Back in ancient times, social scientists shot down the common supposition that we would all be paperless by now. We’re using more paper than ever. As knowledge work grows, paper use grows; because paper is a tool for thinking, which is distinct from thinking with digital devices. (<<<< Lots of reasons for this, which are all beyond this scope of this humble blog post.)

But the production, distribution, and disposal of paper and electronic devices alike, scars the natural environment. As a human being I care about this; as a birdwatcher (I prefer the term “bird nerd”) I regularly see the damage of human consumption on the natural world.

As ONE lone human being, there is not a lot you can do individually, but you can do some things.

You can actually use what you buy.

You can get as much use as possible, out of the paper you bring into the house. (More on this, below!)

And depending on where you live, you can recycle the rest.

This is also good for your budget.

Flip Your Paper Over, to Double its Memory

You know what’s cool about paper?

Paper has two sides!

Unlike a written work on the internet, you can take writing that is on a piece of paper, flip the device, I mean, the piece of paper over, and re-use it again!

Wow! Try that, with your e-thingy!

Paper technology automagically gives you double the memory capacity. (Wouldn’t it be cool if you could flip over your laptop, and instantly double the storage?)

Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, does not use his nicer notebooks for scribbling down his initial writing ideas.

He saves paper he’s printed out, and then uses the back of it for what is called colloquially, “back of the napkin” ideas.

Yeah. Paper napkins, our cultural shorthand for geniusness on the fly*: Ding ding ding! Again, with the usefulness of paper! I’m telling you: paper is a multi-tool!

Of course you can also print both sides of your paper, but in some cases it’s more useful to print just one side. (I use paper notes for public speaking, and only print those on one side for delivering the speech. For other uses, I do print the paper on both sides.)

Storing Your Scrap Paper

Scratch paper, scrap paper, whatever you call it, it’s good to keep it on hand.

It’s also good to designate a place, or places, where your scratch paper lives.

I like to keep mine in a couple of sizes.

Full-size letter-size scrap paper lives in the same bin I use for my clean printer paper:

Scrap paper that I have cut up, and index cards that I’m going to re-use to write on the backs of, live in this little desk tools sorter:

Paper is Your Multi-Tasking Multi-Tool

Obviously you can use paper for your own “back of the napkin” thinking: jotting down a list, drafting a timeline, creating a mindmap.

Other uses:

Cut paper up to use for reminder slips for your tickler file. I also use the backs of index cards, and the backs of memo pad paper for this.

Trade with a kid: give the child your scrap paper and some crayons, and get your phone back.

Even better: put the phone away, share the crayons (as possible), and draw together.

Clean up your custom rubber stamps by pressing them onto a clean, damp sponge, and then stamping a piece of scrap paper until the ink is cleared off.

Shred used paper for guinea pig bedding or package packing material, if you must shred paper at home.

Cut out some paper snowflakes.

Draw some demons.

The possibilities with paper are endless.

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Wondering how to manage your paper-based or hybrid paper-digital systems? Ask me a question.

Notes

* Spoiler alert for Glass Onion: the plot turns on notes scribbled on the back of a paper napkin.

References

Burkeman, O. (2023) Webinar: ‘Designing Your System for Creativity’, 11-12 March.

Havron, A. ‘Draw Your Demons’ (2023) annahavron.com, 3 March. Available at: https://www.annahavron.com/blog/draw-your-demons (Accessed: 20 March 2023).

How exciting! Someone has asked me a question! Here it is:

“Do you ever print online articles on paper, and read them later? I am seeking to reduce screens in my life because of a combination of eye strain and distractions. I’ve been wondering if maybe it’s worth trying to print off articles for reading?”

Yes! I think it’s always worth trying something; it’s the only way you’ll know if something works. (One of the hazards of being an armchair philosopher is that I personally spend too much time speculating over questions that are best answered through action… but that’s me.)

But will printing articles on paper to read later, work for you?

It depends.

And, first things first: If you have noticed any changes in your vision, if it’s uncomfortable for you to read, go make an appointment right now with your medical provider to get your eyes checked, and don’t delay. Vision changes can mean a lot of things; get this checked out.

(Side note: I am typing this while wearing my new glasses. So much better.)

