My reading journey

Background.

In autumn 2023, I decided I wanted to read more, as I had got out of the habit. I had many unread Kindle and Audible books and 2 or 3 physical books. I tried to set aside time in my day to read, which looked like:

• 20 minutes at breakfast time for Audible, instead of having the TV on (I was the only person up in the household)
• 20 - 60 minutes in the evening to read the Kindle or physical books
• Up to 1 hour for Audible before going to sleep (yes I did occasionally fall asleep listening)

The Audible books were starting to be read but I infrequently read the Kindle or physical books, so I needed to rethink my strategy. 

New strategy.

For 2024, I set a goal of reading 24 books, this accounted for the Amazon First Reads monthly book and my Audible credit. For the Kindle or physical book, I decided to read at my break times at work (2 x 15 minutes. In my lunch hour, I was watching TV).

I managed this well, it was only really interrupted during school holidays when my workday was not as strict as during term time. I ended up smashing the target, I hit 24 at the end June and read 48 throughout the year. 

What I realized was that I was getting 2 books from Amazon First Reads, as they usually offer a bonus short read and I was looking out for 2 for 1 deals for my Audible credit. I was quite happy to read what was on offer to broaden my reading. My Kindle wish list consisted of not yet published books, which I was happy to buy upon release. My Audible wish list ended up being about 14 books long though.

For 2025 I settled on 30 books for a goal, 48 (or 50 to round it up) felt like too much pressure, as it was nearly 1 a week. I thought this would takeaway reading for pleasure and leave reading as a chore for me. 30 I thought was a relaxed goal, as I'd already managed more in 2024. 

Changing relationship.

In 2025, I read 70 books and my relationship with them started to change. 

1. Not reading new books, that I bought, immediately on release led me to decide not to buy them on release. One that I read about 6 months after release ended up being 99p on Amazon about 3 weeks after I had finished it. I was annoyed about how much I had paid and decided I wasn't going to pay the higher price again, except for the ones I already had preordered (only 3) and couldn't be bothered to cancel.
2. I was made redundant from my job. I had more time to read at home and had less disposable income to spend on books.
3. My new job is at the local library, so I started borrowing the occasional book from there. I saw a book waiting to be shelved, that I had considered buying and chose not to. I borrowed it and found that I much preferred reading a physical book to either a Kindle or Audible one.

For 2026, I made a goal to borrow more library books. I have so far read 17 library books out of the 46 books I have read this year (by 6 Sept). Last year, I read 4 library books. 

I cancelled my Audible subscription in May because I lost interest in listening to them. I have 1 Audible book left but I have read it in another format already, so I'm not bothered about reading it again right now. If I decide to listen to books again, I will start by using BorrowBox or uLibrary, which are available through my public library.

I have tried to change how much I read in one sitting too. I used to read greedily because I was so engrossed and wanted to know what happened. I have found that I enjoy the books more though if I read small chunks. 

For the library books, I have them for 3 weeks. I divide the page numbers by 20 days to give me a rough idea of how much to read at a time. This way I finish it before the return date. For the Kindle books, I try to read 5-10% at a time. I only read one book at a time now that I am not using Audible. This doesn't always work, I do sometimes end up reading much more than what I have allocated per day. This is a work in progress.

What I do now.

I caught up on my to be read 'pile', which was my original goal. I now have 3 wish lists:

1. The remainder of my Audible wish list - the library has all of the titles in physical format. The 14 mentioned earlier is now down to 5. I will eventually borrow them.
2. What I can get from the library already, as they are on the library catalogue.
3. A wish list on Amazon combining books that are old or have not yet been published and I don't think the library will want to purchase them. The old ones the library has probably had them and then taken them out of stock because there was no demand anymore. The not yet published ones tend to be part of a series and the library doesn't already have the earlier ones, so I have no reason to think they will purchase the new one. I'm not going to request them because why would the library buy a random book 3 of a series, when they don't have the others.

