Thelonious Monk’s Advice — Lists of Note

YOU’VE GOT TO DIG IT TO DIG IT, YOU DIG?

All the President’s Pens — Slate on Barack Obama’s Favorite Pen

Barack Obama, no stranger to controversy, waded into an extraordinarily contentious area of American life on Wednesday when he revealed his pen preferences. The former president told the New York Times that when composing longform writing, including his recent book A Promised Land, he prefers to sketch out his first drafts by hand, rather than on a computer. What’s more, like all true stationery nerds, Obama is “very particular” about his writing tools, preferring the combination of yellow legal pad and black Uni-ball Vision Elite rollerball pen with a micro-point.

The Typewriter Revolution blog: Analog College

What we believe in. If I was of college going age, such an institution would be at the top of my list.

Also, I was not aware of this blog before the ever wonderful Alan Jacobs linked to it. Well worth spending some time and looking around.

The Time-Block Planner by Cal Newport

Cal Newport (of Deep Work fame) introduces The Time-Block Planner which is organized around the ideas he set forth in that book.

It’s important that we’re using paper here… I don’t want you on your computer when you don’t need to be.

Consider me intrigued.

What My 2020 Planner Has Been Through — The Pen Addict

It started off normal. I had a planner party in November last year, where a handful of friends brought their stationery over and we all decorated and prepped our planners for a productive year. Welp. That was the last time I had a gathering of friends, and all the plans we planned went awry.

This, I believe, resonates with us all.

Re-discovering three-cornered notes – The Collation

As far as I can tell, they were never sent through the post (if you know of any examples, please comment). They were just hand-delivered notes containing informal invitations, short apologies, brief questions, little flirtations, and so on. In the 20th century, their function was taken over by the phone call, and in the 21st century, by text messaging.

I had no idea of the long history behind notes like these. Via Alan Jacobs most recent always excellent newsletter.

The Work/Life Task System

The Work/Life Task System (WLTS) allows you to keep your professional and personal tasks separate in the same notebook, while accounting for how most tasks come into our lives in the first place: email.

New analog task system from Harry Marks (who used to be a contributor here). Worth checking out and seeing if some of these ideas might work for you.

An Archive of a Different Type – Internet Archive Blogs

Imagine being so well-known for your craft that letters addressed to “Mr. Typewriter, New York” would get delivered by the Post Office to your door. Imagine you mount a letter wrong while crafting a typewriter, and it causes a country (Burma) to change that letter to accommodate your mistake. Or that, through decades, your expert testimony about the accuracy of a brand of typewriter and the characters it types means the difference between guilt, incarceration, freedom or the swapping of fortunes. Such was the life of Pearl and Martin Tytell, of Tytell Typewriter

Facinating story.

The Notebook – theatre of christi

Here’s how I set up my notebooks. I like cheap notebooks with that thin, shattery glass paper texture — nothing fancy. I don’t do any complicated bullet journalling stuff, although I’m totally happy if it works for you! I just haven’t gotten into it. This is the method I’ve found that’s the best intersection of simplicity and reference points.

One particularly interesting idea I like is item #5:

5. Finally, when I start a new notebook, I go back through the last one and pick out the most important ideas and mindset changes I want to carry through to the next one. (This is the best part.) I write all of these highlights at the beginning of the new notebook.