New Years Resolutions for the Blog

I typically forget to make New Years resolutions these days -- and its now long past the 1st of January -- but perhaps I'll make one now for this blog, as well as pertaining to my writing projects more generally.  Having taken on far more teaching over the Christmas break than I'd have liked -- 3 online classes, two of them of the intensive 4-week variety! -- which resulted in there really being no vacation or down-time to speak of, coupled with the usual holiday travel and festivities, I'm now just getting my head above water, able to indulge myself in some non-class-related reading and writing (between online lessons and handouts for my student, I've probably been writing a good 10,000 words per week!)

As I kept on teaching, produced a lot more YouTube videos, engaged in a bit of academic writing, and drastically stepped up the public speaking over the last year-and-a-half, my writing for pleasure -- blogging -- really has suffered.  It's not entirely a matter of not enough time being left from the spare hours during the day, though -- it's really a matter of using that available time more prudently, more intentionally trimming away some of the less challenging, and therefore easy-to-indulge-in time-sucks that constitute a late modern life -- ranging from devoting too many minutes to email and social media, to occasional binge-watching, to fairly mindless minecrafting.  Looking back on it, I probably would have done better to have taken those added-up minutes and spent them just people-watching, taking more walks, or writing 100 words worth here and there.

As I was overhauling this blog earlier tonight, tinkering with the color-scheme and simplifying the layout to make it more readily readable, I clicked on the About VED page, and was surprised to find out how ambitious the earlier Sadler-self who originally started this blog had been.  I'd planned back then to add a number of new pages:

• a General Information page discussing in broad strokes what Virtue Ethics is, as a family of moral theories and practices
• a Teaching Resources page providing material developed for my classes
• a second, more general Resources page with annotated links to other good resources available on the web
• a Sources page, with links to classic and contemporary sources for Virtue Ethics moral theory
• a List page of discussions about Virtues and Vices, and passages from the thinkers who analyze and describe them.

It strikes me that these remain excellent projects to work on over the coming months -- and so that is one part of my New Year's resolution.  I'll build out each of those, and overhaul and update the Videos page as well.  More regular blogging -- at least two entries per month, more if time permits, for each of my blogs -- is the second part of the resolution.  Now, of course, the difficult part comes -- keeping the resolution once made.