How I am capturing thoughts and writing these days
What I want is two related things: for it to feel easy to jot down a thought no matter where I am, and to grow ideas into creations.
For anything personal, I try to either jot it down in my AnyType vault, or in whatever paper journal I am filling up at the moment.
(For anything work related, I capture it elsewhere. I try to keep work-y ideas and thoughts separate, though the distinction can be fuzzy.)
AnyType is, um, I’m not sure the right words to use. It’s somewhat like Notion, but it’s offline-first and it’s encrypted. A secret key is involved.
Bell and I have been on an adventure over the years to find a home for each of our writing and projects. Ulysses, Bear (the other one for markdown writing, not bearblog), Evernote, Craft, coda.io, Notion. One just wants a platform that is good enough to stay with forever. Moving has been a pain.
With AnyType, you work within one or more vaults. My AnyType is disorganized. It's for the best that Bell can't see it. It is just a lot of pages. You can make relational databases, templates, wrangle chaos into order. Maybe next year. The latest thing I did to make it feel more like home was to make three different categories for the pages, according to whether the page is just some rough notes, an idea I am actively turning into a blog post, or something I published. The best part is that I have a corresponding cover image for each category, each a type of dyed indigo fabric. I love indigo!!
It is true that it’s easy to fall into productive procrastination by organizing a writing system instead of writing. But I do find it necessary to have enough structure for the system to feel simple and clear enough to support easier writing. If I have to make a bunch of small decisions ever time I think of just jotting a thought down (“Where to write it?” “What type of document?” “What tags?”) then the shy little mole animal that is my writing momentum will retreat into its hole.
My paper journalling system has a micro structure of one page per day, and a macro structure of one journal at a time. It’s a loose system. Recently I used three pages: one for an entry, one for drawing up ideas for creative projects, one for a list of people I’d like to send birthday cards to (I love cards but struggle to send them). At this rate this journal will be full soon, and I’m sad because its cover is dogs on a lavender background and I adore it. Today, my entry ended up being work-y thoughts, because my journal was the container I was in when I thought about them.
I find writing on paper helps me focus. Paper is how I learned to write. It is how I learned to think. It is how I learned to record my feelings and my experiences.
But the journal fills up, and then what? It might get mailed to my parents house, where we store a lot of our things. Or I might carry it around indefinitely in a pannier. Either way, there is a higher risk of losing it. And unless I search out an old journal, the entries don’t inspire nostalgia, or revisiting ideas, or building them into blog posts or creative projects.
So I’d say I am ambivalent about what medium to write on. The main goal I have is just to jot things down, digitally or on paper, and to not overthink it.
And sometimes I eschew either AnyType or the paper journal and just write directly into the Bear blog editor. This post, for example, started in AnyType but now I'm writing it here, right where I can hit publish. It drives me bananas that my AnyType doesn't exactly mirror what ends up getting published here on my blog. I know I just need to be at peace with this. To revel in the mess.