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Monthly Reflection

First Published: 2025 May 1

Draft 1

Oh boy what a whirlwind of a month!

Five things I was looking forward to last month:

Last month I had some overarching goals. Let’s see how we did with those:

I kept a living document of daily reflection goals, which I’ve now sort of stopped. While it was helpful for me then, it was also twenty minutes out of each day that I spent filling it out. Time passes regardless of how I spend it, but I have to wonder whether it’s a good use of my time.9 I’m going to restart it, but I don’t really necessarily know where my goals might be. That’s not true, but I do suddenly have a much shorter timeline than I thought for my degree, which makes me kind of feel anxious about what all I will need to do. Still, I cannot write if I do not exist, and so let’s structure the goals from that basis.

When I reflected10 on my goals for this phase of my life11, I did come up with a tiered list of priorities. Structuring the reflection like that might not be the worst idea.12

Before making my list of daily reflections, let’s think about five things I’m excited for, five SMART13 goals, and five general themes I want to shoot for.14 Also, five great things from last month that I didn’t have as listed things last month.

April Highlights

Five things I have to look forward to in May:

Five quantized25 goals for the month:

Five amorphous ideals for the month, like last month’s “areas I want to focus”28:

Looks great!

In making my list of general priorities, family was at the top, but it’s not an ideal here. Why? I generally feel like the way I am with my family is relatively good, and so it does not need to be an area of specific focus like these other five, where I feel that I am very lacking.

So: let’s revise our daily reflection template with my ordered tiers of goals in mind. Within each numbered entry, bulleted points are nominally of about the same importance, or at least feel flexible enough that I cannot always put one above another.

Daily Reflection

  1. Top Priorities:

  2. Secondary Priorities:

  3. Adjacent to Primary and Secondary:37

  4. Cleaning?38

  5. External Obligations:

  6. Tertiary Goals:39

  7. Quaternary Goals:


  1. and a shocking number of parents. Shocking only in that I didn’t expect them to be as into the process as they were

  2. read: generally structured and with an explicit formula

  3. shocking

  4. something something motivation levels

  5. read: I exist in a community and that means that there exist obligations to others that I must fulfill

  6. one might say obsessive, if they wished

  7. give or take the off by a few days tracking error of when I started or finished a book

  8. good to know I’m not crazy for thinking so

  9. oh, actually, typing that here makes me realize that it absolutely is. On the days where I didn’t do it, I got overwhelmed with stress. That’s good to know. Let’s move to it after this

  10. I should really make a new post called what we don’t post and then have different notes for each folly I’ve written and then not made public

  11. read: until the end of summer, which is (not coincidentally) the end of my doctoral time

  12. took a break here in order to run through the rest of the ink within and then clean pens (see: I do hobbies) to set up for the next ink that I’m trying

  13. specific, measureable, achievable, relevant, time-bound

  14. that is, five things that are absolutely not SMART (gotta love acronymizers who make really aggressive things when taking the antonym

  15. in part because I was up and then started making really risky bets so that I could go home early. Ended up like 2% ahead (read: 20 cents), so tossed that in as an extra ante

  16. !

  17. I feel like I’ve almost certainly mused before about feeling unmoored from history

  18. and second

  19. exciting in the literal sense of excited like an atom, full of energy, not necessarily positive

  20. as far as I know, it’s not TAing when I’m not a graduate student

  21. note to self, remember to figure out difference between thesis, defense, dissertation, and everything else that people call this finishing of my academic striving

  22. it’s a wildlife preserve, I think

  23. this is similar to a rephrasing of the first thing

  24. and oop, I really need to pack for that

  25. I refuse to use quantifiable. Wait is there a difference between quantized and quantified? Looks like quantized is a science only word right now but. Wow I’m going to be (more) insufferable

  26. meaning well cited, contains all the information I think that it needs, and has the figures which are most pressing

  27. current front runners include: what does abortion mean, how should Catholics treat the government given its fundamentally unjust nature, punishment, the many ways that we need to ignore saints because they spoke on material reality rather than faith and morals and are therefore explicitly wrong (ok so this is also about punishment), and what it means for me to be Jewish and Catholic

  28. why am I using a different term? great question

  29. love that this is one word, curious what its origins are, guess it gets a note

  30. is post it a trademarked term still? probably

  31. and, of course, work on the friendships

  32. back to the 10 oz of espresso a day life

  33. I don’t know why the term lunch bothers me, but I think part of it is that I often have started eating something over the course of an hour or five, and it feels wrong to call a six hour meal lunch

  34. it is burning hot down here. Apparently there was a heater stuck to on until the other day down here

  35. there we go, a distinction between absence of sound and the actual goal of silence

  36. though tragically, not the mug I so desperately crave

  37. read: things that will help me with the above goals but not goals in and of themselves

  38. yes this one gets its own tab because I think that it’s more important that the below but less than the above

  39. mmmm off by N numbering

  40. love that sonic song

  41. consistent color as writing, regardless of pressure/amount put on page

  42. doesn’t have different hues as light hits differently