The Monday Post

I'm not only quitting the news; I'm quitting many things. So many things that I feel like I'm on my way to becoming a first-rate quitter. Here are some other notable quits going on.

- I'm quitting Gmail's archive feature. Filling a bottomless hole with emails doesn't have a net positive impact on my life.

- I will quit my year-old-and-growing archive of photos and will save but a few. The backups aren't worth it.

- I'd like to quit the more mindless parts of my music collection and listen to more jazz and classical.

- I'm in the slow process of quitting a lot of my cotton. Cotton is an okay fabric for indoors, but it underperforms in the outdoors.

- I've done well with quitting eating out, or, as I sometimes think of it, paying a lot for extra salt, but there remains room for improvement here.

- I've quit the trumpet. This is a bad result of having too little time and making painful cuts.

- I don't spend much time on personal software projects anymore, and this too is bad. I enjoy writing and running simulations to answer questions I think up such as: "What's the average number of points on a Boggle board?" or "What's the ideal Yahtzee strategy?" But like with the trumpet, painful cuts have been made.

Adulthood has for me been the unsteady progression from an abundance of free time to a perceived lack thereof. I suspect this is the way of things for most people.

Last year I experienced the inflection point where I stopped looking for things to do and began looking for the time to do the things I no longer had the time to do. Mainly, this involved denying the inflection point's existence and waiting for things to settle down.

This new year I feel a resolution to do something about it. It started off as trying harder to get more done, but I know my willpower limitations pretty well by now and that I'm not going to fix the problem permanently merely by trying harder. I'm developing a weekly routine to budget time for my priorities and am thus trying to become the organized kind of person I used to laugh at.

My schedule is a work in progress, but for now expect this: a new Just
Enough Craig post on Monday and Thursday evenings.