I keep an eye out for the prices on my Amazon wish list titles and try to buy them at 99p. I also check charity shops to see if they have a copy for me to buy, as they are normally no more than £1.50.

I still have an Amazon Prime subscription and continue to get the Amazon First Reads. I choose something from the list even if I end up not reading it or start it and don't finish it. Until now I have always taken the bonus short read too, this month's is one I know I won't read, so I haven't downloaded it.

Finally.

Finally, my to be read books stand at 4. I have my current library book, 2 Amazon First Reads and a wish list book that is currently 99p, so I bought it. I have spent £4.97 on Kindle and physical books this year, this doesn't include the Amazon First Reads, as they are part of the Amazon Prime subscription.

Job hunting at 51.

Why am I job hunting?

I was made redundant at the end of June. I was unsure of where best to look for a job i.e. which websites. I had already set up some accounts years ago with some sites, I dusted them down and started using them. Knowing there were more out there but not knowing which were the best, I contacted JobCentre Plus and they gave me a list of recommendations. I haven't signed up to all of them and am not going to, as I'm overwhelmed with the ones I currently use but too scared to delete some in case I miss a suitable job ad. This post is about my experience with the ones I use. I figured that they couldn't be too difficult to use, which is true but I find some aspects of them annoying.

Alerts

When setting up alerts, I asked for:

• part time or remote work
• within 5 - 10 miles of where I live (in Hartlepool)

The e-mails I get from one site (I'm not naming names as I have no intention of shaming and others may find that their set up works well) are telling me about on site jobs in places like Dubai - so is their definition of remote to do with location rather than working from home?

Another site insists on telling me about jobs nowhere near where I specified, it's offering Newcastle, Scarborough, Lancashire. Why? If they were remote jobs and that is their base fair enough but they're on site jobs. At first I thought I must've done the alert incorrectly. I went on the site and checked and no I hadn't done it wrong, the alert says 5 miles of where I live, so why am I sent on site jobs that are 50+ miles away?

After a few weeks, I decided that I didn't want to work remotely after all. I went to edit the alerts and there is one site where I would need to delete the alert before I can take off the remote working. I don't know why, as there is an option to edit, it seems though this is more about adding more terms rather than taking some away.

Another site (and this maybe the hiring company's fault) sometimes don't give you the name of the town/city where it is based e.g. it will name a school but not where it is located. Are the hiring companies so full of themselves that they expect the whole of the country to know where they are? Additionally, there are likely to be other towns/cities with schools with the same name.

And there is one site that e-mails 1 job at a time instead of a round up of jobs meeting your criteria. As there are multiple e-mails a day, I feel like i'm being spammed. The same website also sends the same job alert to you multiple times, I didn't apply for it yesterday, I am not going to apply for it today!

CVs

Some sites you can upload your CV and others you need to fill in their form, doing this doesn't though mean you will not need to fill in an application form from the company you are applying to. Even when the CV information can be transferred to another online form this doesn't mean everything is straightforward, sometimes the information gets put in the wrong field, so you need to double check this and correct where necessary.

I have had trouble with the dates on the forms too, they want day, month and year for previous jobs. I don't know! I'm 51, I've worked at the same place for 19 years, prior to that I can tell you where I worked, my job title and roughly the years I worked there. Everything I have read about doing CVs and job applications has always said that companies are not interested in your full work history if you've been around a long time, they are more interested in your skills, so why so exact?. I feel sorry for the younger generation having to fill in these forms with every job they have ever had, when they are changing them so regularly.

Automatic application

This one annoyed me the most even though it only happened once. Having set up my account and uploaded my CV, I started looking around the site. When I clicked on a job to see more information, the website automatically sent an application to the company from me. I contacted the website saying I never applied for a job but my dashboard says I did. The response was that the automatic application must be on and they told me how to take that off (which I did). What a stupid set up, it must be the default setting, as I had just set up my account. Who wants to apply for a job when they know nothing about it because they haven't yet read the description?

