Paper, Primarily angelostavrow.blog
@AngeloStavrow I moved to paper journals after using Day One since 2014. I am tempted daily with Obsidian or other digital tools. But when it is just me and my journal. I am more clear and I see the world and myself in the world.
A couple of years ago as I made the shift to analog - and I think I was turning 50 - I started a "Decade Journal" - in short - I would summarize my month, year into 1 page. - and 12 pages a year or 120 total pages for 10 years. I thought about the value I would have in my hands, in 1 book, of 10 years of my life that I could flip back through and refelct. I recorded a short video about my idea and implementation youtu.be/Fm989_P5z...
@AngeloStavrow I've always printed my Day One journal at the end of every month. Not the same as writing on paper, but helps mitigate my fears around iffy digital longevity.
@AngeloStavrow This is the kind of set-up I am going to build for myself. I much prefer the private environment of this part of analogue writing.
@terrygrier Love this idea! I've done something kinda similar, but on a weekly basis: every Sunday, I sit down for a weekly retrospective/planning session, and over the course of a couple of pages, go through how the past week went, then note what's coming up for the next week.
This helped a lot in writing annual retrospectives, but recently I'd moved this to textfiles (originally Drafts, now NotePlan) — and I've noticed that my consistency with that has dropped. Probably time to go back to this.
@jack You're right, there's a bunch of ways to work around the fear-of-impermanence anxiety. I didn't really address that in my post, and the books you can print from Day One seem really nice.
Though I guess (for me) they lose some of the "value" of the digital original, because links and search don't work anymore?
@simonwoods There's that, too. I mean, sure, you could argue that encryption on a digital journal is more private than a notebook that someone could swipe off my desk?
I think I have a lot more to say about writing on paper, not least of which is the craft labour of sorts that goes into it.
@AngeloStavrow Oh right, you lose all that fun search and linking when printing. But until you actually lose your Day One content (which so far hasn't happened in a decade), you have all those capabilities, which paper never offers. That said, I still much prefer my paper journals :). The artifacts are way better.
@jack Word.
In a way, that's been a barrier to me really adopting Day One as anything more than, I dunno, a commonplace book. Like, I may as well start from paper to begin with? I dunno, I'm still forming my thoughts around this, but: given that in both cases you have to work around their constraints, one of these has been a solid system for years, and the other has been a solid system for millenia.
@AngeloStavrow Interesting chat. I had quite a negative experience with Day One (several data loss incidents) and moved to plain text. I feel it balances the benefits of digital with a good chance of longevity.
@AngeloStavrow nice! I find that I think better with paper, at least when it comes to reflective thinking. Fewer distractions. Re planning, I keep a digital calendar but use paper for recording each day's appointments and tasks. Works well for me.
@annahavron I totally agree! There's something about paper that feels so... I dunno, open? Digital tools insist on a way of working, to varying degrees. Not so with paper.
@AngeloStavrow Right, with digital tools you are shoehorned into someone else's thinking process. fwiw, a few months ago I wrote a blog post about why paper is especially helpful for visual thinkers, because it is, as you point out, so open: www.annahavron.com/blog/to-d...
@annahavron Great article! Thanks for sharing it. I hadn't considered the difference this must make for visual thinkers.
@AngeloStavrow Security can be argued in different ways, although even then I somehow feel greater certainty about my own ability to protect this type of item as compared to some abstracted piece of technology... maybe that's my age showing lol.
Beyond that is just the private process in and of itself. There is no connection between my piece of paper and the rest of the world, not in the direct ways that computers can be manipulated; the capacity for which only increases over time.
@AngeloStavrow If we're ever going to agree with people about how great pen and paper are, it'd be on Micro.blog 😂
@AngeloStavrow Would you be able to show me how you can add footnotes in W.a please? Is there a how-to guide in the W.a forum? Can't seem to find it! Thanks very much in advance.
@ridwan Sure! Essentially I'm using a TextExpander snippet to hand-code these in HTML — you can have a look at the raw Markdown file here and you'll see a <section> block that I'm using for the footnotes, and anchor tags to link between the superscript in the content and the footnote below.
Hope this helps!
@AngeloStavrow hey thanks for sharing. I will check it out and incorporate it into my posts. It's a neat feature!