Photo: Awol Erizku

Photograph by Talia Herman for The New Yorker

I’ve kept a journal on and off since I was 14 years old. In addition to journaling, which documents my most personal thoughts, I also keep work notebooks. The structure of my notebooks is a little fuzzier: they serve as a catch-all for ideas, resources, people, and places. It’s amazing to revisit them to get a snapshot of where I was and what I was thinking about at that moment in time. And yet it’s not a particularly accessible or well-organized system. If I want to share these thoughts more widely, I’ll need to take a page from David Sedaris’s book and take his advice: “Jot things down during the day, then tomorrow morning you flesh them out.”

One of my favorite books of all time is Love in the Time of Cholera. It was my uncle’s favorite, and my dad gave me an inscribed copy as a gift. Over the years, I’ve left a lot of books behind, and I rarely reread a book, but that novel is a rare gem. So happy to see UT archivists putting in the work to make his writing public. 27,000 pages is no joke!

I love reading about famous peoples’ processes. I look for meaning in their rituals and routines in hopes of finding wisdom that will make me more productive. Joyce Carol Oates an excellent productivity role model: she’s written over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction.

Love me a good year-end roundup list. I haven’t done nearly as much reading as I would’ve liked to this year, but it’s something to think about as I draft resolutions for next year. Also proud to see a Lady Collective alum on this list: check out Andrea Tsurumi’s debut children’s book, Accident!

On New Year’s Day, I create a new playlist to hold my favorite tunes for the coming year. I try to confine the list to music that’s released within that year, but...