After the medicos have their say, let’s consider when you might prefer to keep an article in a “read it later” app like Pocket or Feedly (or keep a PDF in your own digital files) and when would you want to print something out to read on paper?

Why — and how — do you want to read an article?

And what do you plan to do with it, next?

When to Keep Articles on a Screen: Don’t Fix What Ain’t Broke

Are you already productive with articles on a screen? Are you getting done what you want, without the time and expense of printing them out, and the maintenance of sorting, storing, and decluttering physical papers?

If, for example, you are successfully using your read later app as part of a work flow which is digital: you are highlighting the article on screen, you are using another app to record your useful insights from it — and this process is focused, smooth, and productive for you — I see no need to print the article out.

Or, it might be something you’re scrolling through, skimming for information or entertainment. Maybe you keep a pocket notebook and jot something down from the article on your screen. But again, if that’s working for you, no need to bother with printing the article itself.

As my pragmatic New England grandfather would say: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But maybe, reading on a screen for you is kind of broken. Maybe screens feel like they are getting in your way.

And there are lots of reasons why people might prefer reading with paper:

Reasons to Print Articles to Read Them Later

• Focus and Attention: you’re too distracted reading on a screen, because it’s too easy to jump to something else
• Slowing Down: you want to read something rich and a little more challenging for personal pleasure; like poetry, or a thought-provoking essay, and paper helps you slow down
• Separating Personal Life from Work Life: you want to read something for leisure, and screens just remind you of work
• Writing by Hand: you want to make handwritten notes on the article rather than use an annotation app
• Personal Reference Library: you want to keep a printed article for reference, or for instructions (I printed myself an article about how to cut out a six-sided paper snowflake; I use that every winter)
• Digital Sabbath: you are deliberately setting aside time apart from screens, like observing a screen-free Saturday
• Privacy Concerns: you don’t want Google or Amazon or Meta or reading apps to own data about what you’re highlighting and annotating
• Digital Rights Concerns: you don’t want The Cloud to zap your reading material away

You notice what I didn’t say up there?

I didn’t say that it’s easier on your eyes to read from paper.

Is It Easier on Your Eyes to Read from Screens, or from Paper?

It depends.

That’s something for you to experiment with, and maybe also to talk with medical folks or occupational therapists about, if you have challenges like low vision, for example.

I read most books on my e-reader (a Kindle) in part because a) it’s easy to manage physically and comes with its own built-in lighting, and b) I can make the font bigger at will. That’s not nothing.

A fraction of my books, I also buy as paper. Those are my “keepers”: books I want to keep as reference books, and some books I know I’ll want to reread. I also prefer to read poetry on paper, because I want no digital distractions. And art and design books, for me, are always on paper.

Reading from paper means you will have to do more with your physical environment. Paper takes up a lot more physical space than a phone or a tablet, and it requires more accessories.

You probably will have to arrange your physical environment to read comfortably with paper. (More on that below.)

You will definitely also have to set up a system to manage your paper, so it doesn’t become clutter. (More on this below, as well.)

Let’s say you find that reading articles on paper is more comfortable or useful for you.

What’s next: managing these tangible objects, that you are now printing into your life and environment.

Office Supplies You Need to Print Articles

Obviously, you’ll need paper.

You’re also going to need a good, reliable, heavy-duty stapler. (I like a nice chonky Swingline desk stapler — they are tough, and don’t need specialty staples.)

Read later apps are digital storage bins. So for analog, you’ll need a physical storage bin to hold the articles you print, until you get around to reading them. You can store your paper articles in a folder, a basket, a box, a tote bag; and that becomes your read-it-later bin.

You might also want a 3-ring binder to store articles in — I do this when I’m reading outdoors. (And of course, a 3-ring binder means you’ll also need a hole puncher.)

Pens, pencils, highlighters. What’s the fun of printing out an article if you can’t highlight stuff for your commonplace book, and scribble comments in the margins?

And yes: you’ll need a printer.

If you print a lot, I recommend investing in a laser printer because it can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars in ink.

Do a cost comparison.

Laser printers initially cost more, and the toner cartridges cost more, but they will print thousands of pages from one toner cartridge. If you print a lot, the cost of ownership for a laser printer is much less than ink jet printers.

I hate ink jet printers as much as I hate home office shredders. I’m sure I’ll be ranting, I mean, posting about printers someday.

