"Midterm" reflections on August's "new year's resolutions"

Back in August, I wrote up a few new year's resolutions for the 2024-2025 academic year. In the past, I've usually written them up and then ignored them, but this time I'm going to take a look back at them and figure out what I did, what I didn't do, and what course corrections I might make.

• "Try to get up earlier in the morning"--the idea here was go get up early enough to do my Duolingo and a little writing. This didn't work at all as planned. I did manage to get up early some mornings and do a little journaling, but I didn't have enough time to do my Duolingo before I had to get the day started. And many days, I woke up just in time to jump in the shower before starting to get my son ready for school.
• "Use my commute time to read"--since I didn't have time to do my Duolingo in the morning, I usually did it on the trip into school. Sometimes I read on the way home from school, but a lot of times, I was using that time to catch up on work. 
• "Make time for writing"--I pretty much failed at this during the semester, unless you count my teaching-related writing and service-related writing. I had the usual amount of the former and, it seems, more than the usual amount for the latter. I did a few little revisions on a couple of book reviews that will be coming out soon, but besides that, I didn't work on any of the papers I have to revise.

So things didn't go quite as well as planned. I think one thing that cut down on my writing time was that I was teaching a new course, so that involved a lot of work to keep ahead of the students. This semester, I'll be teaching "old" courses (though of course I can't seem to stop myself from fiddling with the assignments), which might help. 

Another thing that might help in terms of the writing is that next semester, I'm rejoining a writing accountability group that has always forced me to spend at least an hour and a half a week on writing. I've always found that helpful. I need to finish that George Kerr paper first, then get started on the chapters I need to write for the collaborative biography. 

I think I need to add "going to bed earlier" to the list of resolutions because if I don't get to bed earlier, I can't wake up earlier. I'll try to work on that. I've been napping a lot recently because of some muscle relaxants I have had to take for a sciatica problem, but hopefully I'll get over that before vacation is over. Napping always throws off my evening sleep schedule. 

As for using commuting time for reading, I think I'll still end up doing Duolingo during the trip in. I'll try to do some reading on the way home. I'll have to decide what I want to read, though! Right now, I'm about a third of the way through David S. Reynolds' John Brown: Abolitionist, but I'm going to try to finish it before the semester starts. I have to think about what to read after that. Any ideas?