What a week! Between a busy travel schedule last weekend (and for the first three weekends of January), and the 11+ inches of snow we got on Wednesday, I feel like the busyness and the restfulness have finally balanced each other out. While I have loved the trips I have taken so far this year, I’m excited to have a weekend at home.
There has been some great link love over the past week or two that I can’t wait to share with you. January always seems like a fresh start and a chance to try new things and see if they work better for you than routines you may have had last year. Many of this week’s links are related to that – improving routines, schedules, and efficiency to make you happier this year.
By now, I’m sure everyone has seen, heard, or read Oprah’s Golden Globes speech. Not only was it a great, compelling speech, but there are a lot of public speaking tips the rest of us can take from it. Leave it to Oprah to teach us a lesson while giving her own speech.
I talk to my college friends and my sister about this all the time: making (and keeping up with) friends as an adult can be hard. I love these linked posts that pool advice from lots of people who have made it work, some in very unconventional ways.
Some of my favorite links to share this week are from Emily Thomas’s and Nancy Ray’s “How We Do It” series on their blogs. The two started the series with posts about organizing and managing time, moved on to organizing and managing finances this week, and will continue with five more topics over the next month. I always love seeing how other people make tasks work for them, and in my goal of simplifying, I’m trying to re-read these posts for any takeaways I can put into place in my own life.
On the theme of simplifying and time management, I love this post on the importance of white space. This was one of my biggest reasons for wanting to simplify things this year –
to add more white space to my calendar so I could get greater enjoyment out of the things that I love and the things that fill my calendar.
Lastly, another how-to post focusing on something else I want to improve – time spent reading. I used to read all the time, but after busy college semesters, and now with other things occupying my free time, I often set books on the back burner. My reading list has grown and grown, and I want to start digging in to some of the (hopefully) great books! Carly’s post on how she reads a lot is filled with do-able actions that I sometimes push away because I don’t think I have time. Hopefully getting past that first step (having books on hand) will make it easier to get into the habit of reading regularly.
With that, I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and maybe a chance to implement some of these tips!
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