Ari Armstrong recently said something like the following to me: “I have a hundred ideas for every ten that I could implement, and of those ten, only one gets done.” Too true!

Right now, I’m busy figuring out what few work projects I should pursue out of all the myriad possibilities open to and of interest to me. Until recently, all such decisions about future plans were largely set aside until after the dissertation. I was just collecting a kind of bucket of post-Ph.D possibilities. Now that I’m done the dissertation — and defending on Thursday — the time to make some tough choices has come. (I’m probably not going to announce my future plans; my readers will just have to see them unfold.)

In addition, I’m catching up on all of the life-management tasks that I set aside over the past six months, as my policy was that I didn’t do anything unless it was somehow obligatory, unavoidable, or on fire. That’s a slow — and often dirty (literally) — process. It’s good to see some progress on long-delayed plans, however.