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Daily and recurring preoccupation: The all around book

I’ve slipped back into keeping a journal. I had a lot of arguments for quitting with the journal business. I was very convincing. But I was really just talking myself into something. My biggest gripe had been that the journal business was preventing me from writing anything useful. Turns out, I can come up with any number of excuses to avoid writing anything useful.

When it comes down to it, I enjoy keeping a journal. So I’m back. Writing, musing, recording the nuances of life I will find hilariously entertaining in ten years. Good stuff might go to the site. Other stuff just hangs there. The point is to keep my head working, creating. Maybe someday I’ll write something serious. Or maybe not.

Topic two involves the little daily notebook I carry around for lists and notes. For a long time, I held to a small moleskine notebook. But a couple of weeks ago I hit a singularity of sorts: 1) I filled up the book, 2) I got a job and would be spending considerably less time dicking around in front of my computer, and 3) I slipped into some kind of luddite/minimalist mode.

I’ve always felt more than a little guilt around a Franklin Covey binder in my desk. I’d paid way too much for it in 2004 and only used it for a short time. Perfect opportunity to revive it, no?

But the size is all wrong. And I am becoming increasingly preoccupied with keeping a manual calendar synced with my computer. How very 1998. And where is the line between work and personal lists, anyway?

I’ve sickened myself. This is ridiculous, bordering on madness. I hesitate to wonder what lies at the root of my preoccupation with personal organization. A desire to control a world out of control? A need to mark incremental progress in an unchangeable world? I think I’ll stop carrying a book.

How’s that for minimalism? How’s that for control?

Some habits are hard to break. Especially for people with addictive personalities and proclivities toward organizational paranoia. People like myself.

For me, keeping a journal has been tough to get over. Sure, some of my friends scoff at journal keeping as a ridiculous pursuit. But, until recently, I’d been doing it for some time. It was part of me. When I started writing on this site a few months ago, I noted how I had stopped with the journal business. An activity that started out to help me grow had started to hinder me. So I quit. I was quite content with the decision at the time, but now it’s starting to nag at me, creeping in around the edges of my brain like the third day of nicotine withdrawal.

Sometimes I write to figure things out. This is one of those times.

I first started keeping a journal in fifth grade. This was an assignment from my English teacher, Mrs. Clark. At the beginning of class each day, we had to sit in the little nook of books and write for ten or fifteen minutes. Five lines were required. I believe she read these. I think I remember notes from her about what we wrote. I can’t even remember what I wrote and would give a large sum of money to find one of these spiral bound notebooks today.

It was a good idea. A new approach to get kids to write a bit more, think a bit more. The flaw was in her reading. Sure, a teacher couldn’t really judge an assigned task without checking up, but the whole idea of a journal is something private. For such a diary to be up for judgement really kills the whole idea. You can’t let your mind go when you know Mrs. Clark will be reading it over her lunch break.

Still, the idea stuck and a habit was born. Throughout the rest of school, I kept a personal journal. I wasn’t good at it. I didn’t write regularly or about anything important. Mostly rants about girls or parents, as I recall. Looking back, I regret I wasn’t more intense in my examination of life. But hey, who is at fourteen? Complaining about homework is really all the stress a kid needs. My journals at the time would be a testament to a fortunate childhood.

In college, I got a little more serious. Everyone thinks they got a little more serious in college, right? The girls were older now and no parents were around. Things were bound to get serious. But I wasn’t any more dedicated to a daily ritual like record keeping.

Around twenty-three, I got serious. I started writing every day. This was kind of a low point for me, but the journal helped. I used words to figure things out, to dream, to motivate. Oddly, my outlook seemed to improve in step with the physical quality of my journals. I started with cheap spiral bound notebooks, then on to composition books, then to leather books, and finally to hipster Moleskines. I filled eight volumes in nine years. Then I quit.

As I said before, the journal keeping had become something of a drag. It was a chore. The book was only serving to hold me back. The journal had become a surrogate for actual writing. So I quit, challenging myself to write other things, in other ways. And this has worked.

But.

I still carry a little notebook around with me. I have a lot of nutty ideas I want to capture throughout the day. I found myself writing little notes about what was going on in life. We’ve got a little boy who does something different and amazing almost every day. He clapped his hands for the first time and I thought, I should really write this down.

And this moment really captured the root of why I am compelled to keep a journal. This journal keeping is in lock step with my organizational preoccupations, working to prepare me for the day when I wake up and cannot remember anything. The mind is weak. Even if I can avoid spontaneous and inexplicable amnesia, moments of time will slowly leach away in the catacombs of my brain. Today, I just forgot two more people from my high school class. Gone forever. And I don’t even know who they were.

So all this work is really an effort to avoid my mortality.

