Forget the 'summer of everything': saying no changed my life

Tl;dr: You need a no buddy; I owe mine some of the biggest accomplishments of my life!

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If you’re anything like most academics, or honestly, anyone else who sees a change of seasons as a potential threshold for major changes of habits, then summer (currently on in the northern hemisphere) is a tantalizing moment.

We might be making epic to-do lists that emphasize leisure, “getting ahead” on work, a big move, wrangling care-giving when school isn’t in session, gardening, more exercise, and/or a host of other things.

It’s the “and, and, and” of it that catches my attention. I follow enough writers online to know that mannnny of us dream we’ll get everything done, change the world, and still have a deeply restful and restorative summer. (That this is a dream is the crux of it: there’s no feasible reality in a list with everything on it.)

Having read a few of these monster-list-posts lately, and per School of Good Trouble summer traditions to highlighting past work/ideas/tools that more recent readers may not have seen when I first published them, today with you I’m revisiting a piece I wrote a while back. It’s a reflection about what really happened in my life when I got serious about shrinking my many lists. Since the clarity of that reflection was truly life-changing for me, and the monster-summer-of-everything posts are daunting (and somehow guilt-inducing even though we know they’re impossible!!), here’s that old post again.