Happy Friday, dear readers! It is lovely to be at the end of the workweek and ready for the weekend. I’m excited that we don’t have anywhere to travel this weekend and hopefully can do some reading and relaxing. With the term back in session, the weeks are quite busy. Today I have a couple of useful articles and some thoughts about starting a new year. So let’s get into it.

Lifehacker has a number of wonderful posts and I think this post on the best time to buy anything is particularly appropriate at the beginning of the year. Yay for savings! Especially if you are planning to buy anything big this year, timing your purchase can really help financially.

While I love having colleagues all over the world, scheduling meetings in multiple time zones can be difficult. So I’m looking forward to using World Meeting Time for my next multiple time zone meeting and hopefully it will make the planning easier. If you have any other tools you use for scheduling meetings for people in multiple time zones, I’d love to hear about it in comments.

Finally, some thoughts on the beginning of the year. I always find it lovely to have a fresh calendar at the beginning of a year. It makes it seem like anything is possible. It is just my first week back at work, but already my planner is filling up with meetings to attend, classes to teach, and more project deadlines. I’m hoping to be able to maintain some sense of calm as the quarter continues and make sure that I spread calmness and not anxiety in the library. So I’m going to be more mindful of my energy levels and how many projects I currently have in play so that I can devote my best energies to my current commitments and only add those things that I can also fully commit to doing well. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. I’m also excited to be teaching again this quarter and hopefully by the end of the quarter my students will be excited to have learned a lot in class, too.

Have a wonderful weekend, full of all the things that you love. I’ll be back next week. Allons-y!