Archive for January, 2013
The theme of the year: If it doesn’t work, change something. Now, not later.

Only a couple of weeks into the New Year, and my resolutions need adjusting.  Because I am rushed for time, and only have 5 minutes, I will say this:

  • I haven’t exercised once this year.  On New Year’s Day I went for a nice long walk, but other than that, nothing.  I still want to exercise once each week, but I clearly need something more structured in place to make it happen.
  • I’m doing awesome with limiting my screen time.  I’ve only logged onto Facebook a handful of times, and only to send critical messages to friends/family who I don’t have any other way of contacting.  And I’ve only taken a few Instagram shots, all of which were to document sleep, since I felt like it was such an unusual event that deserved documentation.
  • Not included on my short list of resolutions here, was my commitment to reading 3 journal articles/week for my research.  Shouldn’t be too tough, right?  Well, 2 weeks in, and I’ve only read 3 articles in their entirety.  Certainly, I’ve gone through many more articles than that to fact-check certain small details, but do those really count?  I’ve decided that I’ve set the bar too high for myself.  I’ll try to read 2 articles/week instead, and see how I fare.
  • I’m doing better with being present and patient with my kids.
  • I’m having second thoughts about submitting my grant.  There are many reasons for this, all of which deserve their own post.  For now, I’m going to try to focus on how lucky I am to have a job where I can work part-time and learn new things.  I’m going to try to focus on learning things that will be useful for careers in the private sector, because I just don’t know about this academic stuff.  More on that later.

So that’s my little update.  How are YOU faring this New Year?