End note

I have a Casual Community Hub Assistant post now, which I hope to start soon. I've just had a pre-employment health check for it. Once I have started that, I might feel comfortable deleting some of the job alerts. I have 2 favourite job sites, so I will likely keep the alerts from them only.

Working from home day 5 - however long it's been on 16/04

Yes, it may have been 3 or 4 weeks now but it feels like 3 or 4 months. I have got to the stage where I don't know what day it is, thank goodness for my online calendar.

I still don't feel like I have used any technologies that are new to me and that's disappointing in a way because I thought I would. On the other hand, it might mean I am confident and experienced in using a variety of technologies, there is though always room for improvement. Obviously I have done more online meetings than normal and I have initiated my first one with my team, which was a lot easier than I'd imagined. It wasn't perfect some people where sideways on, so I will have to see if there is way of changing that. Other than that, all my work is things I would normally do in the same way as at work - administration, Heritage housekeeping, social media, enquiries, ordering (e-books), cataloguing etc.

Actually doing the work, the only differences are that I only have 1 monitor (I have 2 at work), I can't print anything (I don't do much of it at work anyway) and I can't go and pick up a physical book to check information - some of that can be done online but some, especially where it specifically relates to my library, will have to wait until we get back. 

Some of the processes, I have had to alter to fit in with my new working conditions for example we usually use physical cards to record acquisitions. For that I have resurrected an old spreadsheet we used a few years ago when we had an issue with our budgets. It records what I need it to. This is a temporary measure to get us through the crisis period. I do though have a task listed to make the process electronic and I will need the input of my team to help develop that.

I miss seeing my team the most. We are still in contact with each other through e-mail, Microsoft Teams and our WhatsApp group, it isn't the same though as popping into the main office or having someone come to my office to vent their frustrations. I should point out at this stage, I'm not devoid of human contact - I live with my family (and so far we haven't had any blazing rows, just some low level tension caused by anxiety due to the lockdown, in case you where wondering).

My home office set up isn't perfect. I am using the dining room table (we only ever use it on high days and holidays for meals), as I have nowhere else. I do have a proper PC chair, which is better than the dining room chair- I tried that the first day and very quickly realised I needed the PC chair. My main issue is that you have to go through the dining room to get to the kitchen, so it can be like a (pre-pandemic) commuter station sometimes with all the comings and goings. The up side is that I am facing the window which looks onto my front garden and the street, so I can see occasional activity. There is still life out there!

Homeworking Days 1 - 4

Like many of you, I am homeworking. I have been since last Wednesday, I have an underlying condition and was told by my employer on Tuesday I should homework straightaway.

I didn't know what to expect, I've never really homeworked before, only ever checked my e-mails and done CPD. As I could see it coming though, I had already set up my PC the previous weekend and made sure I had access to everything I needed.

Last week was so manic that I spent nearly all my time answering queries from my staff or contacting suppliers about their free offers. There wasn't therefore much opportunity to try new tasks, more an increased use of things I already use like Office 365. I also had a to do list of jobs, which didn't get looked at until 3pm (I started work at 8:30am) and only then it was because one of the tasks was to make a list of jobs that my staff could do when homeworking.

By Friday I had managed to collate the free e-resources (that I knew about at that point) and had put together a page on our VLE with links and promoted it via social media. That felt like a huge achievement.

Today I have written a blog post for our Keep Teaching Keep Learning website, at the request of my manager, about using our e-resources. I have written a job description that needed doing by the end of the month - and that is the only thing that was on my to do list last Tuesday that I have done in a week.

I figured that the first few days of homeworking would be supporting my staff if they got stuck and then would come the need to support the students, who have only started their online learning fully today. I'm hoping that in the next few days I can return to the to do list I had last Tuesday and start chipping away at that.

I had recently read that you are more productive when you are homeworking because you don't have Office life as a distraction. I can definitely say I have done more work since Wednesday than I would if I was in the Office. I have been taking regular breaks and trying to keep a routine, there has though been so many things that needed doing quickly in a very fluid and ongoing situation, that I've been taking shorter lunches and working later. I'm exhausted now but know that once everyone is up, running and confident, things will settle down and that means I have done a successful job.

