This time the chart doesn’t have a specific year baked in, so it’s reusable. (And there’s a variation for leap years.) It’s freely available as PDFs in both portrait and landscape. Currently just letter size, though maybe someday I’ll start including A4 and other sizes.

Colophon: I made these charts with HTML (it’s just a table), CSS, JavaScript (on page rather than via Node), and Firefox. The font is Avenir Next.

Reply by email

Momentum is my daily goal app, for keeping a goal chain/streak going. It’s a Python app running Django. The name comes from the momentum that a long streak gives.

Overview

Goals can be either binary flags (whether I did it that day or not) or timed (in which case Momentum keeps track of the time spent). The default mode is focus mode, which shows only the top unfinished goal at a time and looks like this (with dummy data):

The thin red line along the top is a progress bar showing how close I am to finishing my Momentum goals for the day. The red boxes show the last few weeks of the streak, the green box at the right is the button for saying I’ve completed that goal for the day, and the blue text under the goal name shows how long the total streak is.

When focus mode is off, it looks like this:

You can see a partially completed timed goal along with a binary goal. Momentum also supports ignoring goals for Saturdays and/or Sundays (the gray boxes among the red), which I use for things I don’t usually do on the weekends.

When the timer on a goal is running, the favicon changes and the page looks like this, with the pink box at right showing the elapsed time for the current session:

(The idea with the timer is that it may take multiple sessions spread throughout the day to meet the daily goal, by the way — if I wanted to make sure I spend an hour writing each day but don’t usually have time to do it all in one block, for example.)

How I use Momentum

On my laptop, I have Momentum open in Firefox as a pinned tab. On my phone, I have it saved to my homescreen as a PWA.

I use Momentum every day for my morning routine, primarily on my phone. The goals I put into it (as opposed to just adding things to my to-do list in Liszt) are things I want to do each day and, to some degree, are things I might not do if I didn’t have a streak pushing me forward (thus “Momentum”).

The future

I’m happy with the app as it is, but I’ve been thinking about merging it into Liszt, since goals like these are fundamentally to-do items. (Every morning Liszt already automatically adds all the items in my ::streak list to my ::today list, so that I can work off my to-do list without necessarily having to go back to Momentum as much.)

Giving Liszt items the ability to be timed is already in place with belt mode, so I’d just need to add the ability to keep track of both partially finished goals and total streaks. Seems worthwhile.

Reply by email

Since this seemed like it might be useful for others, I’ve made daily goal charts, available for free PDF download:

There’s also what I’m calling a “blank” chart, where you can write in the number of words you wrote (or anything else like that):

Charts for 2018 through 2023 are up. (I figure five years is enough for now.)

Reply by email

And that chart is now full. I’ve written exactly 100,000 words since December 3 (I wrote a little extra each day), which is crazy considering that I used to be unable to get myself to write at all. I don’t know what actually made the change, but I’m writing every day and it’s great.

Reply by email

Here, then, are my reading goals for 2015:

• Read more books I wouldn’t ordinarily be interested in. Basically, expand my horizons, both in fiction and nonfiction.
• Read more science fiction and fantasy classics. I did read the Foundation books in 2012–2013, but most of the time I tend to read newer stuff. (I guess I did also read The Stars My Destination earlier this year. I didn’t like it at all.)
• Read more literary classics. Specifically, I want to read at least War and Peace and Dante’s Divine Comedy, and hopefully the Dostoevsky novels I haven’t yet read. Yes, I know, this isn’t the first time I’ve made a goal to read War and Peace. But this is the first year I’m going to actually do it, so help me. (I’ve read enough 1000-page epic fantasy novels by now that I can handle the length just fine.)
• Read more nonfiction. Specifically, more history and biography. I’ve been reading more nonfiction this past year (Rubicon, Lies My Teacher Told Me, Food Rules, Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn, Stuff Matters, etc.) and it’s been quite enjoyable. Right now I’m reading and loving Edmund Morris’s Rise of Roosevelt, the first of a three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and Blake Harris’s Console Wars, a history of Nintendo and Sega in the 1990s.

Any of you have reading goals or happen to be reading something particularly interesting?

