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Tag: Hobonichi

February 6, 2021

January recap

The groundhog said six more weeks of winter, and right on schedule an Arctic blast is heading toward us. We had days of rain this week but now snow and sub-zero temperatures are on their way. Good times. In other news, while I can’t say that every day is just like the one before, they are way too similar for my liking. At least Bill Murray was eventually able to modify his behavior to escape Groundhog Day. Meanwhile, here in Missouri, the vaccine has made it to hospital staff (which is very good) but not much past that.

WORK

I been teaching my undergraduate class in hybrid format for the last two weeks. This means that some students come to class and the rest log in remotely on Zoom. I’m in a classroom that has a non-pandemic capacity of 84 and a pandemic capacity of 31. So far I’ve had four or five students show up in person out of the 29 total in the class. I may get more, although probably not this week, what with the cold snap. But even having a handful makes it feel a bit more like a normal class. I am not good yet at managing the balance between the two groups, although we’ve had some stretches where people from both sites are talking. I’ll get back on our Teaching & Learning Center’s website and see if they have tips I haven’t thought of yet. It’s a work in progress, and it’s tiring, but it is so nice to be back in the classroom. And the mask isn’t nearly as inhibiting as I thought it would be; I have frequently forgotten I’m wearing it.

We have had several department meetings, none of them particularly enjoyable. We did revive our longest-running seminar as a Zoom meeting this week, and that worked well. It was lovely to see everyone again, and the paper was good, with excellent analysis from the discussant and equally insightful questions from the rest of the participants. Scholarship occurred!

Papers are being revised for resubmission to journals. Grant proposals are being written.

READING/WATCHING/LISTENING

I finished one novel and part of a second in January. That was it. It’s the least I’ve read in years, probably more than a decade. I wanted to read, I wasn’t having reader’s block, I just didn’t have the time. The one book I did complete was excellent: Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel about BBC people during the early years of WWII and the Blitz: Human Voices. It follows the fortunes of a handful of producers, assistants, and voice talent over the course of a few months. It’s very episodic with not much plot to speak of. People come and go, they experience love, career events, and sorrows. She drops the reader into the setting without explanation and you have to navigate any number of acronyms and jargon, but I just went with the flow.

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January 4, 2021

2021

It did seem at times as if 2020 was never going to end, but I guess it had to one way or another. I haven’t blogged since September and I’m of two minds about blogging regularly (mostly thinking no, but never say never). But it felt weird not to do some kind of year-end post. So here I am again. Hello!

Reading

I read 54 books in 2020, which is considerably fewer than in recent years, but not bad considering the circumstances. I read most in literary fiction, then mysteries, then SFF, then finally romance. The romance genre and I have finally broken up for good, or at least for the foreseeable future. It’s been coming, as you’ve no doubt noticed. I’ve enjoyed going back to mysteries, mixing new authors with old favorites. And my classic novel readings have been rewarding.

I’ve basically given up challenges and reading awards lists; I mostly ignored the Booker lists (both international and English-language) and not much on my favorite Goldsmith’s longlist appealed this year. I also just didn’t have the headspace for challenging books unless I knew in advance I wanted to read them. I kept up my focus on translated novels and found some gems in Korean and Japanese fiction. And early in the year (it really was still in 2020) I read the most recent Javier Cercas.

I read a lot from my TBR, with half of the 54 coming from that. I cancelled library holds and/or sent back requested books unread. I have a handful on hold for this winter, but they’re familiar authors. I was one of the few people who seemed to like and value reading the Don Delillo novella, The Silence. Yes, it was a lesser Delillo in some ways but it also speaks so much to our current conditions, or at least it did to me.

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May 17, 2016

My ToDo list system

This is not a post about the wonders of the Bullet Journal. Just to get that out of the way so anyone looking for a BuJo discussion isn’t disappointed.

Now that I’m more than five months into my 2016 productivity setup I’d been thinking about writing an update, and a Twitter conversation today motivated me to do a quick post.

Standard caveat: Everyone is different, with different needs, interests, and psychological makeup, so whatever works for you is the best system ever. If anything I do resonates with you, or sounds like something that might work, feel free to ask questions in the comments or just go off and try it yourself.

The hardest part of my productivity system is figuring out a way to make ToDo lists that work for me, which means get me to do the things that are on them. I like lists a lot, but I hate having ToDo items hanging over me. These two feelings are contradictory, so I’m frequently tweaking whatever method I’ve adopted. Right now, what is working best, and has been working for the last few months, is combining four different lists in three different places.

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January 17, 2016

Organizing 2016

2016 planners

I was perusing my old blog to see what I’d written about planners and diaries and discovered that I had written organization posts in both 2014 and 2015. So it seems only right that I post about my 2016 planner setup. For the past four or five years I’ve been using only paper calendars, diaries, and task list systems, no electronic ones, and my class prep has stabilized into paper form as well (I’ve switched back and forth between paper and computer-based notes over the years).

For the third year in a row I’m switching up the type of planner I use. I really liked the bound weekly planner I used last year and I’d intended to use the 2016 version. But the one drawback was that even with 30-minute increments, sometimes I didn’t have quite enough room for all my appointments. My year is shaped by the academic calendar, so I have quite a bit of stuff to write down during the semesters and fewer routine engagements and meetings between them. Within the semesters, though, my administrative responsibilities bunch up in specific weeks, and I can have a dozen appointments in a day. Add to that having to change appointments because students or faculty (or I) suddenly can’t make a scheduled time, and the pages can get really messy and there’s not much room to rewrite in those slots.

I’d used a day-per-page diary in a Filofax a few years ago, but that format winds up being very bulky and you don’t get a good look at the week unless you add in a weekly diary (or it comes included). There are bound A5 diaries that come with monthly, weekly, and daily pages, but I find the A5 too big as a daily carry and again, they get thick and heavy. So I was really intrigued by the Hobonichi, a Japanese planner that comes in both A5 and A6 size, with the A6 also coming in an English version. It’s a daily format, but the paper is Tomoe River, which is very thin while still being fountain-pen friendly (another requirement of mine).

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