Making better use of e-resources

At the beginning of the year, or possibly late last year, an e-mail came through from Credo Reference informing me that some e-books had been discontinued and that I should look at replacing them with other e-books that are available. I had actually forgotten that we could choose the 100 e-books we use from the 821 listed.

As we have had recent in year budget cuts, this seemed a very appropriate time to review what titles were live, review them and look into any other way we could better use this resource to help promote its use. I think Credo Reference is a very good value product with excellent high quality information and the fantastic features of topic pages and mind maps, so it would be a real shame if I ended up having to make the decision to let the subscription lapse because I needed my budget for something else. I have therefore set about trying to make Credo Reference the most relevant it can be to our learners and increasing its visibility.

Initially I downloaded a spreadsheet of all the titles we have access to, which enabled me to choose the most relevant 100. I used the following process:

• Marked off all the titles I considered relevant to our learners, this ended up being just over 300, so I had a way to go to get it down to 100.
• I then labelled these up as to where they were published, whilst the country of publication doesn't always matter, I knew in some cases in was very important that I have UK based information.
• Next I cross referenced them against our other e-books and discounted any we already had from another source.  
• I then graded them 1 - 3 or discounted them on 2nd look based on year of publication (which again isn't always important and in some cases is very important), country of publication and content (having now looked beyond the title).
• This gave me 93 grade 1 titles. To find the remainder, I asked my colleague to look at my 2s and 3s to see if she would upgrade any of them to a 1. This gave me the final 7 to reach my 100 target.

Whilst looking through the titles, I came across Key Concepts in Health Psychology which is a very popular book in our LRC, therefore I immediately added this to the list available to use, this was a really good find. Having chosen my 100, I then set about changing the selections to reflect this. The majority of the titles chosen ended up being published in the UK and I believe that there is a relevant title for every course taught at my College.

My next task was to upload the MARC records to our LMS, Heritage. Previously we had never done this and relied on learners looking at the actual database so that they could use the full functionality of it. However in retrospect, I think this was an error in judgment, we should maybe have concentrated on providing access to the titles and encouraged use of the other features through information skills sessions, enquiries handling and promotional activities.

Within a fortnight of uploading the MARC records (and 1 of those weeks was half term), we had an enquiry that was satisfied by a title from Credo Reference. This was an enquiry about kidneys and one of the Harvard Medical School titles (ironic I know, it's US published) came up on our catalogue search and was exactly what the learner was looking for.

In addition to the titles being changed, I also looked into where the topic pages pull their information from and have made it more UK specific, this was evidenced in preparation for a recent LRC staff development session on enquiries that my colleague and I did, where she discovered that Credo Reference has a UK Welfare State topic page and EBSCO's Discovery Research Starters doesn't. In the actual enquiries session, Credo Reference was promoted to the LRC staff as a good place to start enquiries because of the topic pages (and mind maps), potentially better than EBSCO's Discovery because I have made it more UK based than US based. In the subsequent practice enquiries (based on real ones we've had this academic year) done in the session, another Credo Reference title was found on the LRC catalogue to successfully answer the enquiry, this time it was The International Encyclopedia of Depression (again ironically US published).

I have now signed up for a Credo webinar to see if I can find out about anymore features I can make use of. I am looking forward to seeing if the user statistics have increased because of these changes and the immediate impact has encouraged me to link the Issues Series title to their Issues Online counterparts through Heritage and start uploading the MARC records of the Britannica E-stax titles that we have.

Online course

I have recently done my first fully online course, this post is going to reflect on the structure and what I liked / disliked about the course rather than the content. 

The course consisted of 3 units that were subdivided into 3 - 5 sections and made up of text, video and interactive activities. The assessments were free text questions relating to the content immediately previous. Along the way there were revision questions usually a choose the correct option(s) type and free text boxes to record your examples. There was also a notes section, for any notes you wanted to record.

