really good… I have similar, composition book on the nightstand
crazy ideas come out of that liminal space between sleep and wake
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This is year 2 of me writing in a weekly Techo and using my expensive uni-ball tri color pen.
- Todo items go in black ink
- Anything past tense goes in blue ink: journaling or check marks basically
- Things that will happen whether I take action or not (appointments, release dates, etc) go in red ink
If I mess up the color (which happens all the time) I underline with the correct color. I draw arrows if a date gets moved. so it can get pretty messy sometimes. But I think this helps tell at a glance how productive/stressed I am that week.
Since I got my first Techo the idea I had is to write down any task as soon as it pops into my head, weeks or months in advance depending on how important it is. That way, I can stop thinking about it once I’ve written it down. This has a couple different effects.
- Every week it’s a surprise what tasks I assigned myself in the past. keeps things interesting
- Sometimes enough time passes and you immediately realize a task was totally unnecessary in the first place, which is better than wasting time thinking about how to accomplish it
- Tasks are very spaced out through the whole year. Instead of having a todo list of 20 things and looking at it every day, I just have 1 or 2 things to do in a given day, and if I complete that I feel a sense of accomplishment for the day.
The right side of the weekly Techo is blank and that’s where I journal every week–in blue ink of course. (I also use that space for some todo items that don’t have a definite start/end, things that contain the words “start looking into” or “try doing”…) Every Sunday feels like I have amnesia so I really just write about whatever I can with no structure (events, feelings, reactions, desires) to try and piece together what happened that week.
I also “journal” on the daily grid if it’s like one sentence that’s not worth putting on the journal page. Stuff like “today I ate x” when I feel its worth mentioning.
There are month grids at the beginning of the book and that’s where I put things that recur every year. Birthdays etc. It makes it easier to copy everything onto next years Techo.
The blank pages at the end could be for anything, there’s no organization. Right now it’s new years resolutions, an ideal daily routine, long term goals (which will eventually be broken down into tasks & copied into the weekly section 
), game dev ideas, my dog’s training progress, countries I want to visit in my lifetime. I’m glad there’s a table of contents.
It never leaves the house because I would be devastated if anything happened to it. I just email myself things to write down later 
I think last year was a success, I read through the whole thing at the end of the year and got a sense of what I did that year for better or worse. There’s so much mundane stuff I don’t remember. I’m looking forward to filling out a bunch of these and having the effect compound over the years.
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in 2020 i started using huge work notebooks but i switched back to keeping them in a pocket notebook back in march. i have a traveler’s pocket notebook with an extra cord run through it, the front staple-bound refill is for personal notes and the rear one is for work. it is sad how much quicker the work one is filling up, but potentially motivating
i would like to establish a habit of going through old notebooks on an ongoing basis
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latest dispatch from the analog utopia…
i’ve really gotten into this concept that the cell phone is the bane of my existence right now, and maybe our collective existence. it’s not even the social media per se (i already know social media is bad, there’s been loads written on this recently, etc) but just the notifying-ness of the cell phone. it’s actually obscene how many apps want to notify you, by default of everything under the sun. this itself is basically lootbox gambling-addict app design imo.
i’m not gonna get into the word ‘dopamine’ here (little skeptical of how much ppl claim to know about brains) but it’s indisputable that just having a buzzing device on your person puts you at least a little on edge, mentally preparing yourself to respond at a moment’s notice. on the one hand, the buzz could be something good! on the other hand, maybe something bad! (and then you start getting phantom buzzes, your brain excited just because something could be happening even though it’s not.) i think it promotes a sort of nervous sensibility and emotional lability — your ability to feel deep feelings or think deep thoughts hampered by this nagging feeling that there’s something else you should be paying attention to. i’m tired of this damn demon on my shoulder.
here’s a great youtube series on this concept by a gigging musician, he switched from streaming music to only using an ipod, but in the process discovered a ton of other impacts that phone use was having on him… so he ‘dumbified’ his phone, reducing it to a glorified menu (click HERE to see the series from the beginning)
having mostly quit social media already, i decided it was worth experimenting with this ‘dumbify your phone’ concept. from the r/DigitalMinimalism subreddit i found this app, WHITE SCREEN, which acts as an alternate app launcher for iOS, basically a menu of 5 options. (it’s easier to do this on android; on iOS there are a few other apps that do this but they’re paid.) It’s shockingly easy to set this up actually, they provide a video tutorial in-app. so having hidden every other desktop on my phone – no more little app icons – my homescreen now looks like this…
- top of screen - google calendar overview widget (sadly necessary for work, otherwise i’m getting fired for missing meetings)
- middle of screen - launcher menu, with the options listed vertically: PHONE - MESSAGES - SIGNAL - FIREFOX - MAPS
- the bottom bar — the only app icons left on my screen. in the middle is my music player (Marvis Pro). on the left is a folder containing various ‘edifying’ entertainments (language learning app, ebooks apps, podcasts, radio).
