Early last year, I wrote about my 2021 journalling setup - pocket notebook, project journal, page-a-day journal.
And then, late last year, I wrote about how my page-a-day habit fell off. At the end of that post, I mentioned how I thought it was important to let personal obligations go when they become a drag.
Which is why on January 2nd this year I went out and bought another page-a-day journal for this year. OK, I know, this is starting to sound like an abusive relationship, but hear me out.
In January this year I bought a beautiful thick Moleskine page-a-day planner. My goal was to keep a daily log-book, tracking what I did, ate, listened to, read – my impressions as I travelled through the year.
On Sunday, July 25, I recorded a blank day. That’s not to say that I faithfully recorded one entry per day every single day for the period leading up to that day - but at the very least I filled it all out from memory when I did have a spare moment. On Sunday July 25, however, I didn’t bother to go back and fill it out.
2021 is a new year! I’ve been slowly ramping up my logging and notebooking routine, and this year I’ve reached new heights of pretension for my analogue note-taking setup:
From bottom to top:
A month ago, I posted about my attempt to get motivated using tiny fold-up zines to track my evening activities. Here’s how it went.
I’ve been having real problems focussing on doing stuff during the evenings this last year or so. It’s a real shame since I’ve spent the last ten years or so investing heavily in GTD and fancy tools in my computer to keep track of my projects, but all this goes out the window when I’m sitting down at 7pm after finishing up all those chores that comprise adulthood. In fact, my normal process is:
Which isn’t the best way of dealing with the situation.
Except for a period of about eighteen months in my early twenties, I’ve generally been a bit sceptical of the whole quantified self movement. In theory, sure: it can be useful to know some hard facts about how you make your way through your day, week, or year. But in practice I suspect that most people, if faced with every measurable facet of their lives, would change exactly nothing.
And yet we persist in quantifying our lives. Perhaps it’s part of our obsession with optimisation and squeezing the value out of every minute of the day. Perhaps it’s because numbers, like lists, give us a way to escape our thoughts about death.
Breaking the radio silence. My spare time recently was taken up with both the new job, and one coding project that I really, really wanted to get done. Now that it’s done, I hope I can push some things I’ve been thinking about to the blog.
Lately1 things have got shaken up. I’ve moved countries and started a new job, and I’m still feeling the ripples. One unexpected consequence is that I stopped trusting my notebook as much.
Sometimes knowing when to stop is as important as trying to keep going.
Genres in iTunes don’t serve much of a purpose for me.
Travel these days for me means this:
