In the short time since that all-purpose touchscreen computer that we’ve taken to calling a “phone” has appeared in everyone’s pocket, I feel like it’s been insinuating itself more and more into different areas of my life. I’ve happily collected a menagerie of convenient apps for different purposes. But for everything that you decide to manage with your phone, you increase the number of times you unlock your phone to look at it, and therefore you increase the opportunity to look at the various big tech social media platforms - all of them designed in the image of slot machines and all of them doing everything they can to anger the blood and increase “engagement.” I felt like this was doing a lot to not only waste my time but to numb my creative mind.
Over the last couple years, I’ve been starting to take steps to decrease my reliance on the phone and increase my sense of actually being an active participant in my life. This has, over time, added up to a stack of various notebooks with different purposes.
About two years ago, I felt like long spans of time could go by without me really remembering a lot of things that happened. Days were just coming and going. I decided to start keeping a small journal specifically dedicated to just jotting down little lists of things that happened in a given day, eventually settling on the format of each two-day spread being a week’s calendar. More recently, it occurred to me that the daily to-do lists, grocery lists, and other notes that I was using Google Keep for were causing me to unlock my phone many more times a day than I otherwise would, each time an opportunity to get stuck “just checking something” and waste time. So I evolved this little notebook into something I carried with my everywhere, with not only weekly calendar pages but various lists of information I wanted at my fingertips on post-it notes in the front and back of the book. This has been a big win. I love this little thing. The notebook itself is just a cheap thing they carry at Walmart that costs something like three dollars. I’m on my second one. It’s good to have something I can refer back to regarding little things that happened, things I did, people I talked to, etc. “When was that big hailstorm?” “What’s the name of that new neighbor up the street?” “Oh, so-and-so’s birthday is coming up next week.”
I had been tracking workouts in an app called FitNotes, but I got to thinking that it’s such a limited and specific amount of information that I’m tracking that it could just be a simple paper log. The main convenience of FitNotes is that you can set it up to calculate what plates you need to use to get a specific amount of weight on a bar, and that was actually pretty easily replicated by taping a couple of tables of information into the back of the book. I do also frequently copy this data over to a LibreOffice spreadsheet on my home computer, which also has the historical data I exported from FitNotes.
My sketchbook! I’ve actually been keeping a sketchbook for years, since roughly 1998. I have a shelf full of these. I don’t always draw a lot, so sometimes they fill up fast, and sometimes one book lasts three years. When I was in high school I either read or heard an interview with comedian Joel Hodgson where he recommended keeping a series of sketchbooks and numbering them so you have a place to put ideas as they come to you. This might have been my introduction to the concept of “catching ideas.”
This is my Commonplace Book. This was a new concept to me only recently. A recommended YouTube video introduced me to the idea of a commonplace book, which was described as a “journal of other people’s thoughts.” When I’m reading, or listening to something, or watching a movie - really whenever I’m exposed to anyone else’s ideas - if something jumps out at me I might put in a bookmark or jot a note somewhere and later put it in my commonplace book. This comes from a similar impulse to the one that inspired the first journal I wrote about up above. Often when reading, something will stand out to me, but later the memory of it will fade. This isn’t a log of every book I read (I have a LibreOffice spreadsheet for that), but rather a place to collect these things I encounter that I find to me meaningful or helpful or that I want to be sure to remember.
I’ve always been the sort of person who thinks new technology is neat, but it’s been nice to take stock and prune back some of the technology in my life that hasn’t actually been making a positive contribution, and to consider in what circumstances paper is actually better.
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