Make Yourself Comfortable, for Reading Your Printed Articles

You know how, with a phone, you can just stand around and scroll? Or even walk slowly, and scroll?

Try that with an eight-page printed article. No, don’t.

Phones and tablets and e-readers come with lighting, and the whole article lives on one physical device. You’re managing one phone; not six or seven sheets of paper fluttering around.

It is hard to read paper articles like we read from phones or even tablets.

If you’re reading paper, you need to set things up so you can do so comfortably.

Start with good lighting, of course.

Perhaps a chair, a table or lap desk, maybe some writing materials handy for highlighting and note-making.

You might need reading glasses.

And even if you don’t, you might still want a magnifying glass.

Why?

Because there is no touchscreen zoom function on paper!

You cannot touch paper with your fingers and expand anything. I’ve tried that, before I realized what I was doing and had a good laugh at myself. Trust me, it never works.

I, personally, also like to read with cats around. Bonus: sometimes they sprawl on top of my paper articles, which is perhaps sort of a mysterious feline analog curation function. (Or not.)

Here is the reading and journaling corner in my office, with the Analog Office staff hard at work:

Reading Paper Articles Outdoors

You know that thing where you go outdoors, and something invisible pushes you around in weird ways?

They call that a “breeze,” I think.

Again, something that is not an issue with a phone or tablet; but something to keep in mind with reading paper articles.

I like using a slim 3-ring binder for reading articles outdoors, or away from home.

A 3-ring binder can also sub for a lap desk. Stick a pen and highlighter in the pocket of the binder, and you’re good to go.

If I know I’m going to be waiting around somewhere — a doctor’s office, a car repair shop — a 3-ring binder is a good way to organize articles to read, and write on, away from home.

You NEEEED A Functional Paper Flow System: Don’t Print, Without a Plan!

Read later apps are article storage bins, and they are also digital filing systems - you can organize articles in them. They also have a trash can: a way to delete articles you no longer need.

If you’re going analog, you need to have analogous (ha ha, pun intended) systems to manage your documents, and you cannot leave your documents unmanaged as easily as you can with an app.

Let me share a secret with you: Paper keeps professional organizers in business.

Paper must be managed, because it can become surprisingly dangerous: it is a tangible, physical object that is capable of holding FOMO information (articles, news, history), holding intense emotional content (letters, journals, sketchbooks), being the means by which we prove our identity (birth certificates, citizenship papers), and by which we prove ownership of valuable resources (financial statements, deeds, titles, receipts).

People really struggle with disposing of paper, whether it’s books, articles, magazines, newspapers, children’s school papers, etc.

At the extreme end, when you see people struggling with hoarding (a complex problem that is both hidden, and more common than is publicly evident), paper is one of the main materials saved.

Too much paper is, literally, a fire hazard. Too much paper can attract insects and rodents. Too much paper can literally destroy buildings: the weight of it can collapse floors.

Paper is one of the hardest physical objects to manage because it is incredibly versatile, it evokes all kinds of emotions around our identity and what we think we “should” know and do and have, and storing it can be surprisingly complex (for example, do a search for “best” filing system).

Paper gets out of control, real easy.

And we don’t want that.

So you need to have a plan for how you are going to manage the paper articles you print.

You can keep thousands of articles in a read later app and it will not mess up your living space. You CANNOT mindlessly keep equivalent numbers of paper articles, without a system to manage them.

If you don’t have a plan to manage your paper, it wins every time. It’s that sneaky.

The key decisions?

Putting limits on how much you keep, and being really clear about how and when you get rid of the excess.

Here are some key principles to live comfortably and happily with paper articles in your home:

Containers Are Your Limits, for Timeless Read-it-Later Articles

Limit the amount of physical space that you will dedicate to papers to read later.

Pick out a container to store articles you plan to read that you don’t have a deadline for, or that have information that won’t be outdated too soon: find a folder, a basket, a box. When that container is full, that’s your limit.

If you print out another article, you have to discard one from your read it later bin. (Think of it as a game.)

Set Discard Dates for Articles That Have Information That Will Expire

If you are planning to read articles that record time-sensitive information like news and events, figure out when and how you’ll get rid of them.

We get a local paper newspaper, in part because we don’t want to read everything on a screen.

Today, I got the newspaper. At the end of the day, today’s newspaper will go into the recycle bin.

I will discard it whether I’ve read it, or not. Nobody is paying me to read the paper today; nothing depends on my reading the paper today, if something is truly relevant to me, I will hear about it from other sources.

If I haven’t gotten around to reading, oh well.

When today is over, that’s my cue to move the paper into the recycling bin. It’s literally old news. It’s expired, like that poor forgotten slimy parsley in the back of the refrigerator bin.

I’ll get another newspaper, tomorrow. It can sit in my house waiting to be read, until tomorrow evening. Then I discard it.

I am not a historian, I’m not an archivist, my house is not a library, my house is not a museum, my house is where I LIVE.

I need the square footage to do fun stuff, not to pile it up with a bunch of outdated papers that do not serve me or my family well.

Have a Way to File Articles You Insist on Keeping

Hey, I keep articles on paper. But I also have a filing system for them. I have not written about ways to file reference material yet, but am planning to.

In the meantime, if you plan to keep a printed article, devise a way to store it so you can retrieve it again when you want it.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

And: happy reading, however it works best for you.

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Wondering how to manage your paper-based or hybrid paper-digital systems? Ask me a question.

References

Shlain, T. (2019) 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week. Reprint edition. Gallery Books.

NPR (2009) ‘Amazon’s “1984” Deletion From Kindle Examined’, NPR, 24 July. Available at: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106989048 (Accessed: 14 March 2023).

A good filing system records your decisions about what you plan to do next with a given document.

You win the filing game by labeling documents so that you know exactly what you are going to do next with whatever is in them, without your having to open the file to read anything inside.

Many people sort documents related to where they are in the work process; by their status.

In his excellent book The Organised* Writer, author Antony Johnston recommends setting up desk trays labeled “Inbox,” “Current,” “Future,” and “Pending”… for his writing projects. (<<< important specification)

He labels his desk trays with these status labels — they tell you what the status is, of something you are working on:

• Inbox (unsorted documents you need to decide what to do with, what happens next with them)

• Current (documents related to projects you are working on right now)

• Future (documents you plan to work on soon)

• Pending (documents you can’t work on for now, until something else happens — for example, you’re waiting for someone to get back to you with information you need)

We might also label desk trays with status names like the ones in Kanban systems:

• To Do

• Doing

• Blocked

• Done

Status labels record your decisions about where your documents are, in your work process.

Status Filing: Here Be Dragons

What’s the hazard with these?

Status trays can easily become de facto inboxes: undifferentiated piles of paper that you have to read over and over again, to figure out what they mean for your workload.

Status trays work best when everything in them is similar; when you have multiple projects that are the same kind of project. This way, you’re not shifting contexts all the time.

For Johnston, a professional writer, his status desk trays are how he tracks what’s going on with his various writing projects — but, at least from his description in the book, he is not also piling personal projects, non-work-related projects, in his status trays.

For me, working from a home office with a day job that is wildly varied, I do not have dozens of similar projects. For me, status trays would leave me with undifferentiated piles of bills, package tracking receipts, work-related projects, brochures, and so forth. I would have to re-evaluate each piece of paper individually to know what to do with it; I would be shifting contexts all day.

This is why I use action files, instead of status trays, naming the files with verbs like “to call,” “to scan,” “to review” so that I immediately know what to do with them next.

This is also why I use trays to store materials for individual active projects rather than by status.

I would not be able to glance at a tray labeled “Current” or “Pending” and know exactly what kind of work awaits me in there. I don’t have dozens of similar projects; I have a handful of dissimilar actions.

This is the key, in organizing your work.

You win the filing game by setting up the kind of system that tells you what you need to do next with a document, without having to re-read it to figure that out.

If you’re working on a lot of similar projects, status trays can be really helpful. If you’re not, action files might work better for you.

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Notes

* The author is British, so he spells “organized” with an “s.” Being American, I spell it with a “z.” Another American, Mark Twain, claimed to have no respect for people who could only spell a word one way.

References

Johnston, A. (2020) The organised writer: how to stay on top of all your projects and never miss a deadline. Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Experiencing organizational difficulties?

Wondering how to manage your paper-based or hybrid paper-digital systems?

Ask me a question.

When I started using notebooks after years of keyboarding, I immediately re-discovered how illegible my handwriting was.

If you, too, find yourself squinting at your own chicken-scratch, here are two books I used to help me understand what I needed to change.

It came down to a couple of simple fixes. My handwriting is readable now (at least to me).

A Practical Book on Making Your Handwriting More Readable

Most handwriting books are geared toward handwriting as an artistic practice. However, this first book I’m recommending takes more of a clinical approach; aimed at making your handwriting legible.

It also includes a detailed chapter for left-handed people.

Because my handwriting was so bad, Improve Your Handwriting by Rosemary Sassoon and Gunnlaugur SE Briem was the book that helped me most.

Now I can read what I wrote.

Cool!

A Practical Book on Making Your Handwriting More Artistic

The second book I recommend is Brenna Jordan’s The Lost Art of Handwriting.

Jordan covers hand lettering techniques for both cursive and printing, with suggestions about how to mix the two in composition.

If, for example, you want to make quotes stand out in your notebook, or letter something as a gift for someone, The Lost Art of Handwriting would be a valuable resource.

Jordan addresses left-hander problems briefly, but not as in depth as Improve Your Handwriting does.

I loved her tips on flourishes, and how to use them responsibly effectively; and now I have wonky but legible writing with swoopety-loops around it.

Also cool!

Two Video Courses on Improving Your Handwriting

Tip o’ the Fountain Pen to a reader in Istanbul who took two handwriting courses, considered them “very good,” and kindly emailed me about them.

Since I made a solemn vow to be semi-reasonable* about my online course habit, I haven’t checked these out.

Yet.

But they do look interesting!

Here are the links:

Skillshare, Transform Your Handwriting

The Postman’s Knock, Improve Your Handwriting

Finally, if drawing a robot or a daisy in the margin feels too ambitious for you, handwriting exercises (loops and lines!) are excellent for doodling.

I think of handwriting exercises now as almost like a fidget tool.

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Notes

* I vowed to finish a course before I line up another one. Right now I’m drawing birds; so handwriting will have to wait.

References

Sassoon, R. and Briem, G.S.E. (2010) Improve your handwriting. London: Teach Yourself (Teach yourself books).

Jordan, B. (2019) The lost art of handwriting: rediscover the beauty and power of penmanship. First Adams Media hardcover edition. New York: Adams Media.

Transform Your Handwriting With Beautiful & Easy To Read Cursive | Robert J. P. Oberg (no date) Skillshare. Available at: www.skillshare.com/en/classe… (Accessed: 24 February 2023).

Improve Your Handwriting: A Comprehensive Online Course (no date) The Postman’s Knock. Available at: https://thepostmansknock.com/course/improve-your-handwriting-a-comprehensive-ecourse/ (Accessed: 24 February 2023).

Nature Journaling and Field Sketching | Bird Academy • The Cornell Lab (2023). Available at: https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/product/nature-journaling-and-field-sketching/ (Accessed: 24 February 2023).

Although the Analog Office strives to move at a stately pace rather than a hurried one, sometimes even we get busy around here.

I’m coming into one of the busiest times of year for me, so there’s no way I’m going to keep up with everything.

However, I’m not too stressed about it.

This is because my filing systems are set up so that I know at a glance:

• what is urgent and must be dealt with under a deadline
• what can wait until I get around to it
• what I’m doing with it, once I actually do get around to it

Broadly, you can think of filing systems under two main categories: you need a filing system for reference materials, and you need a separate, quite different, filing system for action-based materials.

Reference materials are documents you want to have on hand, but which don’t have an action-based deadline. Example: I printed out an article about how to cut six-sided snowflakes from paper. Nearly every January, I’m seized by the urge to make paper snowflakes and can never remember how to fold the paper to make a six-sided one. That’s a reference file. I refer to it, I look it up; I put it back for next time. (I’m planning to write about reference filing systems, but not today.)

An action filing system helps you track stuff that you need to do something about.

I use three components in my action files:

• the projects stacking tower helps me manage papers associated with ongoing projects: for example, one slot is dedicated to bill-paying, other slots are dedicated to some recurring work-related things. These are papers I move around, and shuffle through a LOT; and they are organized by project.
• the action basket helps me manage papers that are non-urgent and are also not complex enough to become separate projects, but that I still need to do something about; most of them are the office version of what CJ Chilvers calls brainless tasks.
• the tickler file helps me manage papers with hard deadlines, associated with the calendar.

Here’s my action basket, which is a literal basket I bought at a farmer’s market, signed by its maker. (I’m in Appalachia, debatably,* lots of skilled weavers around here!)

The action basket is for papers I want to do something about, but they are non-urgent; no hard deadlines. (If it has a hard deadline, it goes into the tickler file.)

All the papers in the action basket have a task, an action — a verb — associated with them.

Examples:

• some papers I need to scan
• I’m waiting for a new passport; so I’m temporarily keeping the receipt and tracking number and signature card from mailing my old one; I also put a note in my tickler file to alert me if too much time has passed, and I need to follow up
• A magazine article that refers to a book I want to order
• some information I want to enter into my digital files; the paper will then be recycled
• papers associated with a non-urgent phone call I need to make

I store all action folders in the action basket.

The action folders are — surprise! — labeled with the actions I need to take.

Behold:

For my action files, I do not personally use manila file folders.

You could! Many people do!

But I am a highly visual person, and I need to see what’s in there, so I used 3-ring binder inserts. Then I pressed self-adhesive index tabs on the top of them with the action label.

Binder inserts are transparent, they’re colorful, and last but not least, they’re vertically oriented; which means my action basket** can be smaller and take up less space.

I make it a practice to sort action-related papers into my system frequently. Undifferentiated piles are stressful. I want to know exactly what I have, and what I need to do with it.

The action-based filing system tells me what I need to do, and when I need to do it:

• Stuff with hard deadlines —> tickler file.
• Non-urgent tasks —> action basket, with action folders
• Ongoing, active projects —> project files tower.

Useful Action Labels

Name your action folders with verbs.

Scan. File. Mail. Call. Order. Waiting for. Enter/Log. Try This Out.

To make your action labels truly useful, they must match up to the wording you use, for literal actions you take. I feel silly having just written that sentence: but my action labels might not be yours.

I have an action label called “Review” — this is stuff I want to review which maybe — maybe — I’ll move into a reference file. But probably not. (I have to review it first…)

I have another action label called “Decide” — these are brochures and mailings with upcoming events. I need to decide whether or not I’m going.

To me, that makes sense. You might prefer to call those folders “Read” and “Plan.”

Make the labels meaningful to you.

How can you tell when an Action Folder label is meaningful to you?

When you glance at the label, you know EXACTLY what you will do next with the papers in there.

Organization is One of My Favorite Forms of Meditation

I’m not naturally organized. It’s all artificial. I know what it is like to be desperately disorganized (desperate = racing around looking for something important, at the last minute, which I often did not find when it was needed).

Setting up and maintaining my filing system is at least as important to my sense of inner peace as meditation, journaling, and getting out for a good walk — and perhaps more.

It’s THAT awesome.

Bonus: an action-based filing system gives me enough relaxation and time to do things that are fun, like writing this blog.

The action-based filing system helps me define exactly what is urgent, and what I can safely ignore.

I know exactly what I need to get done today.

I also know that I do not have to bother mentally, physically, or emotionally with any of the rest, today. And I know exactly where it is, when it is time to deal with it.

This brings inner peace!

Creating an effective filing system, and getting yourself into the habit of using it, allows you to be intentional about your work instead of reactive.

The time I set aside to file things is much less time than it once took me to run around and look for things, or deal with the inevitable problems that came when I lost information: re-doing the work to get that information all over again, feeling embarrassed and frustrated with myself when I had to tell someone I couldn’t find it, delays and usually additional work to deal with the problem of information I had lost.

Chaos is quite time-consuming.

You can find inner peace in many ways: one of those ways, I would argue, is in keeping a filing system you can thoroughly trust.

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Notes

* Rabbit hole: Is Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley culturally part of Appalachia, or not?

** You might be thinking, “But couldn’t you just use a file box or a file cabinet, instead of taking up all that desk space with a basket?”

Yes! YOU could, maybe. But I can’t. Out of sight, out of mind for me.

My reference folders live in a file cabinet.

My action folders live in front of my caffeinated, cheery face.

References

Brainless Tasks (2023) CJ Chilvers, 15 Feb. Available at: https://www.cjchilvers.com/blog/brainless-tasks/ (Accessed: 22 February 2023).

