I think it's time to admit that weekly reviews just aren't very compatible with my academics—a month is long enough to say that it's not a single occasion, but rather the general pattern of the semester.
I've been doing reasonably well (I still haven't gotten very many assignments back) and mostly maintaining my balance, but the process of slowing down long enough to reflect on the past week is a habit I've clearly broken. We're on Fall Break right now, which seems a reasonably enough time to state the matter openly.
Grad school is more reasonable than the demands of being an undergraduate upperclassman, but the fact remains that it isn't easy to maintain a writing habit. I started a couple of Fictober prompts, for instance, and almost instantly abandoned them simply because I had other assignments and such to worry about. Design reports seem to satisfy the itch well enough that I don't have to write—there's ideas still bouncing around in my head, both fiction and non, but fitting it into my schedule is....tricky.
In any case, this concludes a series of weekly reviews stretching almost a year. My conclusions is that they can help clear my mind to some extent, but do not in themselves provide too much in the way of self-organizational value. Talking about my life to friends on a regular basis probably goes further, with the added benefit of feedback or simple external insight. It's possible to get stuck going in circles, which is one of the reasons I'm so glad to have more friendships in my life than I remember having had right now.
Come to think of it, maybe that's why I don't feel so compelled to write about my personal life so often. It's gotten a lot less internal, and about that, I really can't complain.
