Read this on galpod.com. I started reading James Clear's Atomic Habits before the Christmas break and finished it last week. It's possible that my feeling that this is a collection of blog posts held together by anecdotes stems from my intermittent (at best) reading of it. And I've read it during particularly difficult weeks, so I may have been less kind because of it. That doesn't negate the fact that you'd do well to just go onto James Clear's website instead of buying the

Read this on galpod.com. I know, I know. That's going to be confusing. But I anticipate tomorrow and Friday to be extremely crazy what with flying to Israel and my dad's memorial. So I'm trying to stay ahead of this particular curve. We'll see how that works out. Saturday: Good habits formed Journalling every morning is one of the good habits I managed to (roughly) keep this year. I write three things I'm grateful for most mornings. It has helped me a lot to think about my pr

Read this on galpod.com. If you haven't yet checked out James Clear's website and you're interested in productivity in any way, go check it out now. Honestly. He talks about goals and achievements in a way that makes so much sense to me. Specifically, he talks about setting up a system as opposed to setting goals. I liked the metaphor he uses of rudder and oars. The goals are the rudder; they determine which way the boat is going. The system of habits you've set up is your oa

Read this on galpod.com. One of the reasons summer holidays freak me out (and freaked me out as a kid) is that I love my routine. I need to know what's going to happen next. It helps me get through the day. I would love to be spontaneous and go with the flow, but I'm just not that person. With time (and experience) I learned to accept that. And once I accepted that I needed routine and schedule in order to be productive and thrived, I started scheduling most of my day, almost

Read this on galpod.com. If you've been anywhere NEAR productivity blogs, books, or gurus, you know that deliberate practice is all the rage lately. Deliberate practice consists of picking a skill and working on it, deliberately, consistently, with feedback. A couple of months back, I made a list of skills that writers should have. I've put it on the bottom of this post as well :) To improve my writing skills, I want to work on each of these skills. But, I can't work on all o

Read this on galpod.com. I have no time for a real post today. Last week has been crazy, and this one is shaping up to be quite similar. I always manage to forget what the last two weeks before a school break look like. BUT I started a "Word of the day" tweet on my twitter. Every day I'll tweet the Merriam-Webster's word of the day and use it in a sentence with a little bit around it to make for a fun little tidbit. I don't want to call it a story, but it's a fragment of a st

Read this post on galpod.com. Hello! I'm experimenting with blogging every day. Because I'm very new to this, I need your help. Please take a minute to drop me a line and let me know what you think. I will post stories, thoughts, and possibly recipes (if I'm having an off day). Here's the post for today. I started keeping a reading log last week, and I LOVE it. I had sort of a reading log back when I was reading for my PhD, but I was always able to keep the main points in my

Hello! I'm experimenting with blogging every day. Because I'm very new to this, I need your help. Please take a minute to drop me a line and let me know what you think. I will post stories, thoughts, and possibly recipes (if I'm having an off day). Here's the post for today. I grew up in a small village in which everyone knew everyone. Our library consisted of two bedrooms lined with bookshelves, and a third with a desk and some bean bags. I spent most of my afternoons and ev

Hello! I'm experimenting with blogging every day. Because I'm very new to this, I need your help. Please take a minute to drop me a line and let me know what you think. I will post stories, thoughts, and possibly recipes (if I'm having an off day). Here's the post for today. I’ve known that habits are an excellent way to get stuff done for a while. But at some point, over a year ago now, I read a post by James Clear that made everything clicked for me. Suddenly, I didn’t just