New Year's Program Recommendations

I took a bit of a hiatus from the blog during the week of Christmas, and then that sort of rolled right into New Year's and so I'm playing catch up. But only a little!

I used to be very much against this whole "new year, new you" kind of idea that we get hammered with right around now. But this year it's actually something that's working for me. I've got a lot of things I want to change about me, how I live, how I deal with the world, and how I accomplish goals. I've had plans for a lot of things, but there was always little stuff standing in my way. But after the week and a half of vacation that was the Christmas holiday this year, it's just turned out that New Year's was a really good time to get started.

It really has felt like a bit of a clean break with the past this time around. So I've got a million things going on. First and foremost, to keep up with this blog and try to not just update regularly but also grow my readership and try to get some interaction with my readers. So please, comment on posts if you have something to say!

I'm also trying a few new ways to keep myself organized, including working with Evernote. One thing I'm doing is using that to keep track of all the things I want to write about, which should help me with updating this on time. So far, I like it quite a bit. Especially because I can use it on both computers, my phone, and my Nook with all the same information synced up across all devices.

Along with blog updates, I'm also using it to keep track of the deep cleaning/organizing project that I'm doing around the house. Plus another similar notebook where I'm starting to list the bigger and more long term renovations that we'd like to do, like new shelving in the linen closet.

I'm also continuing to use Todoist and Toggl for my task manager and time-keeping. Both are great programs, and I highly recommend them. Todoist is especially nice because unlike all of the other popular task managers that people like to talk about, it allows you to set up recurring tasks in a number of different ways. So you can have something that occurs every day, every Tuesday, every third Monday, etc. It's been a lifesaver so far.

The biggest fault I have with ToDoist is that it's useless to try to use it on my phone in any way. The app only syncs once a day unless you pay for the premium service and I just don't have that in the budget right now. Plus the mobile browser version of the site doesn't sync properly even when it does sync. So it's really only useful for me in Chrome, but that's okay because that's primarily where I need it.

Of course, I also still use Google Calendar for scheduling day to day things, but I've also started trying to adapt to using a mix of digital and analog scheduling. I'm still experimenting to find the right mix of everything for me. But scheduling my day by the hour is actually really helping me with time management, so anybody that's a freelancer or a stay-at-home whatever should consider it. All of my bills I'm starting to keep organized in a paper planner that stays on the desk, because I've realized that I don't really ever look at the month-long view in my Google Calendar so I don't see upcoming bills and paychecks as easily as I need to for our budgeting issues. The planner to the left is similar to the one I'm using, only I think mine is prettier (thanks Cyn!) and I love that it's got tabs to quickly flip to the different months.

Hopefully everyone else is having fun with trying to work out new ways to accomplish the goals that they've set for themselves. Don't overreach, but it's always worthwhile to try to make things a little easier on you, you deserve a break.

There is no such thing as a "real" book

Way, way back in 2006 or so, the bookstore where I worked started selling e-readers. I think it was a Sony e-reader, and they tried to make this big push out of it because the store itself was failing (as in they've gone bankrupt and no longer exist, the writing was on the wall even then) and they thought something new and shiny would actually help.

It was almost instant how quickly the "real" books vs. e-books debate started. And at first, part of me was on the "real" books side. But I kept getting drawn back to this e-reader on display, and looking at it. The thing is, I started reading random walls of text online when I was 13, and fanfiction became a big part of my life around 1998 or so. So the idea of reading on a screen wasn't foreign to me. I still recognized some limitations (I don't learn as well reading academic material on a computer instead of on paper, for example) but in general I thought the idea had merit.

But I still held on to this "real" books thing, possibly out of stubbornness. This idea that only if you love physical books could you be a "reader" and that it was a huge house full of book that defined a person. Which was also evident if you went into my guest room, where my bookshelves were, because they filled an entire wall, largely double-rowed, and with extra stacks all over the place.

It took a long time for me to get out of that mode, and I think one of the things that did it for me was traveling a lot. Even for something as simple as going home to visit my parents, I would always pack a book or two with me. Usually two because I wouldn't know what I would be in the mood to read.

Then I started flying around the country to work on my latest film project, and during a trip to Las Vegas last year I only packed one book because I was trying to pack light and I had all this camera equipment. Of course, I ended up finishing my book on the plane to Vegas and spent three days looking around for a bookstore so I would have something to read on the way home.

On top of that, I started noticing a lot of the really great features that technology could bring to reading. I've never been a person who writes in books, it seems disrespectful to me. But an electronic book? I can bookmark favorite pages, highlight quotes I like, write notes in the margins if I felt like. In short, I could do all the things I may have always wanted without any actual lasting damage to the book itself.

On top of that, I could carry hundreds of books, for any mood I might be in, with less weight than a hard cover. Not to mention being able to change the size of the text, the contrast of the letters, and other things that started to make reading more accessible.

It also helped that around this same time the newer generation of e-readers was coming out. They were quickly and efficiently solving a lot of the problems the earliest devices had. Every time a new one is released they add more features that are making books more and more amazing. Children's books that can read aloud to kids or help them learn to read as they go. The ease of jumping back and forth between footnotes and the text (a must if you're reading a Mary Roach book).

So to cling to the idea that a physical printed page is the only thing that counts as a real book is just stubbornness. Yes, it's a different experience. And yes, I still own a wall of books (though they're no longer double-rowed and stacked everywhere, my rule is they must fit on the bookshelves I have, so if I get new books I need to let go of old ones I never reread). Books on paper won't go away any time soon, though bookstores might.

And that is sad, browsing a website is no substitute to browsing a bookshelf for me. It doesn't lead to as many new and weird discoveries.

But I think people who love books and who love reading need to start looking at everything that e-books have to offer us. They're were never designed to somehow steal our books from us, they were designed to give our books to us more easily, to give us a new experience with them, and to help us stop breaking our backs carrying around everything we might want to read at a given time.

E-books are real books. And we can live in a world with both.

This post may or may not have been brought to you by the fact that I got a Nook for my birthday and I've already realized how easy it is to indulge my love of books and getting new/free/bargain books without also ending up with them taking over my guest room.