How The iPad Mini Fixed My Reading Habit

For several years, I used an iPad mini as my primary reading device. As my kids grew up and became more interested in occasionally using a tablet, I gave it to them. I had just started my new job and purchased myself an 11-inch iPad Pro M4. Given the screen size and quality, I figured I wouldn't miss the Mini very much.

I was wrong.

Since I gave up the Mini, my regular reading habit has taken a hit. Some of this was me making the wrong choices, especially at night, when I would find myself watching YouTube or scrolling endlessly instead of reading a few pages. When I did dig into reading, I'd find myself trying to read on either my iPad Pro or my iPhone, and neither was the right choice.

The iPad Pro is too big.

The iPhone is too small.

I realized that the iPad mini is just right.

After using the iPad mini for a few weeks, my reading has picked back up, partly because of this device's "just right" size. It's easy to hold in one hand, but big enough for my middle-aged eyes to enjoy. Of course I can pull up YouTube on it, but it's far less tempting on this screen than on my iPad Pro, with its larger OLED display. It feels like a tool made for reading, for self-reflection, which is exactly what I need it to be.

I've set up the Mini with a custom Home Screen with just two options. The Kindle app and a shortcut to my gratitude journal in Day One. That's it. I'm really trying to avoid the distraction baked into these devices, and doing this removes some of the temptation, and even more so the ease of access, to other apps that do not support either my reading or my end-of-day reflection habit.

I'm still not reading as much, or as fast as I did when I was a stay-at-home dad, and that's okay. Some progress, even less than before, is still progress. Returning to the iPad mini is helping me become the reader I want to be again, even if it’s different than it was before. I’m happy to embrace this season and make it work for me.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff on Learning From Uncertainty

This quote from Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s popular book Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal Obsessed World, sums up how things have felt in recent months.

Professionally, there’s been a lot going on. New opportunities for growth, important deliverables for the client, a massive multi-site, multi-discipline, week-long audit and survey with huge impact on my professional standing and, more importantly, on the reputation of my customer. There have also been changes in the team, new initiatives, and the day-to-day work of keeping my piece of the business moving in the right direction.

Personally, I’ve been doing some rebuilding. A lot of rebuilding, actually, as I work towards developing new habits to better serve my mental and physical health, stay better connected to my family and friends, who I haven’t spent as much time with in the last three months as I would have liked, and reconnect with aspects of my personality and belief system that I’ve become disconnected from. They’ve been patient—my friends and family, and those beliefs and tenets—and I am grateful to them for this and many other reasons.

With all of this, there’s been plenty of uncertainty and plenty to learn from. Through it all, I feel like I’m learning more about keeping things in perspective and getting marginally better at finding balance. Still, there’s plenty to do, but I’m making progress.

The trick, I think, is understanding that uncertainty is relentless. Because of that, it is best embraced, or at least not seen as a negative. Stoicism teaches us not just to tolerate but to embrace what happens in our lives, including the unknown.