You know the ones: the ones with the creamy paper, the ones with the little envelope built into the back cover, the pre-printed index, the dot grid, or the lined pages, or the smooth blank pages where the website showed an artist’s delicate watercolor rendering of a fern.

The ones with the pristine covers with muted, sophisticated colors, or vintage renderings of wilderness scenes, or the ombre effect.

The ones where the makers include a tiny brochure telling you how awesome this notebook is, how sustainable the paper is, or how they are fifth-generation stationers from a storied seaside town.

The “fountain pen friendly” paper ones. The ones with the coptic binding, the skinny grosgrain ribbons.

The ones that seem too good to use. The ones where you wince a little inside, when you realize what stashing it in your pocket just did to it. (Now it’s all bent up!)

These are the notebooks you need to mess up.

These are the ones you need to write in with your scrawly handwriting, and cross stuff out in, or get eraser marks grubbing up the finish of that once-pristine page.

Listen up: notebooks are alive, in a thingy-sort of way. Or, they could be alive; much more alive than they are untouched on the shelf or in the drawer, but they need you to bring them to fully living status.

Your notebooks need you to mess them up.

Until YOU MESS UP your notebook by actually using it, it is just like any other blank notebook by that maker. It is interchangeable. It has no uniqueness yet. It is waiting. It is in limbo. It is passed by, over and over again, because you think you are not good enough to use it.

But what if it thinks it’s not good enough for YOU to use it? Don’t make your beautiful notebooks sad.

Okay; I just noticed that you’re looking at me funny.

So let’s think of it this way, then:

Consider the notebook makers.

What about those fifth-generation stationers who go to great lengths to source wonderful paper, to find skilled craftspeople who will bind it just right, so that the binding lies flat when you open that notebook?

What if you were the notebook maker? If you went to all that work to design and manufacture a notebook you thought would be totally awesome for someone to use, what would be cooler to you, five or twenty or fifty years from now:

A) Someone gives you back one of the notebooks you made; and it is pristine, untouched, still in the wrappings.

B) Someone shows you one of the notebooks you made that they used; or that maybe their grandparent used, and it’s a mess. Writing. Doodles. At some point maybe ?? Somebody dropped it in a bathtub? Or was that a coffee spill? And dried it out again, and kept using it.

Yeah: you don’t get that used notebook back. That one is special! It’s unique.

And it’s no longer the stationery company’s notebook anymore, is it?

The maker of the notebook manufactures it. But the joy of making is when someone else USES what you made!

And the ultimate maker of the notebook is the one who messes up a blank notebook, and transforms it into something else. A journal. A log book. A writer’s notebook. A sketchbook. Jottings. Scribblings. Musings. False starts. Mundane reminders. Seeds of greater things.

Now that notebook no longer belongs to the manufacturer. It belongs to the one who messed it up.

So give your notebooks life.

Use them. Use them! Literally: it was for YOU to use them, that they were made!

Mess them up!

That is the best thing that could possibly happen for these beautiful notebooks.

Only then, after YOU mess them up, do they become unique and irreplaceable.

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Notes

Re the notebooks in that photo above? I’m totally going to mess those up.

Tip o’ the Fountain Pen

To Greg Morris, whose post, and its subsequent discussion, inspired this one.

Resources

Chris Wilson shares some great ways to start messing up your new notebook.

References

Morris, G. (2023) Greg Morris - A New Notebook, 12 February. Available at: https://www.gr36.com/2023/02/12/a-new-notebook.html (Accessed: 13 February 2023).

Wilson, C. (2020) ‘7 ways to start a notebook,’ Sketchy Ideas, 5 May. Available at: https://sketchyideas.co/7-ways-to-start-a-notebook/ (Accessed: 13 February 2023).

Havron, A. (2022) ‘The Souls of Things: Decluttering and Disposal as Sacred Acts,’ Anna Havron, 3 February. Available at: https://www.annahavron.com/blog/the-souls-of-things-decluttering-and-disposal-as-sacred-acts (Accessed: 13 February 2023).

Get into the habit of writing the date next to your notes, and you may not need to bother with numbering pages or making a table of contents.

I don’t over-organize my morning pages or my capture notebooks, but I do put the date next to each entry.

