Anthony Wang
b10ca8695f
4.7 KiB
| title | date | draft | description | type | tags | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Effectiveness of Using a Physical Notebook | 2022-08-04T21:44:11-05:00 | true | Some notes about the effectiveness of sometimes using a physical notebook | post |
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I have a physical paper journal that I started using this summer. Now this sounds like some pretty boring stuff, but I have to admit that... you're actually correct!
These are some highlights from the first two pages:
The rest of this page is unintentionally left blank.
Reader's guide: There is none, because this notebook has no readers.
Anyways, I mostly use the notebook for three things: private essays, time tracking, and random notes and lists.
I'll start with the second thing (because it's too cliche to start with the first item). Notebooks are amazing for time tracking because you can avoid the Schrödinger's Cat problem of getting distracted while you are tracking your time spent doing various things. It's still possible to get distracted with a paper notebook (reading old entries, thinking about other stuff), something that I've gotten increasingly better at doing, but it's still way better than using a computer. I've tried all sorts of ways to decrease distractions on computers (running kquitapp5 plasmashell to stop KDE Plasma, disabling internet, switching to a TTY, and much more), but my ebooks bot has the ultimate advice for this:
Life advice: if you are having trouble concentrating, don’t read anything on computers until you can concentrate on the task at hand. That’s the best way to improve your mental skills and reduce the chance of mistakes!
Very wise words by a usually very unwise bot!
Anyways, the big downside of a paper notebook is that it's physical. You can't copy it perfectly. You can't back it up to an offsite backup 1600 kilometers away (like what we do with exozyme). If my house burns down or if fire-breathing iguanas from outer space annex my house, all is lost. I did digitalize a few important items in the notebook, but for the most part it's not backed up anywhere (and I have an OCD-level backup plan for all my computers involving the original copy, a cloud backup, an offsite backup, and a backup on my phone) Arguably most of the notebook isn't even important, so I would be quite happy actually if the notebook got destroyed by fire-breathing iguanas since then people in the future wouldn't be able to read my cringe writing if they rediscovered it.
OK, so back to the main attraction here: time tracking. I waste most of the day, so I wanted to quantify precisely how much is wasted, so I could determine exactly how bad I should feel. The answer? Very bad.
Alright, next!
The next thing I'm now mandated to write about (since I mentioned it in the list above) is making random notes and lists. Sometimes, I just have a few ideas I want to jot down, and the notebook is again perfect for this. They're basically just things that aren't important enough to warrant me creating a new file on my laptop or a new draft blog post or a post on the fediverse. Just something super short or unimportant.
As for lists, I used the notebook a ton while drawing the LadueCS anime mascot, since I kept on getting distracted on my laptop with other random stuff since there's always something else to do that's less painful than drawing, so taking notes on paper (similar to my use for time tracking) worked. It actually worked! I'm still in disbelief that I finished that drawing, since I strongly believe 1) I can't draw 2) I can't finish large projects. So this strategy actually worked somehow. Somehow, since I still don't believe it worked, except for that it worked.
Lastly, I also wrote some much longer essays in the notebook, but I can't reveal too much about them since people would probably doxx me with this information. That's probably the wrong reason for the right decision.
Writing on paper feels similar enough to thinking and writing on a computer (like I'm doing right now) that the differences are very apparent. When I'm just thinking about stuff (such as most of the time when developing Gitea federation, or at night when I'm wasting time by not falling asleep), almost everything that I think of is gone within a few minutes. Very little of it actually gets recorded somewhere or turned into actions in the real world. It's very ephermeral, which is also one of the more interesting words I've used so far in the notebook. Well, that's it for this draft post. If you're reading this, well, I totally didn't expect anyone to read this, so I don't really know what to say. What a terrible ending.