Reply by email

Last year I wrote 355 blog posts, which seemed like a lot until I went back to my 2006 New Year’s post and found that I wrote 452 in 2006. Goodness. But I do think this year’s posts were better, at least to some degree. I hope.

With Riverglen Press I published only Phantastes and Beowulf: Student Edition, both way back in January, but I also designed Lorin Farr: Mormon Statesman and Niels and Christiane Christensen (two family histories), and I’m in the middle of designing books by Truman Madsen and M. Catherine Thomas.

As for the rest of life, I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English Language, got an exceedingly cool job at Special Collections going through all the treasures in the vaults, started my MLS (master’s of library science), and got a staff position at Special Collections processing manuscripts (which means I can check out 100 books at a time for six months each :)).

And now for the list:

1. Didn’t quite get all A’s my last semester at BYU, but I did graduate.

2. Turns out being graduated didn’t quite give me all the free time I expected; I only read 60 books this year. And 28 of those were by the end of April — how on earth did I read more books in school than out? Sixty isn’t bad, but it’s nowhere near 100.

3. I wrote a whole novel, Out of Time, in November. (Finally!) And while I didn’t write a full-length play, in August I did write a 20-minute play Candle in the Darkness, and it even got produced in October.

4. Riverglen Press published two titles, not 10. ~sigh~

5. I did get a job at the library (two, actually) and not only figured out where I was going, but also started. (I’d originally planned to work for a year and then start my master’s, but life threw me a twist in the road.)

6. The study program didn’t happen.

7. My planning sort of got better, but it’s still far from perfect.

8. Didn’t really save money at all. And I bought 137 books in 2007.

9. I eat marginally better than I did last year (I usually get a salad for lunch now).

10. It’s hard to measure a goal like this (focusing on others and serving more). I still have much improvement waiting for me here.

11. I give more compliments than before, but not by much. Needs improvement.

12. This one’s even harder to measure.

And in with the new…

This year I think I’ll keep to the more quantifiable goals, since I seem to make more progress with them than with vague goals like “eat better.” I have a few more resolutions than I’ve listed here, but thirteen was just too good of a number to end on, so we’ll cap it there.

1. Read 80 books. I figure I may as well be realistic (though considering the trend, being perfectly realistic would mean setting a goal for 50). Sure, I do have free time, but these other goals (like writing novels and plays) take up a lot of reading time, so it’s okay if I don’t read quite as many books as I’d like. It’s the whole consumption v. production balance thing.

2. Read all the C.S. Lewis books I haven’t yet read.

3. Read all the Jane Austen books I haven’t yet read.

4. Polish Out of Time and write another novel (as part of NaNoWriMo).

5. Write three short plays and one full-length play. I’m planning to do the full-length one as part of Script Frenzy in April, and the three short plays will be for the New Play Project. (I’m already almost done with the first draft of my next short, which I’ll submit to NPP in a week and a half.)

6. Write a full-length screenplay.

7. Write five songs.

8. Publish five Riverglen Press titles. (This’ll probably include Pride & Prejudice, Words of the Prophets: Selected Sermons from the Book of Mormon, and the Welsh Book of Mormon.)

9. Redesign the look of this blog (Top of the Mountains) and BenjaminCrowder.com.

10. Produce a short film in 3D.

11. Post a drawing to BenjaminCrowder.com each day in January, a painting each day in February, a 3D render each day in March/April/May (focusing on modeling, texturing, and lighting, respectively), and a logo a day in June.

12. Reply to all incoming correspondence within a day or two.

Reply by email

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about. It’s that time of the year again, time to review the past year and make resolutions for this one. So, 2006. It was, overall, a good year. I can’t tell if that’s because it’s an even year or not. :) (I apparently have a subconscious dislike of odd numbers, which is only now surfacing.) Anyway, I started Riverglen Press and published two books (The Book of Mormon: Reader’s Edition and A Christmas Carol), began blogging in earnest (452 posts on here in 2006), got a camera and started learning photography, became president of the C.S. Lewis Society on campus, and did lots of other stuff.

