Reboot

New Year's resolutions are always dicey, so this week's blog reboot comes with no promises to either me or You. Still, if the endgame is more regular writing on top of Life Otherwise, it needs to start somewhere.

So it starts here.

I guess I was most excited about blogging in the pre-Facebook days, when the idea of generating a personalized website seemed far-out and progressive. Now it seems like another (slightly creaky) spoke in the social media wheelhouse. Still, it seems to me that as an outlet for regular and public writing, blogs still have their purpose.

The potential is still there.

So in the spirit of potentials, here's a short-list of three things for me to do this semester to personally increase professional (and therefore personal) satisfaction:

1. Regular writing. Blog as mental stretching exercise...but work on upcoming conferences necessarily opening up into larger projects. Like Blur says, "Yes, it really really really could happen."

2. More face-time. With students, this means scaffolding conferences into larger assignments, revisiting the notion of the Ron Christensen Memorial Oral Final Exam, and leaning on my advisees for more than 15 minutes a semester of "quality time."

3. Manage the inbox. Getting my personal email inbox down to double-digits was a personal victory. The goal is to do the same for the university address. Let's just say that there are miles to go before I sleep.