Benefits of a daily diary and topic journals Derek Sivers

You can’t trust distant memories. But you can trust your daily diary. It’s the best indicator to your future self (and maybe descendants) of what was really going on in your life at this time.

Truth. I also love his idea for a Thoughts On journal:

For each subject that you might have ongoing thoughts about, start a separate “Thoughts On” journal. Whenever you have some thoughts on this subject, open up that file, write today’s date, then start writing.

Bullet Journal: One Book to Rule Them All – Jamie Todd Rubin

Good post about moving from multiple notebooks to one.

Improve your handwriting with this simple daily practice / Boing Boing

Useful!

The act of drawing something has a “massive” benefit for memory compared with writing it down – Research Digest

In some cases, the patients’ drawings looked just like scribbles. But how good – or bad – the drawings were didn’t seem to matter. In fact, in most of the experiments, the researchers assessed their participants’ ability to create vivid images and also their experience at drawing, and neither was correlated with memory performance. Even people who struggle to create a stick figure should, then, get memory benefits from drawing.

Could also be a good case for using Sketchnotes to capture information.

By the way, both this link and the previous one via Austin Kleon’s always excellent newsletter.

Why Is Japan Still So Attached to Paper? – The New York Times

In an age of sharply escalating computerization and digitization of everything into an intangible ether, it can be hard to remember that paper, too, is just another medium, something that acts as a transmitter for something written or typed in the past.

Chris J Wilson – I still love paper

I can divide my life into the disorganized forgetful mess I was before I had my first notebook, and the increasingly organizing and effective person I am still becoming since then.

Brad Dowdy shares his notebook notation system on Instagram

“I was asked what syntax I use in my notebook: 🔲✔️ for tasks #️⃣ for notes/ideas ↪️ for sub-notes That’s it!”

Ink Foraging in Central Park — The New Yorker

On a recent drizzly Tuesday morning, a small group of ink enthusiasts—already rain-slicked, under umbrellas and ponchos—stood on Gapstow Bridge, in Central Park, admiring a brilliant-pink pokeweed bush. The Park was the first stop on a five-hour foraging trip that would take them up to Hudson Heights, to collect foliage and trash, which they would cook, to make ink.

This is really cool! I had no idea this was even a thing.