For my personal 26 Books in '26 challenge, I'm aiming for a non-school book every two weeks.
When I started reading In Praise of Slowness on the first as my first book of the challenge, I decided to aim for 1/10th of the book a day - it works nicely for that book because there's 10 chapters, but for other books, I'll just divide the page count.
My reasoning was that if I had a day where I didn't get my reading in, I'd still be okay. I can even miss 4 days of reading every two weeks and still stay on track.
This turned out to be just the right line of thinking.
I couldn't get any reading done yesterday because just moving my eyes across the page set off the vertigo and made me have to run and puke.
When we're setting goals, we've gotta make sure we add a buffer for life, otherwise, we'll fall behind, beat ourselves up, and quit.
With that buffer, I'm still more than on track and I don't feel like a broke a "streak" because that buffer was already built into the plan.
Developed a minor ear infection that turned into a horrible vertigo episode yesterday.
Couldn't even scroll through TikTok without getting nauseous!
Thank goodness for telehealth - a three minute call with a doc and I had a prescription for antibiotic ear drops.
Feeling better this morning. Still a minor ache in the ear, but no vertigo.
Thank goodness.
Classes start tomorrow and I do not want to deal with dizziness during the semester!
My Word of the Year for 2026 is Discipline, and one of the practices I'm undertaking in that is no arguing on the internet.
Productive conversation, yes.
But not engaging with trolls, sea lions, or others who present bad faith arguments - no matter how quick those dopamine hits are.
Still arguing with myself about whether I'll also avoid scrolling through ratioed threads/posts... another quick source of dopamine that is maybe not really taking me where I want to go in my growth...
I'm at the age where staying up until midnight for the New Year is not going to happen.
But I also live in a neighborhood where there's a good chance I'll get woke up by fireworks and or gunshots going off as others ring in the New Year.
Tomorrow starts my 26 in '26 books reading challenge.
Already have my first book picked out.
In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honore