on the right is a few socially-necessary social media apps (discord/tumblr to message @digs, my jazz class’s online hub, whatsapp to message my parents, a transit app for bus schedules, and of course a shortcut to SB). i’ll have to continue to monitor this, but honestly none of these is particularly ‘addictive’ for me. - swipe right = Work inbox overview widget, Notes widget (i track my injections in here)
- swipe left = app library (i’m not -deleting every app-, just making it less immediate to access them. there are certain apps like SPL meter, metronome, drumgenius, ireal pro etc that I use for music, but I don’t need them on screen because I can find them when I want to find them - not to mention authenticators, password managers, all that kind of ‘necessary’ stuff in the modern era)
just as importantly, i expanded some changes that were already in process…
- put my phone on permanent Do Not Disturb mode (i already use Do Not Disturb, but not nearly enough, and I get way too many unwanted buzzes. I also manually went through my settings and disabled every notification ‘badge’ [the little red number on every app] and every sound [should be illegal to make noises at me] and many apps i just disabled notifs entirely or even deleted the app.) now my lock screen just shows a little indicator at the bottom – “3 notifications” (or whatever) and i can peruse them at my leisure. Calls will still buzz, as will texts (i think, not sure)
- permanent black-and-white mode - i had previously set my phone to be in black and white mode in the evenings, using Color Filters and Shortcuts. I removed the automation that turns the color back on, so it is now on black and white 24/7. I have an accessibility shortcut to switch the color back on so I can look at photos/videos in color (triple press Power button), but i don’t use it very often, and my automation will always switch it back to black and white at midnight. my brain has already started to associate phone=boring through this alone.
- switched from Google Maps to Apple (less cluttered interface, this is more experimental than the others, we’ll see how it goes when i’m driving)
I haven’t done the whole iPod thing, because 1) my music is all in FLAC, 2) i want/need last.fm integration 3) don’t have any portable headphones 0) no ipod or other player (i never bought one back in the day). but i’ve heard about this ROCKBOX thing i ought to look into…
i do want to figure out a better photo/video solution but i’ll save that for the photography/camera gear thread.
here’s how i’m typing this right now btw. sublime text + distraction free mode = dana_scully_using_her_computer.jpg
i understand this all seems insane but i honestly feel way better. the peace of mind is its own reward and motivation to keep going. i’ve been spending a lot of time with ebooks and real books, a lot less time just doing nonsense and being pushed around by apps. (this is partly also because i’ve been time tracking in my daily log notebook, which i’ll talk about another time)
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i found that i could do bujo + habit tracker in lockdown, when there were no animals in my house; it’s been hopeless since then. i know that i can hack an A5 at home for dreams and narrative reflection, and an A6–A5 that i keep on me to scribble in, as long as they’re both cheap enough that i don’t feel like i’m wasting paper
i sat at an actual desktop computer for the first time in a while recently, and the surge of motivation i got from just having a big digital work environment and a keyboard to type on makes me think that maybe trying to be ascetic about this stuff is mostly just giving me more things to worry over and not helping me get anything done in my life. still keen to try this white screen thing though
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I’ve done the whole ascetic thing before (ask @Father.Torque about when I was into stoicism) I def feel the pitfalls of getting too into that. to me the whole Minimalism thing is more like. cutting out the digital stuff I don’t actually want, to make the space for the stuff I do want. hence why I haven’t made anything truly inaccessible - all I have to do is long press my phone screen and unhide my app icons with two presses. but I feel just these relatively small changes are having an impact.
for example…
I spent two hours uninterrupted last night setting up a personal music server to serve FLACs to my phone. it’s the biggest digital project I’ve done in… I don’t even recall. I felt like I used to feel, installing Linux in high school and fiddling with config files etc - stuff I enjoy. I think it has to do with the fact that my time felt abundant, because I wasn’t being pulled to and fro by social media, notifications etc. and now I have rare Bud Powell alternate takes on my phone! and can let @digs stream them too, and I learned how to use a mesh VPN, etc
really good stuff and it’s all under my control and not some techbro company. not to get early 2000s FOSS evangelist but they were kinda right about the pernicious impact of not owning anything and letting tech companies rent it to you, or rent your brain to other companies for that matter
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I’m down to 2h43m average screen time… not great but way better than 5-6hrs
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I’m getting sub 1 hour with timers on some days, not counting work-related apps
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analog life update
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ios screen time is generally around the 2-3 hr mark of which about 40% or so is reading books. more hours on days I’m in office, less on days I wfh. I’m not too fussed about it. analog life isn’t a number it’s a feeling, dig?
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current bullet journal layout is quite simple still, but I added some basic time blocking - less to track what I will do than what I did do. I highlight blue when I feel an activity was aligned with my overall life goals etc (pilot frixion highlighter my beloved). it’s useful to lookback and see how much of my day was spent doing stuff I really wanted to do, vs obligations or timepass activities. and it’s still pretty simple - one pen one highlighter, maybe a ruler. no fancy calligraphy
- I’ve hit a little bit of a block recently with wasting a bunch of time watching YouTube on the TV. on the one hand it’s better than a phone because you can’t take it with you. on the other hand it’s a lot of time sitting and basically melding with the couch, delaying sleep etc. I’ve really been bad at sleeping enough, so if I can just put some strategies into place for that I think I will have more energy to avoid getting couch locked.
starting simple with, drinking a big glass of water before bed (dehydration apparently can reduce sleep quality and I am always hella dry)
- my reading has hit a spot where I’m struggling for good ebooks (so much more convenient I fear) and I’m just half reading a bunch of different things I don’t love. but I really like reading in general as an alternate phone activity that doesn’t make me stressé.
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