Weeknote 1

by Sunita

This is the first in what I hope is a regular Sunday series. I got the idea from Baldur Bjarnason, who got the idea from Amy Hupe and other people. A Weeknote is pretty much what it sounds like: a weekly report that is similar to journaling but more public. I don’t journal, and while I’m good at making to-do lists I’m very bad at doing the week-in-review or week-to-come lists which are also cornerstones of many productivity systems. I’ll use my weeknotes to talk about work, reading, and miscellaneous stuff.

Work

I have been working on revisions to a paper that needs to be sent out sooner rather than later. It’s our third round because every time you submit to a journal you need to tweak it for that particular audience. It’s been rejected twice, which is not unusual in my discipline, especially when the paper appeals across several audiences but isn’t necessarily core to any of them. This is the biggest tweak we’ve done since our initial post-conference-presentation revisions, and my part has taken me a while. But I was finally able to get myself into the headspace I needed (changing disciplinary audiences is harder than moving to a different audience within the same discipline), and I’m almost done. Which is good because I’m thoroughly sick of this paper and need it to go away.

I also had some teaching and tutorial work to do this week despite not being in residence. Recommendation letter, grad students, and recruitment do not go away just because I want to.

Reading

I finished a couple of books this week, both library reads that were about to expire. Both were excellent. I read Claudia Rankine’s The White Card, which is the script of a play she wrote that was produced last year in Boston. I have a review of it scheduled for tomorrow. I also finished Juan Gabrial Vasquez’s The Shape of the Ruins, which I read as part of the Man Booker International longlist. I’ve only read two plus parts of three others, but it is going to be hard to beat. Review to come.

Productivity stuff

This probably deserves its own post, but I’m still making changes to my tech tools. I’m working in Linux as much as I can, which I find soothing compared to the noise that MacOS and Windows10 computers come with. I splurged and bought a like-new refurbished Google Pixelbook (it was massively on sale at Best Buy), and it’s a pleasure to type on. I told myself I could return it if I didn’t like it, but I don’t see it going back to the store. 🙂

The bigger shift was that I have returned to the Mostly Dumphone life. I had been eyeing the Nokia 3310 since it came out and TheHusband and I decided to take the plunge this week. It is basically a dumbphone because the data parts are so slow and crippled. And back to T9 predictive text for messages! I can get work emails on it (which right now doesn’t matter but will matter for traveling when I’m back to teaching and on committees). And I can listen to music and podcasts and it has bluetooth so I can use wireless earbuds. But basically it’s just a phone. I’ll write more about this after I’ve been at it for a while.

Next Week

First up is finishing the paper and working on a different project I’ve been wanting to get to. I also have one admin task left, not a bad one but one that takes mental effort and meetings with people. They really never go away!

Hopefully the weather will warm up and I can spend more time outside (we were in the 60s and 70s last week and then a storm crashed through and dropped us down to freezing again, blergh). When I’m on campus I’m going to retreat to my library cubbyhole so no one can find me.