Another thought behind these journals is the idea that someone in the future will pick them up. Maybe my son. Maybe Mrs. Clark’s great-granddaughter. But this goes back to the problem of having an audience. When you write in a journal as if you have an audience, then you leave out all the interesting bits that people wold want to read anyway, so no one wins.

Someday my present self, past self, and future self are going to meet behind the woodshed and have it out once and for all.

I see I’m at the bottom of this page and haven’t figured anything out, yet again. It seems important that I capture the important points of life somehow. It also seems important I have some place to let my mind doodle around. Maybe that place is a journal again. But maybe that’s just what an addiction feels like.

I’ve got some baggage. Rather, I’ve got a thing for baggage. I’m always on the lookout for the perfect bag for some specific activity. Disc golf, hiking, geocaching, work. You get the idea. Everything should have its place, I say. All my gear should be ready to go, allowing me to grab the appropriate bag and hit the door for adventures unknown.

The thing is: I rarely have adventures. I’ve got work and dogs to walk and prime time television to watch, just like everyone else. I’m uncomfortable in rental cars. I dislike airports. And with a small child, the potential for adventure travel is somewhat limited. But this doesn’t stop me from browsing REI for a better daypack.

Whenever I travel, at some point I find myself organizing my gear, making sure everything is accounted for and in the right place. I never noticed any of my friends doing this. Anal-retentiveness, I suppose. But I should wonder what it is I am really doing when I find myself sorting through my stuff, when I find myself making doubly sure pens and keys and batteries are all in the proper pockets. Am I worried about my stuff, or trying to maintain some control over life itself?

Maybe this is all just anal-retentiveness. But lately, I’m questioning my motives, my purpose. As a father, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I want to raise our son. I want to instill in him a sense of wonder in the world, a hunger for curiosity that will make him want to see what’s around the next bend (even if it is just another bend after that). I have this fantasy of going on family vacations. On these vacations, I would keep all my essentials in one small bag. This would teach my son how to travel light yet remain prepared, how to not fixate on “stuff”. Then my fantasy seems to derail into an itemized list of what exactly I would keep in this bag. And how would I use this bag? If we go hiking, do I dump everything out and load it up with hiking stuff? Or do I grab another bag?

This all seems to miss the point, if you ask me.

Maybe keeping myself organized is a way to overcompensate for the randomness of life. But it’s a sucker’s bet. You can’t prepare for life by keeping necessary items close at hand. The only thing you can do is remain flexible, ready for anything. Ready for change.

So not only is organization a deceptive activity, it also leads you away from how to truly remain prepared. While I am increasingly obsessed with having the proper bag for the proper situation. To be ready for life is to keep things easy, to not worry about keeping things organized. Keeping things orderly places too much emphasis on the items themselves.

I realize that I can never teach my son these things I wish to teach him because I don’t know them myself. Not yet. It seems I’m much more likely to instill a sense of organizational paranoia and object worship in my son–hardly the best gift a parent can give.

On the other hand, I think of my Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared. I’d also like to be the kind of father who is ready for any crisis that might emerge. But not at the expense of carrying a purse.

You have to remember what’s important. And usually it’s not anything kept in any bag.

Part 2

Last time, we watched our hero pursue organizational insight from paper to digital and back to paper before ultimately becoming on of those Mac people. Will he prevail in his struggle against organizational chaos? Will he give up and concentrate on just living life? Continue on to find out!

Handheld Redux

After trading my venerable HP tower for an iBook (on which I am typing this, incidentally), I started wondering how to get all the data from my hip Mac apps into some kind of digital format.

Sensing this (or reading the notes I left around the house), my wife surprised me with a new Palm organizer for Christmas. I was back in the game.

The Palm synced seamlessly with my laptop and I found a a lot of good freeware apps. List keeping was never better. And e-books! I’d forgotten about e-books! And solitaire! These were old friends returning to the tavern.

Again, I don’t know what happened. After a couple of months, I stopped using the Palm. It seemed like too much work. I had finally started to understand that time spent fiddling with a system wasn’t really time spent accomplishing anything. Planning to do something isn’t really the same thing as doing that thing.

I feel the same guilt as with the Axim. The Palm is in a fancy shoebox under the bed. Right on top of the Franklin (Covey) planner. Like I might pick either one up any day now.

Moleskine

By now, it was 2006 and the GTD craze was in full swing. Sites like 43 Folders and Lifehacker created communities for people just like me to gather and discuss organizational preoccupations. I must thank Merlin Mann for making my affliction cool. Well, maybe not so cool, but at least I wasn’t alone anymore.

I flirted with online web applications for tracking lists and projects. But these always felt cumbersome. I also didn’t like the idea of having to be online all the time. Portability is always important, as I do a lot of my best planning in the bathroom.

