#6 Weekend Bites šŖ
My kingdom for a routine!
Between traveling to Singapore, Covid isolation and a recent trip to visit my parents, my routine is completely out of whack. Bedtimes? What are those? A regular eating schedule? Never heard of it. My brain craves routine (this is why I used to like camp so much - an itinerary? Yes please) so this week Iāve been clawing back some semblance of a schedule. Alarms have been set, to-do lists have been created. I am still a child wrapped in an adult body, but at least that child can be somewhat organised. If your life is also feeling a bit like a loop-di-loop track, Iāve added a couple of links to this edition of Weekend Bites that you might find helpful. Have the best weekend!
I hope you feel pretty today. Listen to this as you read the newsletter:
Iām aware that goal setting and what feels like organising your life to the nth degree isnāt for everyone BUT for those of us who it is useful for, hereās a video you might enjoy. Itās very timely since we only have four months to the end of the year* plus the process that Cal Newport provides is super practical. Iām a fan of Newport and have found his books āDigital Minimalismā and āDeep Workā incredibly helpful over the last couple of years as I figure out how I work best. If youāre curious, my 3 keystone habits are:
Wake up at 7am every day (itās been three days and going strong so far!)
Go for a walk 4 x a week (at this rate, I need to do two today and two tomorrow)
Read for an hour a day (Iām reading everyday, but I donāt think itās for an hour)
Are there any habits or routines youāre trying to start this month? Feel free to share in the comments, Iād love to know.
*writes in mild panic
I love a metaphor. Here Rajiv Surendra (you might recognise him from the film Mean Girls) calmly tidies and organises a drawer aka your mind.
Iām a classic over-subscriber of newsletters. In a fit of optimism, I subscribe to anything that piques my interest - illustration, food, in-depth essays, listicles. I then spend the next six months ignoring every single email before finally manually unsubscribing from them one by one. However, one fellow Substack newsletter that I would like to recommend today is Very Short by
, a beautifully brief and well-written piece. āOne hundred hundred-word stories in one hundred daysā is the tagline. Curious, arenāt you? I havenāt been a subscriber for long, but what Iāve read so far has been beautiful and feeling inducing. Steemson is up to no. 70 but you can read the full archive on their Substack page. This is the one she sent out yesterday:Love found us in August, after midnight. She had red eyes and a dry laugh and this wild, shot smile and stayed up and up so that we had to stay up, too.
Love backed us into a corner, expectantly repeating her same flat jokes and squeezing us into each other. Ā
Love looked at me looking at you and ploughed on, talking about losing her mind and her least favourite book and asking questions and answering them for herself and finally, when her work was done and the sun had risen, Love said, you two really hate me, donāt you?
Have you heard of One Piece, the recent live-action adaptation of the hugely well-loved and long-running manga series and anime? Well, now you have. Itās on Netflix and despite never consuming any One Piece content before, Iāve become a fan of this new mini-series (or probably what will be a very long series if it remains popular, but itās only about eight episodes so far). Give it a watch and see if you enjoy it.
I recently finished reading Undoctored: The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients by Adam Kay. You might of heard of Kayās first book, This is Going to Hurt which has since been adapted into a TV show starring Ben Winshaw. In Undoctored we join Kay as he manages life after leaving medicine for good - his relationships, his halting writing career and, honestly, the lingering trauma of being a doctor. It sounds heavy, but Kay is a comic writer so recollections about awkwardly seeing an old colleague who thinks he left due to a mental breakdown or trying to explain to his parents why heās trying to be a TV writer are interlaced with amusing anecdotes from medical school or a poop story I canāt stop thinking about. If youāre a fan of memoirs and like the idea of reading about someone who truly is trying to make the best of a pretty awful situation, I recommend Kayās book. Reading that back, thatās a terrible recommendation, but I personally find it comforting to see how other navigate challenges and career changes. Maybe you do too.
I was really into this song when I heard it in the 2007 film āJunoā and then I started to hate it. This morning, Iām really into it again, so listen to this to kickstart your weekend:
I'm trying read for 30mins, 3 times a week and wake up at 7.30 :)