Friday, August 23, 2019

New year's resolutions for the 2019-2020 academic year

Although in some ways this is a bit of a masochistic exercise, I'm going to write up a short list of resolutions for the academic year as I did last year and some years before. Two of my main motivations for doing this are that 1) I haven't posted anything in August yet, and 2) I should be working on revising a book chapter that's due Sept. 3 and/or writing a new syllabus for the first-year writing class I'll be teaching in a couple of weeks. And nothing beats procrastination as a motivation for making new year's resolutions, right? No? Hmmm....

Well, anyway, last year I had deleted my Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ (RIP) accounts, so I was able to get more work done (somewhat). Unfortunately, I have drifted back onto Twitter, which I'll probably have to disconnect from sooner or later because it's so depressing. If I can keep away from Twitter, I'd like to do more reading and writing (in addition to the required reading and writing I do for my classes). I'd like to try to do some of that reading and writing in Chinese, too.

I could also try to spare some more time for family activities. Last fall was nice for that (at least for a while) because we had "family time" on Fridays, but this fall we'll all be in school on Fridays, so we might have to join the crowds on Saturday.

Hmmm... this is beginning to sound more like a wish list than a list of resolutions. Maybe I'll come back and fill in the blanks later... [Update, 8/27/19: I took action on my "wish list" yesterday by deleting my Twitter account. So I'll either get more things done or I'll spend inordinate amounts of time skimming my LinkedIn feed...]

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