My Analog Life

I’ve always been a handwriter, and one of the great joys and embarrassments is that it links you to the you of the past. Flipping through old notebooks, I can go back more than ten years and instantly be connected to the terrible and embarrassing moody poetry of my high school days– dark and cheesy like my soul –or the chirpy Lion King diary with the little golden lock where I talk about playing games with my brother at the cottage. I remember where and why I wrote most of these things, unlike when I WayBack machine my old blogs which usually feel like they were written by a foreign entity. No plausible deniability when your handwriting hasn’t changed much in 10 years.

The whole thing is wonderful. Go read it.

The Five Minute Journal — Tools and Toys

The Five Minute Journal bills itself as “a journal for people who don’t write journals.” Its aim is to help you cultivate a daily journaling habit — a topic I am very interested in — by making the process as easy and painless as possible.

I had not heard of this journal before. Looks like a great way to start.

The Good Bad Ideas by Chank Diesel (Paperback) – Lulu.

This activity sketchbook helps unleash your creativity through a series of helpful instructional tips. The pages are mostly blank so you can leave your own personal mark with pen or pencil. Sometimes it’s good to get both the good and bad ideas out of your head and onto a page.

Chank is a friend of mine and I had the pleasure of being at the same New Years Eve party with him and he had this book along. I opened it to a random page and quickly sketched what you see above as a response to the prompt “Draw a moving object”. Typical of Chank’s work, it is full of delight and whimsy with some fun ideas that will draw out the creativity in anyone. As someone who is always looking for ways to nurture my drawing skills, this will be a fun addition to my life.

Hacking a Midori Traveler’s Notebook | The Well-Appointed Desk

Like Field Notes, Hobonichi Techno and Filofax, there’s a rabid and growing following for the Midori Traveler’s Notebook. At its essence, the Midori Traveler’s Notebook (MTN) is a simple leather cover with elastics to hold small bound notebooks and accessories into it. As more people use them, the more they’ve added to them — from simple DIY inserts for all sorts of tasks, list, planning and goals to posh handcrafted leather accessories. Here are a few of my favorites ways to customize and hack a Midori Traveler’s Notebook to best suit your needs and preferences.

If you have never looked into the Midori, this might be a good chance to see if it might be the right solution for you.

J G Ballard working on the opening page of his manuscript of “Crash”.

via Bruce Sterling

How to Jumpstart Your Journaling | A 31-Day Journaling Prompt Calendar | The Art of Manliness

It’s been said that constraint actually gives way to greater creativity. When we have clear boundaries, or direction, we no longer have to think about the act itself. We don’t have to think about what to journal, we simply have to journal based on a prompt.

This is great. Thirty-one no-nonsense daily prompts to get you started on a journalling routine. If one of the things that has stopped you in the past is that you don’t know what to write, here you go.

On paper notebooks in a digital world — 512 Pixels

In a digital world, there’s still a place for things like paper notebooks. They can’t cause distractions in meetings and don’t require Wi-Fi.

Truth.

Reading back through 30 years of daily journaling

Sometimes I randomly grab a journal and read a few pages. I often have no recollection of the events I wrote about. I just pulled out 1995 and was surprised to see that a neighbor brought three studs and a mare over on Dec. 18. I noted it was a big struggle to geld those horses as they had never been touched. I kept two of them here and started breaking them to ride on Dec. 20. I must have been hard up for money as there are no indoor arenas on this place and it is seldom fun to break colts wearing overshoes.

This is a fun post to read. Especially if you have an interest in farming. But, more importantly, it is a reminder that journalling is for more than just writing. It is nice to go back and read and remember too. I often do this — randomly pick up an old journal and open up a page. I always find something surprising that I did not remember. Something that seemed important enough at the time to capture often finds new meaning when read again months or years later. In a way, a journal is a message left for our future selves.

This Life of Leisure – Uses for Notebooks

I love notebooks, but I often have to justify getting so many while filling up so few. So, I’m keeping this ever-updating list of uses for notebooks to return to whenever I feel the need to put these works of office art to good use.

C.J. has started a good list. He is looking for help adding to it. If you see an idea not represented there, help him out.