. (Not an affiliate link. Possibly not even a recommendation. More on that maybe later?) Without getting too deep down the rabbit hole, I think it’s the best currently available solution to the me-shaped set of problems, but I don’t find it delightful and I would abandon them the instant a better app came along.
With apologies to Robb Knight, from whomst I stole the format. General Continuing and, indeed, accelerating the trend of the previous year, 2025 was marked by a significant amount of travel. Short trips, long trips. At times it felt like I was gone more than I was home, although the statistics don’t bear that out. My blog is read almost exclusively by the friends who I directly link to it (thank you!
During last year’s Hobbit Meal (which, apparently, I didn’t post about,) I ended up serving way too much bread. Don’t get me wrong. I like bread. But by the third or fourth meal of the day, it was too much. This year I’ve cut it down just to the biscuits in the biscuits + gravy, plus the stuffing which is technically bread but I think mostly doesn’t count. Without further ado, here’s the plan.
I’m going to start living on minimum wage. Sort of. Not really. It’s complicated. Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t enjoy wine twice as much as you, they’re more keenly aware of how most wine isn’t good enough. Avoid sophistication that diminishes your enjoyment. — Conor Barnes In the beginning God created a budget There’s basically two parts to a budget.
My seasonal theme is more thoughtful use of less space.
Lately I’ve been trying a new system for how I manage my evenings. Someone else might try “no system” or “having fun” or “relaxing,” but I am not that someone. Instead, I’ve cobbled together something from the charred husk of the Bento Method that seems to work pretty well for me. Of course, to make that make sense, I have to describe what came before. In the early days there was StumbleUpon, and it wasted a lot of time, and I got nothing done for approximately 2008-2016.
I’m not a traditionally “goal-motivated” person. For certain values of goal, motivated, and person. I have a formative memory of telling my third grade teacher that I would not be setting any new years resolutions because the idea is quite ridiculous, thank you. I continue to agree with past-me about that. “Goals” are sort of like a report card: some people are super motivated by getting good grades for some reason.
Have you ever lost something and then spent the next ten years trying to find it? I have. It’s an essay about the fall of the Roman Empire. Did the average citizen know the empire had fallen? No. It took them about 200 years to figure out, but you’re just going to have to trust me because all the kings horses and all the king’s men haven’t been able to find that paper again.
I wanted to try something new this week and give an end-of-week status report. No idea if this is something I’ll keep doing, but the best way to figure out if it’s useful (to me or anyone else) is to give it a try. The majority of this week has been spent working on the website for WizardHQ, a project that all my friends know about, but if you don’t know me personally this is the first time you’re hearing about it.
We’re a couple days over one quarter of the way into the year, so I sat down and worked on a template for planning around my yearly theme. Part of a yearly theme is not to plan too hard. There’s a reason it’s not a yearly goal or, so help me, new years resolution. But I thought having some sort of light framework for checkin and intention setting would be useful, so that’s what I’m working towards.
What began as a fear of undue influence transformed into a realization that ideas are meant to be shared, not hoarded—execution is what truly matters in the end.
As we head out of 2024, these are the apps I’m using. (Computing) Bookmarks: Raindrop (Computing) Browser: Firefox (Computing) Calendar: Apple Calendar (Computing) Chat: Beeper (Discord + Signal) (Computing) Cloud Storage: iCloud Drive (Computing) Passwords: 1Password (Computing) Photo Management: Apple Photos (eMail) Mail Client: Apple Mail (eMail) Mail Server: Fastmail (Entertainment) Media Player: Infuse Pro (Entertainment) Music: Apple Music, Radio Paradise, a growing collection of physical media (Entertainment) Podcasts: Pocket Casts (Finance) Budgeting: YNAB (Health) Body Tracking: Whoop (Health) Meal Planning: Plan To Eat (Health) Workout Tracking: Gentler Streak (Reading) Book Tracking: Hardcover (Reading) eBook Management: Calibre (Reading) eReader: Kobo Sage (Reading) Read It Later: Readwise Reader (Reading) RSS: The Old Reader + NetNewsWire (Social) Contacts: Apple Contacts (Travel) Flight Tracking: Flighty (Travel) Trip Planning: Tripsy (Writing) Blogging: Micro.
I believe it was roughly around this time of the year, several hundred years ago, third or fourth grade to be imprecise, that I declared in no uncertain terms that new years resolutions were stupid, and I would not be doing them. If you’ve met me, that anecdote probably doesn’t seem very surprising. Yes, I was always like this. No, I won’t elaborate. The reason I bring it up is that I’m about to talk about what to many people would in fact sound like a new year’s resolution, but is prompted approximately zero percent by the new year and entirely by the trip to Disney World staring me down from approximately two weeks in the future which I am clearly, woefully, physically unprepared for.
The society I happen to have been born into is based on consumption. It tells me that my worth is measured in my economic contributions. That I will be judged by the clothes I wear, the car I drive, the establishments I frequent.
A few months ago I looked back at my first 30 days of tracking 100% of my time. Now I have about a quarter’s worth of data, and some patterns have emerged.
Establishing a baseline for reviewing things can be difficult.
I’m not “traditionally” goal motivated. What do I mean by that? I mean if I tried to set a goal for a year from now that looked something like this: “in one year I want to have written a book,” that would not, on its own, result in any of the behaviors that lead to a book being written.
I’ve spent the last several weeks using Toggl to track 100% of my time, and the results have been interesting.
As part of the Year of Scales and Arpeggios I find myself needing to keep track of new things in new ways. The problem is that tracking things, like naming them, is hard. Maybe it’s less hard for people that don’t suffer from perfectionism. It’s hard for me. The ideal system is one which tracks itself, but those are few and far between and rarely support the other principles that matter to me.
It’s the last day of the Year of Time, and I think of it broadly as a success. I’ve cut my commitments to the bare minimum, and for the first time in forever have been making solid progress on self care and relaxation as a goal. Most nights, after work, there hasn’t been more work. The Steam Deck has been life changing, being a system perfect for the playing of games and almost nothing else.
I quietly set the goal of spending no money for a week and almost managed to do it. There’s nearly enough food in the house that if I’m clever I don’t need to supplement much to make a week’s worth of meals. Even though we ended up making a few grocery runs, we avoided eating out so I’m still calling it a success. Heading into 2024 I’m wondering how long I can extend the concept.
Resisting the urge to wait until I know exactly what I want to say before saying anything. Spent the day on the couch playing Dave the Diver which I did not like at first, but which I think gets better, and watching Christmas movies. It’s a rare treat to get to spend a weekend day doing basically nothing, by which I mean doing only what sounds nice in a relaxing manner.
Getting ready for next weekend’s retreat by printing off every blog post even tangentially related to the problems I’m hoping to solve so that I have resources I can read and reference without being tempted to get back online.