Summer (Writing) Reading! challenge: Week 8

Read, read, read. I have been only reading this week. It has been wonderful. I have had a pile of reading that I have needed to get done for a while now and am now actually sitting down and getting it done. Most of the reading has nothing to do with my teaching, nor did it have anything to do with my main Ph.D. research reading. So, although I have known that I should read through these things and make good notes, especially for the new direction I want to take in my project, I always put them aside as non-essential reading. Well, now that it is quiet and I don't have a pile of "essential" reading to do for teaching purposes, I have the time to dwindle this list at last.

Something that I have not been as good at doing but know I need to get better at, especially as my life gets busier with many different kinds of events and responsibilities, is to make sure that I take efficient notes from these articles so that I don't have to re-read them in full to get a better understanding for what they contain. Scrivener has been a good tool for me to make sure that I know how the article fits into which part of my project. I still tend to make notes on the PDF copy of the article outside of Scrivener and then store it in Scrivener, mostly because I haven't found a way to easily highlight and comment on the text when it is within the program. Non-the-less, it works well at the moment so I am willing to read in one place and store/reopen in another.

As I wrote last week, my newly acquired Things app is keeping my daily tasks at bay. On Friday afternoons, my new habit is to bring together all of the tasks that I want to accomplish in the next week and put them in my app. Once there, I can sort and assign my reading to the days I know I can tackle them. Right now, I am trying to find longer reading projects that would take 3-4 hours because I have this much uninterrupted time (a summer luxury for sure!). The philosophy behind Getting Things Done is helping me offload my ideas and goals onto a workable and realistic platform.