I quickly found that I prefered to make handwritten notes, so that I had them visible alongside the course information rather than having multiple windows open or flipping between the notes and content on screen.

The size of the units and sections varied greatly, ranging from bitesize to overwhelming. I would have prefered more bitesize sections even though this would mean more of them, as the largest sections were off-putting.

I did like the way the sections were set out though, they were clear and easy to use. There were a variety of tasks, different ways to provide the information and revision questions, all which I found useful and engaging. The parts where I had to add my own examples, I quickly started to ignore, as I discovered that I didn't need to fill them in to progress.

The assessment questions were all in the same format and this was disappointing given the different variety of tasks on offer in the actual course. I thought that some of the questions could have been multi choice like the revision questions, or the own examples sections could have been used as part of the assessments (this would make me do them!). 

Sometimes the assessment questions weren't all that clear either, some answers required examples but didn't say so. This led to me having to resubmit some of the assessments. One of my assessment questions was missed out of the unit too. I only discovered this when I was reviewing my answers and found I hadn't answered one. I then wondered how I'd missed it because the course was set up to move on only after you had answered the assessment questions.

After this experience, would I do another online course? I'm not sure. I would have to really look closely at how it was set up before making that choice. It was a different experience rather than a good or bad one. It has made me reflect on what I liked about the course and what I didn't, so in the future I have a good base to make a decision over whether other online courses would be suitable for me or not.

Spring cleaning my logins

 

I thought it was time to spring clean my logins, I have been suffering from technology overload and figured it would do me good to prune. I am not someone who signs up for everything but being aware of digital footprints and what people can find out about you, I thought I should close any unused accounts I have. Whilst about it, I figured I could make sure I know my passwords rather relying on the remember me facilities websites have.

In my mind this would take me about an hour, afterall I thought I wouldn't have that many logins to deal with and that I would end up with about 15 - 20. After 3 hours, I'm nearly there and I have over 50 logins, admittedly a few are the same but I've separated them for ease, things like Blogger and Google Drive, Skype and Hotmail. I've closed about 5 and I've finally figured out why my Google Drive and Hotmail have different passwords. I know that might seem obvious because they are different companies but I set my Google account up a long time ago with my Hotmail e-mail, so at some point I think they were the same. I've later changed passwords and they've ended up different. My logins can be broadly broken down into the following categories:

Social media / Apps / Cloud services 22 logins
Shops 12
Entertainment 9
Financial 6
Personal interests 4

All of these logins are personal ones, some I do use at work such as Dropbox and Evernote. I had considered setting up new ones at work for these, as though, I use them mainly to remind myself of things and know that I can share with my colleagues if I need to, I chose to use my personal account rather than adding to the long list of work logins. I also haven't included any logins from work that I might use at home like e-mail, Blackboard or Athens.

I have in my e-mail, a registrations folder to remind me of what I already have accounts for, this helped me greatly in both finding out what I had subscribed to and what my passwords might be, as I sometimes send myself an e-mail containing my password (yes I know that this could be a security risk). The interesting thing about this folder is that it didn't have any e-mails relating to the websites I log into regularly like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google Drive etc. These websites are the ones that I usually have set on the remember me option, so this tested my knowledge. I went to them individually, took out the password and re-entered it to see if I knew what it was. I surprised myself by still knowing them, The only one I use regularly that I couldn't remember was for Channel 4's On Demand (or All4 as they have recently changed it to). This amused me because I logged into it last Friday inputting both the username and password and 3 days later I've forgotten it!

As previously mentioned I'm not someone who signs up for everything, I therefore figure that my list of logins is small compared to other peoples. I think that I have probably forgot a few as well, although I didn't find evidence of a YouTube or a Spotify account, I have a vague recollection that I do have accounts for them. Are there anymore lurking around that I have forgotten about I wonder?

I do feel better for sorting them out, I've exorcised my technology overload. However, I am totally shocked by how many personal logins I have and never realised how many I use.