Notes
Finished reading: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman 📚
As great as everyone says. It’s striking how much chronic illness and grad school prepped me for accepting rather than struggling with the ideas here. This is a perfect book to read when you’re in your 40s.
Please read today’s Book Riot Literary Activism Newsletter and EveryLibrary’s statement on the appointment of Keith E. Sonderling as Acting Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It’s always a hard time for libraries in the US but it’s been an especially rough couple of weeks.
📚💬 “…having large amounts of time but no opportunity to use it collaboratively isn’t just useless but actively unpleasant…” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Oliver Burkeman writes about professor Robert Boice’s attempt to get PhD students to work a little bit daily and take weekends off. The students wouldn’t do it and their desire to rush the work actually got in the way of their progress. I found something similar when I did a dissertation boot camp where for the whole day I was working on my dissertation instead of the small increments that I normally did. I was so exhausted after that week of pushing really hard that I had to take a 2-week break which obviously did not advance me as far as you might hope a boot camp would.
📚💬 “…the presence of problems in your life… isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence, but the very substance of one.” Oliver Burkeman, Forty Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
📚💬 “…reading Is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule.” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Finished reading: The Perils of Pleasure by Julie Anne Long 📚
A book with an awesome heroine and a delightful hero. Julie Anne Long is new to me and seems bound to become one of my favorite historic romance authors.
📚💬 “Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they better not be, because results always come later—and later is always too late.” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
📚💬 " …a good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing; that’s a sign you’re doing it for its own sake rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome." Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
📚💬 " In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth." Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Sometimes, I’ll think of someone I connected with online and wonder how they’re doing. I’ll miss them and if I don’t have their email address or they don’t have a newsletter or RSS feed, I just won’t know how they are, because social timelines are bad for my mental health right now.
“…what we think of as ‘distractions’ aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
📚💬 “…if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
EveryLibrary has created a tool you can use to send an email to your legislators and governors urging them to support federal funding for Libraries. Libraries could see downstream impacts from Trump’s Executive Order as soon as this Friday.
📚💬 " The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things." Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
🔖 Book Riot’s Literary Activism Newsletter explains: Library Funding Targeted in New Trump Executive Order: What It Means & What To Do Now.
I was looking at my On This Day page, reading an old post I wrote that’s especially thoughtful and in-depth about improv, and it struck me that I don’t think that deeply anymore. I miss it.
But I do think that deeply at work, I’m just not blogging about it. May be time to start blogging that stuff.
🔖 Read The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion? by Oliver Burkeman (The Guardian).
I’m trying to find a space where determinism and existentialism co-exist. I just keep coming back to the line from the TV show Angel: “if nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do.”
Finished reading: Full Speed to a Crash Landing by Beth Revis 📚
The first novella in a series of three. At first I thought it might not be the right moment for me to read this, but I’m glad I stuck with it. The payoff is great.
Finished reading: Dark Russian Angel by Odette Stone 📚
📚💬 “… there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things,’ or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
📚💬 “… once you become convinced that something you’ve been attempting is impossible, it’s a lot harder to keep on berating yourself for failing.” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Finished reading: Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell 📚
I really enjoyed this! Sad boys falling in love in space.
📺🍿 How I Met Your Mother co-creator Craig Thomas wrote about .
I replied with this:
This has me thinking about the voice-over narration in The Wonder Years, beautifully done by Daniel Stern. A Christmas Story (which for years my dad would put on for its 24-hour marathon) came out in 1983. The Wonder Years ran 1988-1993. What other films and shows use this device? (I think maybe 8-Bit Christmas does?) Are they all doing the same thing with it? What does it do that stories without flashback voiceover don’t? I would read the heck out of a smart pop culture essay about this.