Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I am a sucker for any hack that takes any task that feels too big to begin and breaks it down into small pieces. Enter the Delete Week.

Someone posted this on LinkedIn. You set a timer and focus on deleting things from one space, such as email, social media, your phone, or camera roll. When the hour is over, you walk away. It won’t be perfect, but think about how much you can delete and space you can wrestle back.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

There’s nothing like a government official firing all of the C.D.C. vaccine panel experts from the advisory committee to get you to schedule your overdue shots. I had been moving “get my shingles vaccine” from to-do list to to-do list, putting it off because I didn’t want to feel crappy all weekend.

But this weekend was the perfect time to kick off a two-shot plan because I could get them Thursday morning, feel crappy by Thursday night, lose Friday to soft moaning from my bed, and then still have the rest of the weekend to feel weekend-y vs. achy. I will sacrifice a random weekend in September for the second part of the shingles shot.

In addition to the shingles vaccine, I layered in my pneumococcal vaccine, too. And I got blood drawn. I like to stuff as many dreaded tasks as possible into a single visit.

The shingles shot hurt going in (I didn’t feel the pneumococcal one at all), and then my arm hurt for a few minutes. Then, the pain went away by the time I was walking to the car. Then I got home and felt exhausted by noon, though that could also have been the fact that I was off-schedule with my coffee consumption. I worked late a few days that week to make sure that I had only easy tasks left for that day. I wasn’t up for a lot of thinking.

I took Advil at noon when my arm began to throb with pain. Treating the pain may have preemptively impacted other reactions. But in the beginning, I mostly felt… slow. I was thinking slowly. Moving slowly. I felt like I was mentally and physically moving through gelatin.

That all changed around 10 pm. I pulled on a sweatshirt in 90-degree weather because I was shaking from chills. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t stay asleep because I felt so terrible. I woke up on Friday feeling washed out from a lack of sleep, but overall fine. It set me up nicely for the moaning-from-bed portion of my plan. Until I started to actually feel terrible in the afternoon, dozed on and off, gave up and went to sleep at 9:30 pm, woke up a few times, but reset to normal by morning. Nausea + chills = horrible way to spend the weekend but happy I’m protected against shingles and pneumonia.

My main advice is to do the shot leading into the weekend or take off of work the rest of the day/next day. But do it. It’s a few hours of suck (10 pm to about 4 am, for the worst of it for me) for a lifetime-ish of protection from something much worse.

I am feeling like crap today from a shingles/pneumococcal vaccine combo (more on that when I can concentrate) — Freedom from preventable illness! Liberty from hospital stays! Happy 4th, everyone! — so I’ll keep this brief and remind you to check your vaccine schedule and see if you’re up to date.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Middle Girl captures life in a few brief sentences. She writes: “I am unable to report that I’ve worked on (or better yet, finished) the story of Janice* … On the flipside, I can report that I am still chug, chug, chugging along and still trying to tame my wild and woolly salt-and-pepper mane. Take gentle care, gentle folks.” It feels like poetry, and I agree with the first commenter on it not being a time for accomplishments.

Finally, A Half Baked Life returns with an update. Even though I just saw her in the face-to-face world, it made me smile to see her in my feed reader. It begins: “So my kid tells me I don’t post much any more. Which is true. But it also means he found my blog and read it, or at least part of it.” Gulp. But it’s all good. And you get a recipe, too.

The roundup to the Roundup: Stay healthy. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between June 27 – July 4) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.

There were so many great parts of this Substack, so read the whole thing, but the part that stuck with me came about halfway down the page.

She tackles the sentiment: “I wish I could do that.”

I hear myself constantly say it, and I hear others too—particularly when it comes to talking about languages … As though…learning Spanish were akin to wishing you had been born an armadillo. It’s actually something you can do!

But then she reveals the truth: “Often, what I realize, is that I don’t actually wish I could do that thing. Not really. The truth is: I don’t want to! And that’s fine!!!!”

I think we’re conditioned to think that we need to put into action the things we want (that can-do, make-it-happen attitude), but she encourages people to pause and think: (1) can you do something about it beyond wishing and (2) do you actually want to or are you okay not taking action? Or can you be involved in a passive way (e.g., watching movies in Spanish with subtitles to hear the language without committing the hours to learning it)?

I’m trying to catch myself when I use the term “wish” and say what I really mean.

Anil Dash usually makes me think, and his recent essay on Internet consent points out the lack of consent in the online world. You have the illusion of consent in the sense that pop-ups come on the screen and ask if you agree to cookies, but there are still thousands upon thousands of times when your data is compiled and used and sold without understanding that by using or buying or entering spaces, you’ve technically (but usually unknowingly) consented to this situation.

He points out that in the beginning,

It was so broadly understood that you would respect the visitors to your site that you didn’t even have to ask their permission because there would be a massive user uproar if you were to do something so hostile as to surveil them or track them.

And then, of course, everything changed. His example about how your data is tracked and sold feels even more absurd when you consider his example: It would be as if a restaurateur wrote down everything you said while you ate your meal and sold it to another store. It has nothing to do with the food. It has everything to do with using the consumer.

Go read the whole thing.