When I was ~6 years old, my mom was a Creative Memories scrapbooking materials distributor. I don’t know how well that translates to today’s MLM influencer culture, but I do remember that it paid for our FL resident annual Disney passes. She’d have the parties you’re supposed to have to sell product, and her friends/clients would come over and scrapbook, but then, of course, we’d have to clean up after.
Enter THE MAGIC SCRAP.
It was a game: Mom (who, it’s clarifying to note, was a second-grade teacher) would choose a random piece of trash in the living room — my sister Emma and I would scramble around, pick up most of the trash, any piece of trash, the smallest corner of paper almost lost in the green shag carpet — and then whoever got the Magic Scrap™️ would win.
the Great Magic Scrap-ifying
Flash-forward to college and graduate pd: I’m not a kid anymore, not even a teenager, but I’m discovering that the door to effective time-management and study habits haven’t changed all that much from the same core impulse of Mary Poppins’ cleaning game or the Magic Scrap. I still need a game. And whereas I once would have shrugged it off socially as ‘childish’ or ‘strategic,’ I’m choosing to lean into it now (and there’s no better TikTok trend to describe it than this one).
I’m no longer ashamed: I’ll admit, when I had chapters of reading for my TESOL class last semester, that I set up a line of Haribo Berries to eat, one-by-one, as I finished sections of readings.
If you knew me in college, you knew my Google calendar was chock-full of blocks saved out for class, homework, coffee, and events. I’ve switched to iCal since then, but in many ways the guiding principles have remained the same (though since the pandemic I haven’t been half as busy (thank God)). Still, I found myself lagging: so I turned back to the spreadsheet.
At the top of the month, I bit the bullet and spent an hour and a half consolidating all my syllabi into a single spreadsheet— with class dates, presentations, paper due dates, and readings aligned on a single page. It’s a pinned tab on my Safari window now, next to my emails.
it’s giving Cher
This approach to habit growing isn’t but a step and a half away from another approach: ironic self-care, seen here, in which a person tells their therapist that by doing healthy habits for a ‘bit,’ as a joke, ironically, they’re actually having a really nice life.
The reason I’m bringing this up, and why I’m thinking about this, is that I think my approach to reading is somewhere on the spectrum between “I love a game” and “I love a gimmick.”
The gimmick is what brought me to StoryGraph, an independently-owned competitor to GoodReads. I believe it’s superior, not just because it’s not owned by Amazon, but because it’s giving me a lot more information about what my reading habits are and sort of gamifying the act of reading. You can import your entire GoodReads dataset into StoryGraph for free, so the transition is seamless, plus you get to see stuff like this:
It’s so awesome. It calls me out! It’s like a CoStar for my reading habits.
It’s a given. A lot of the books I read are and will be for class (hence why my most-read author is William Faulkner), but I still love the amount of knowledge I get to have about my reading trends. “Know thyself,” they say, and know myself I do.
You’re rambling now
OKAY: so, as we close the first full week of Saved To Drafts, I’ve introduced two aspects that I hope will become running footnotes to my letters: What I’m listening to, and What I’m Reading.
From now on, Wednesdays I’ll include a footnote under my letter about what I’m listening to on repeat, or something about my latest Spotify playlist, and on Saturdays, I’ll review something I’ve read recently (and there’s a LOT in the pipeline, let me tell you).
See you Wednesday,