Monday Thoughts 03

29 Dec, 2025

It's Monday morning, 10:55am as I start typing these notes. Technically we're still in 2025 by the calendar; but at work and in my planner we're in 2026 (week 1). These thoughts are scattered throughout the day as I type them today instead of all at once.

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Does anyone else try to peel clementines in one continuous...peel? Instead of ripping off one bit of a time. I see it as a bit of a challenge, and if it looks like even one little bit of the peel is going to break off I adjust and change directions. So far I think I've only "messed it up" once.

I love clementines.

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I'm typing these thoughts in Notepad, as a .txt file, on my Windows 11 laptop. In the top right corner I see a settings cog, a little person representing my account, and a Copilot icon. I don't mind LLMs, but Notepad doesn't need this feature creep.

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I'm trying something new this year: instead of a bullet journal, I picked up a 2026 Moleskine A5 weekly planner (link goes to Indigo, a Canadian book store). I don't use a lot of space for my daily entries in my journal for "to do" items, and this book has one side for daily items and one side for notes. The side for notes will be short, point-form things, and if I need/want to write anything longer I'll go with my journal, or perhaps more likely, a one-page notebook.

Of course, I recently discovered I had some interesting planners¹ on my Amazon wishlist that I should have picked up instead of the Moleskine book I ended up buying. But that'll be a 2027 purchase I guess.

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My 2024-2025 weeknotes "series" wrapped up today, finishing Week 52. Last year I don't think I wrote any notes for the last weeks of the year - I think because I took the two weeks of Christmas & New Year's off, so I wasn't at a computer regularly. Going forward my weeknotes will be hosted here - but I want to set up a new template for 2026. I'm not sure what it looks like yet, but one of the things I'm going to do is take inspiration from Jedda and do a "post roll-off" for my links. Currently I have 64 links in my Raindrop public list; I'd like to get that down to a smaller number and rotate links out of the list. This will let me re-visit links I've shared in the past, instead of clipping them and never seeing them again.

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In 2026 I'd like to use my phone a little less. Not out of an altruistic goal to reduce screen time or because I think I'm addicted to my smart phone, but because I realized in the past few weeks that I'm returning to apps like Discord/Mastodon/Reddit over and over and getting nothing out of them; I'll scroll Reddit and either get the same things every time or a bunch of posts that aren't very interesting to me. How many times do I need to see a post on /r/StarWarsOutlaws about how underrated the game is, and how it was "done dirty" by reviewers? How many times do I need to read about bad drivers or public transportation woes, seeing the same arguments and discussion every time?

I hope to address this with self restraint rather than forcing the issue with app timers and whatnot. The only day that I do this is Sunday, when I have a routine on my phone that blocks out social media and related apps. That's fine - I think a forced day off is helpful in many ways. But I think I can stand to reduce my phone-based browsing a little bit and put focus on anything else.

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There are so many things on my mind going into 2026. I wrote down some ideas but many more pass through my head before I get the chance to write them down. I hope at least that 2026 is a year full of creativity and fun. 2025 was a mixed bag, next year can only be better.

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#echo #thoughts