The Moleskine notebook became a hallmark of these communities. I’d been keeping these simple black notebooks for a couple of years for my journals, but had never considered using one as a planner. A former co-worker and fellow productivity geek showed me how he’d set up his Moleskine. My curiosity was peaked. I’d always been concerned with how you would keep a bound book tidy as a planner. You couldn’t add or remove pages. It wouldn’t scale well. But the point was to just go with it, don’t worry about tidy, worry about doing.

I checked out some of the intricate hacks people had devised around this little notebook and was sold. I could be as crazy as I wanted to be and no one would notice. For ten dollars. I bought a pocket notebook the next day.

My first step was to divide the notebook into sections. A section for lists, a section for projects, a section for notes, a section for To Dos, and so on. Back to my old scheming ways, capturing everything like a GTD ninja.

Exactly six months later, I realized I was out of control. I spent a lot of time looking at my lists, tweaking project plans, making notes…and very little time getting anything accomplished. Further, this was all pointless, personal, pet projects. This was 1999 all over again. But I’d replaced the battered Franklin planner with a hipster cliche.

There is no rehab for this kind of thing. So I just quit.

Sanity

Responsibility finally drove me from the forest. With a baby the grandparents refer to as “extremely active”, a move to a new city, and so on, time is at a premium. And I’d rather be enjoying my free time with my wife and son (and even the dogs, at times) instead of fretting over some pointless project. Sure, I still have pet projects. But only a few and I try to keep them useful. Like keeping our files in order or scanning important papers. It’s all about clarity of thought. If something is worth doing, just do it. Don’t plan on doing it.

I also realize that some kind of system is necessary to maintain this clarity of thought. I don’t want to wake in a panic because I can’t remember what kind of primer is best for Warmachine figures. So here is my system:

• Contacts: Address Book on my laptop. Syncs with my iPod.
• Calendar: Google Calendar. Syncs with iCal on my laptop, which in turn syncs with my iPod.
• Email: Gmail
• To Dos: 3 x 5 notecard in my pocket. Only things I actually plan on doing in the immediate future.
• Passwords: In my wallet. If I lose that, these are the least of my concerns.
• Projects and Lists: A few text files on my laptop, mostly for gifts to buy, books to read, and projects I might want to do someday. As I said, important stuff, like preparing emergency escape bags for my family and tagging all my digital photos.
• Notes: Small notebook in my pocket. So I never miss an idea for a thrilling blog post or really bad short story. Really bad. And really short.

And that’s it. The point was for me to worry about what you need to do, what you really want to do and forget the rest. And then just do what you say you will. All the cumbersome technology and productivity flowcharts in the world can’t really help if you can’t get past that idea.

But then again, it’s time for me to get a new phone. And I hear I can get a Blackberry cheap….

Part 1

While the baby sleeps, I am busy adding album art to music in iTunes. Truly a twenty-first century problem if ever there was one. This one of the nagging little projects that tend to eat up my free time. I have several, all of which are about as useful as linking little pictures of album covers to MP3 files.

I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember. And this has lead me down a path looking for the perfect organizational solution. This is a long path. A sad path. Consider yourself warned.

Before I begin, I should note that I have never had an issue staying organized at work. I’ve always been able to keep my priorities in line with rather simple lists. This obsession with productivity applies only to my own pet projects. There is probably a lesson in that. But I have no time for lessons right now.

The Pre-Digital Days

It all started my first day of high school. It’s not often that one can pinpoint the exact moment of downfall, so I like to remember this. In homeroom, 8:21 am on August 29, 1989, I was handed the ECHO: Edgewood something Homework Organizer. This was a small, spiral-bound notebook where we could write down our homework assignments. When I think about it now, it seems like a pretty good idea. Have you ever tried to get a fourteen year old to do anything? Imagine trying to make a couple hundred of them take ownership of their own educations.

I used the ECHO for two days.

This really wasn’t an issue. I was a pretty orderly kid and never had much of a problem keeping my homework in line. This freed up plenty of time to work on my mullet.

Before I left for college, my stepmother gave me a Franklin Planner. It was the best thing ever. Being away from home, I suddenly had a need for an address book. And a real calendar. And there was lots more homework. Lots. This was the big shock of college I never quite got over.

I used the Franklin Planner all the way through college and into my first real job. Over time, I strayed from the Franklin methodology and used only monthly calendars, address pages, and blank paper. Blank paper was for lists, and I loved me some lists.

CDs to buy, books to read, places to visit, bills to pay, Things Never to Drink Again. You name it, and I had a list for it. To some, this may have been a cry for help from an unfulfilling job and vastly empty social life. To me, it was an intricate system of knobs and switches by which I could control my life. In fact, I used to really enjoy sitting down and rewriting all my lists–almost as much as marking completed items off a list.