What do I expect this year? Well, foremost in my mind is graduation in April. After that, I’ll try to get a job at either BYU Library or Provo Library, work for a semester or two, and then apply to library school (either online or at UNC Chapel Hill, most likely). Hopefully I’ll get married somehow. :P (But that depends on a planner which I don’t really have access to. ~sigh~) I’m sure I’ll blog a lot. No worries there. I’ll save the rest of the expectations (er, goals) for this next part.

But first, here’s a review of last year’s resolutions:

1. I’d forgotten that I set the real goal for 70 (I thought it was 100 all along). And voila, I read exactly 70 books in 2006! Fancy that.

2. I’m not sure exactly what’s happening with Beyond. Last week I had a change of heart, and was determined to revive the project, but I’m getting rather tired of programming in general. We’ll see.

3. My only exercise has been walking to and from campus. Yay.

4. Well, I now alternate between pasta, baked potatoes, and frozen burritoes for dinner, so I guess that’s some small improvement. Not really. ~sigh~

5. Still haven’t done this…

6. I made a dent with reading the rest of the C.S. Lewis corpus but there’s still a fair amount left to read.

7. Haven’t done this either. But I’m taking Latin 302 starting in six days, so hopefully my memory of Latin will rescue me until I get my head above water.

8. Haven’t done this.

9. Or this.

10. Or this. ~sigh~

11. Well, I have posted almost every day, but I don’t know if the quality of posts has changed much.

12. Haven’t done this either. But I did try.

Resolutions for 2007:

1. Get all A’s this last semester. Fight apathy and senioritis as if they were a two-headed dragon. Strive for excellence in all I do.

2. Read 100 books. From January to May of 2006 I only read eight books; from June to December I read 62, average of 10.33 a month. (In December I read 14, or about one every two days.) I’m tempted to bump the goal up to 120, especially since I won’t have homework after April, but I don’t know what the year will bring.

3. Write either a full-length novel or a full-length play, or both.

4. Publish at least 10 books via Riverglen Press.

5. Get a job at a library, and figure out when I’m going to go to library school (and where).

6. Set up a study program for expanding my knowledge and skills in a variety of areas (languages, history, art, music, etc.).

7. Plan better. Don’t waste time.

8. Save money. (And try not to spend it all on books.)

9. Eat better. If not…well, I guess they have Internet access in hospital rooms, right? Right? (Just kidding.)

10. Focus more on others; serve more.

11. Say more nice things about people. I often think them, but for some reason they scarcely leave my lips. The absence of mean words doth not warm fuzzies make.

And finally, 12. Be more like Christ than I’ve ever been before.

It’s all quite doable, I think. And this post is plenty long. The End.

Reply by email

1. So, with that in mind, next year I will read, read, and read some more. At least 70 books, let’s say. Preferably over 100 but we’ll see.

2. Get Beyond to a usable state, hopefully a 1.0 release.

3. Start exercising. Really.

4. Learn how to cook so I can move beyond scrambled eggs for breakfast and pasta for dinner every single day.

5. Spend a set amount of time writing each day, and not just freewriting or journal writing but actual pieces — “real” writing.

6. Read all the C.S. Lewis books I haven’t yet read.

7. Brush up on my Latin so I can take Latin 301 in the fall.

8. Update Blank Slate more regularly than once a year.

9. Visit Thailand this summer.

10. Reply to e-mails within a few days of receipt.

11. Continue to post in this blog every (or every other) day, and write better posts while I’m at it.

12. Start working at the BYU library, in preparation for grad school.

These aren’t in any particular order, by the way — just in the order they popped into my head (which I suppose gives somewhat of an indication as to how pressing they’ve been in my thoughts lately…maybe). I could go on for another forty or fifty items but twelve is a nice even number (it’s a pity I couldn’t keep it to ten, huh).

Anyway, I’ve spent the last hour or so reading through various and sundry blogs online, and I discovered two that I like a lot and will certainly be on my blogroll whenever I get it up. The first is So Many Books, and the second is Rhetorical Response. If only there were more blogs like these! I’d write descriptions but in all reality they can speak for themselves, better than I could do. Check them out!

Reply by email