I’m not one for resolutions, but I do enjoy a good challenge. In order to shake things up I’ve decided on two particular challenges for the start of the year, I’ll no doubt add more afterwards.

Reducing Zombie Social News Consumption

I’ve decided that I waste too much time on certain websites, reddit and Hacker News being the two main culprits, and that I’m going to replace the time that I spend on them with something else. In this case I’ve decided to take up reading the New York Times when I have an idle moment on my phone instead of automatically opening a reddit app and mindlessly scrolling through page after page of distraction. That’s not to say that these sites don’t have value, they do, but I think that I long ago hit the point of diminishing returns.

Why not the Irish Times? Well, it’s an election year in the US and there’ll be plenty to watch as it plays out, the times is hardly unbiased but it is still the paper of record and I find that I end up reading a lot of NYT articles from the above social news sites. In addition, The New York Times Web and Smartphone subscription are cheaper due to their academic subscription discount which is a plus.

80 Books in 80 Days

I recently purchased a complete set of Penguin’s Little Black Classics in an effort to broaden my reading a bit, I’ve been mostly reading biographies lately and it’s getting a bit stale. Each of these books is short, about 50-60 pages in total, some are complete works: short stories and poetry and some are extracts from larger works. I plan to read them in order and to read at least one a day. 80 days from today (which, coincidentally, is April 1st!) I plan on having all 80 of them read, which roughly equates to one 350 page novel a week. I’ll be posting roughly once a week with a summary of the books that I have read.

I’ll be back in a week to post my progress!