By 2000, it was time to move up in technology. I’d been working in the IT industry for a couple of years and it was high time my red-Ford-Ranger-driving bad self went digital.

Handheld

Well versed in my affliction, my mother gave me an electronic organizer for Christmas. An eight megabyte Handspring Visor. This was the new best thing ever. My contacts, my appointments, even my precious lists were all there in grayscale glory. Passwords we secure! Not to mention solitaire games and e-books. Without this little device, I probably wold not have found Cory Doctorow when I did.

Truly, this was an enlightened time. Tinkering with my lists became even more fun. This was a good couple of years. And I ruined it by getting greedy.

In 2002, I went back to school. I noticed a lot of folks were carrying Windows Mobile PDAs. Color screens, wireless web browsing, Excel. Excel! I decided it was time to upgrade. Credit card debt notwithstanding, I ordered a Dell Axim post-haste. It was the new best thing ever.

For about two weeks.

To this day, I can’t really pinpoint the problem with the Axim. I see it in its tomb (a box at the top of the closet) occasionally and feel shame. Sure, it was clunky. Sure, Windows Mobile crashed all the time. Sure, the interface was counter-intuitive. But I still feel that I was the one who failed here. I could have tried a little harder to make things work out.

Finishing my MBA, I treated myself to a new Franklin planner. Now, Franklin Covey. Sleek, black leather. I immediately set about making my lists all over again. But something wasn’t right. It felt contrived. I’d been touched by digital convenience and wasn’t sure if I’d be able to go back.

Back to Basics

Fortunately, my organizational chaos did not toss me down the dark chasm of despair. By this time, I had a fiance and didn’t need these little lists and projects to prop me up. Thankfully, this woman was patient enough to let me figure this out and is understanding enough to allow me pointless projects.

So I went on for a year or so making my little lists. I was faking it, but it didn’t really matter.

After we were married, I bought a Mac–first one since college–and all was good. I kept my calendar in iCal, my addresses in Address Book. I typed up my lists and printed them out onto pages for my Franklin (Covey) Planner. And I began to think, “You know, it would be neat to somehow keep all these things digital…”

And so goes the cycle. Tune in next time for more hot handheld action, a resurgence of Luddite methodology, and the possible return of our hero to something like sanity.

I’ve been enjoying Nicholas Felton’s 2007 Feltron Annual Report this week. Mr. Felton publishes yearly statistics about himself in the form of an annual company report. I find this document fascinating on several levels.

First, Felton is a graphic designer by trade and the report works as a portfolio piece for prospective work. Second, the document reveals something about the author. Not only do we see statistics like number of book pages read and beers consumed, we see Felton as someone who is willing to compile such statistics about himself. Third, the report is simply beautiful and intriguing.

Mr. Felton is not alone in his journey to quantify his life. An article in Print Magazine last year, entitled The Obsessives, brought together Felton and several other artists to document their consumption for a week. How each artist collected the data is nearly as interesting as how each chose to present the results.

Another example of personal data collection is Craig Robinson’s Personal Pies. Mr. Robinson presents key data about his life in the form of pie charts. Again, fascinating stuff.

It seems the world is full of personal data collectors. One could dismiss this as another syndrome of the times, a need for everyone to feel important. But there is something more going on here.

While Mr. Felton and Mr. Robinson each tell a story with their statistics, there is a key difference in how they choose to tell these stories. Felton uses an overwhelming quantity of data to show a complete picture of his daily life. Robinson uses more esoteric measurements, such as “% of life that my father was alive” and “% of life interested in baseball”. The resulting picture of each man is quite different, but each is compelling.

What may appear as simple onanism is actually a representation about how we all seek control in our lives. We are each increasingly harried and digitized, spread apart by responsibilities, distracted by media, and reduced to numeric ID by all institutions. Doesn’t it make sense that people should want to exert some kind of control (or illusion thereof) over their lives? Further, gathering data in this manner may actually be useful. Our country is out of control in its consumption of resources. Perhaps we would all be a little more conscientious if we woke up every morning to see a graph illustrating the amount of garbage we had generated over the past year. Perhaps we would stop complaining about the price of gasoline. Perhaps we would start thinking about changes on the personal level.

I tinkered with some personal data collection last year. For a month, I tracked chewing gum (60 pieces), Diet Coke (75 cans), hours of sleep (avg 6.425 hours), and several other useless metrics. I was going to post these in the form of sparkline graphs. In the end, I gave it up. I didn’t like the story it was telling. Sure, I was killing the caffeine, but this was the same month my son was born.

Perhaps I need to pick better metrics next time.

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