It Probably Shouldn't Be All I Have In My Head

I've been mostly offline for the last 10 days, so I have not yet accumulated enough good links to share with you as I usually try to do on Thursdays. However, since this is the time of year when we think a bit more than usual about self-improvement and resolutions, I thought I might share a list of thirteen very small things I've been doing over the past 12 months and intend to continue doing. These are activities or habits that have brought me joy, given me a release from stress or expectation, or simply kept me entertained. They are, of course, specific to me, but perhaps you will find a spark of inspiration below for your own version.

1. Cut open your skincare tubes. If your cream or serum comes in toothpaste tube-style packaging, it is not finished when you think it is finished. Cut or tear off the end that isn't the cap and you will be horrified at how much product you were about to throw away. I sometimes get another week's worth of applications out of my moisturiser, for instance, by progressively cutting my way down the tube as I empty it.
2. Really commit to a task system. Whether you write your to-do lists on bits of paper, in a journal, on your phone, in an app — it doesn't matter. Pick one system and stick with it so that it can help you. After years of wanting to be someone who used paper lists but was always losing them, I finally moved everything into the Todoist app and made my peace with its digital-ness. More than twelve months later, I'm reaping the rewards of tasks I set to repeat "every year": I'm buying birthday presents in good time and remembering to get seasonal clothes out of storage.
3. The jar of cleaning tasks. I have struggled with cleaning my whole adult life: I need a clean space to feel mentally calm, but I have found it impossible to develop a consistent routine that keeps spaces clean. After learning more about neurodivergence and where I fit into those spectrums (thanks, therapy), I realised that I need novelty and urgency to do things like this. I experimented with a jar containing a dozen slips of paper, each with a different cleaning task written on it. Every day, I would pull out a slip and do that task immediately. Not knowing what I was going to do beforehand somehow made it exciting, and I did more cleaning during this period than in the entire month beforehand. Now I have created a digital "jar" of cleaning tasks in an app that pulls a random one for me every day and I weirdly look forward to learning whether I will be cleaning windows or hoovering or whatever else.
4. Having two phones. This one is quite specific to my job. In 2024 I increasingly found social media to be a corrosive force in my life, but I felt unable to quit it completely because I needed a way to tell people about my books, podcasts, articles etc. I was stuck in an endless-feeling cycle of installing the Instagram app, scrolling guiltily, and then deleting the app again. Then I listened to this podcast episode from Emma Chamberlain in which she describes balancing her needs as someone who works online with her desire to end her internet addiction by having two phones. She describes how the "good phone" contains all the normal things she needs and wants for her day-to-day life like maps, music, podcasts, texts, and so on, while the "bad" phone has all the necessary but addictive stuff on it like social media. The latter stays in a drawer switched off until she needs to post something for work, and it goes back there once she is finished. I dug out an old phone, paid a few quid to get the cracked screen mended, and set up a similar system for myself. I use the Freedom app to stop myself from installing the bad stuff on the good phone and now spend almost no time at all having thoughts that automatically take the form of tweets or Instagram captions, which was a disturbing habit I had picked up. It's alarming how quickly the basic friction of having to walk to a drawer and turn another device on releases you from the impulse to "just have a quick scroll".
5. Mentally divesting from social media. This was helped greatly by having two phones, see above, but even before I did that I had begun trying to separate my mind from the algorithmic hivemind. I work by myself in silence most of the day and I had begun to notice that when my husband came home from work my conversation with him was about 90 per cent "I saw a TikTok today that said..." and "have you watched this funny video of a dog". Now, some of that is fine, but it probably shouldn't be all I have in my head. I'm trying to feed myself a diet of audiobooks rather than podcasts, longform videos or television episodes instead of "shorts", and books instead of articles — the improvement was noticeable straight away.
6. Searching for apps on your phone instead of scrolling menus. I'm sure you have sensed a theme here: I've been working on my relationship with my devices quite a bit. I can't speak to all phone makes and models, but on my Google Pixel I have turned off every possible automatic recommendation option for apps and websites, and set the browser homepage to a blank screen. Now when I want to do something on my phone, I pick it up and start typing the name of the app I want, and it filters the menu until I'm only seeing "Whatsapp" or whatever it is I want. This stops me scrolling past the tempting icons of distracting apps and keeps me on track with the task I originally wanted to complete. If you find yourself picking up your phone a lot and then putting it down 15 minutes later with no memory of what you wanted it for in the first place, I recommend trying this. It feels clunky for the first few days but the new habit forms quickly.
7. Getting a silly chair. My back hurts a lot and I have terrible posture from working slumped over all the time, but I don't have space in my house to get one of those fancy up-down standing desks. So I got a backless kneeling chair off Facebook Marketplace (like this one, but a fraction of the price!) instead. It has helped.
8. Never going anywhere without a book. I mean, literally anywhere. If I'm not going to look at my phone unless I have something I need to do on it, I require other ways to keep myself amused. Cultivating a collection of small books that fit in any coat pocket or handbag means you never have to be bored while queuing or waiting.
9. Having a really big e-reader. I know some people use a Kindle or similar for the above purpose — a portable reading-only device that they can whip out for entertainment during any in-between moments. I, however, find the small screens on most of these frustrating. I like to see a whole page at a time, like in a physical book or journal. Two years ago now I invested in a BOOX Note Air2 Plus e-ink tablet and I still use it every day. It's slightly smaller than A4, satisfying my size requirements, and it has the advantage of being a black-and-white Android tablet so you can install all the library and reading apps (including Kindle) rather than being locked into one company's ecosystem.
10. Reading email newsletters via RSS. I refuse to get the Substack app but was finding that I was missing newsletters in the sinkhole that is my inbox. I use Feedly as my feed reader when I'm working on The Browser and have now switched my newsletters into a folder there too. For most, you can just paste in the publication's url and it will automatically find the feed, and for those that require an email subscription (eg those you pay for) it can generate an address to use so they show up in the reader too.
11. Be who you are, aesthetically. My tiny cupboard-office is papered with a 1920s wallpaper featuring pigeons and my laptop is covered in stickers of my dog's face. Neither is especially chic or "Instagrammable", but they make me happy every time I see them. Find whatever your version of this and pursue it, regardless of fashion or expectation.
12. Stop checking the news every five minutes. For me, this is a hangover of my time as a journalist in a newsroom, but I've encountered it in non-media types too, and it took me a long time to unlearn this. Unless you work in breaking news or similar field, you don't need to look at the BBC News homepage (or your equivalent) every five minutes. It's fine to find out about world events a few hours after they happen, via a radio or TV bulletin or a longer written report. In fact, you'll probably get better quality information this way because enough time will have elapsed for it to have been gathered.
13. Get the thing you need to do the thing. However inconsequential or silly it feels. And as long as it is affordable, of course. I'll give you an example: I wanted to write in a notebook every day, but I didn't like the thin paper or tight lines of the one I had designated for the purpose. I also found the area at the top of each page for the date annoying because it was too small for my beloved date stamp. I persisted for months, hating the experience of doing this thing I wanted to do, before I eventually snapped and spent about £15 on exactly the notebook I had wanted all along. Now I write in it every day and positively grin when I get to stamp the date at the start of every session. I think the lesson here might be that sometimes you don't have to tough it out just for the sake of doing so — if some friction can be easily and cheaply smoothed over without expending extra willpower, you can just do that. It isn't cheating.