Since I often use these notebooks to map out plans, record questions, and think out logistics for myself, it’s handy to be able to refer to particular entries without having to rewrite everything.

Let’s say you have a meeting with your accountant on February 27.

And let’s say a rather involved tax-related question popped into your mind the other day and you grabbed your trusty capture notebook, wrote out your thoughts and questions about it in there, and dated the entry (let’s say it was February 5 when you thought of the question).

You can drop a note to yourself in your tickler file that reminds you on the day of the meeting: “Check out note about taxes — capture notebook, Feb 5”

Very handy.

And of course, routinely putting the date on your notes is an excuse to use one of these.

I usually just stamp the day’s date on my capture notebook each morning, and let the games begin from there.

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A hearty thank you to Loura for allowing the Analog Office to share this photo of her marvelous journal!

One of Loura’s resolutions for 2023 was to use her journal, daily.

SO many things I love about this journal. Loura is using this as a hub for all kinds of thoughts and ideas. All kinds of thinking on paper is happening here!

She’s using it as a commonplace book, to collect quotes that resonate for her.

She’s using it to draw in the margins, a time-honored way to annotate one’s texts.

She’s using it as a journal, to process her thoughts and feelings about daily events in her life.

She’s using it as reading notes, to process her thoughts and feelings about things she has read.

She’s using it as a writer’s notebook, writing down her wonderings about grief and love. (Two things I suspect we all wonder about, at some point…)

She’s using it as a design notebook: incorporating space, lines, illustrations, lettering variants, and color to help the eye, and the mind, navigate the page.

Let’s just sit back and savor this for a moment:

Let’s also think about some cool options you can try out, by keeping a journal like this.

But first! I want to say, all by itself, if she does nothing else with it — if she doesn’t even write another word in it — this journal will bring joy and all kinds of memories to her, many years from now.

It is a treasure, complete to itself, just as it is. She need do nothing more with it; it is a joy to see and to read, and in this tech-saturated world, her personhood, her life, shines forth from this. A treasure: just as it is.

Her journal here is also something I know — from being lucky enough to have inherited some writings from my own antecedents — could be appreciated by generations to come.

That being said: I’m calling it a “hub” because you can spin a book like this out — if you wished to — into all kinds of things.

• You could keep a multi-purpose notebook like this as a kind of capture notebook and move actionable things into your productivity system.
• You could spin off a dedicated commonplace book or zettelkasten system from this.
• You could write longer essays or blog posts (or letters… or books…) from thoughts and quotes recorded here.
• You could start “Thoughts On…” files for yourself recording the life wisdom you earn, to remind yourself of what works to keep your life humming along, and what does not (as Sivers points out, we do forget how things actually make us feel; in the moment and in the immediate aftermath)
• You could test design layouts here that move into publications.

Maybe I’ll work on improving my handwriting again…!

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Tip o’ the Fountain Pen

To Loura, who posted another cool journal page spread right here. (Accessed: 13 February 2023)

References

‘Medieval Monks Wrote in Their Books and So Can You – Another Word’ (2018), 12 November. Available at: https://dept.writing.wisc.edu/blog/medieval-monks/ (Accessed: 7 February 2023).

‘How And Why To Keep A “Commonplace Book”’ (2013) Thought Catalog, 28 August. Available at: https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/ (Accessed: 7 February 2023).

‘Reading’ (no date) annie mueller. Available at: https://anniemueller.com/reading-all-the-books/ (Accessed: 7 February 2023).

‘Making and Using a Writer’s Notebook,’ North Dakota State University (no date). Available at: https://www.ndsu.edu/fileadmin/cfwriters/Handouts/Writer_Notebook.pdf (Accessed: 7 February 2023)

Benefits of a daily diary and topic journals | Derek Sivers (2019), 28 January. Available at: https://sive.rs/dj (Accessed: 7 February 2023).

Department of Shameless Self-Promotion: I wrote about journaling as a tool for action at my other blog, annahavron.com.

Let’s say you make an interest grid and still can’t decide.

Here’s another way to think with paper, and narrow your choices down to one.

Make one of these.

Perhaps you, like me, have far more that you would like to do, than you realistically have time for.

Enter the interest / importance grid: a way to think through what you would like to focus on.

What kinds of things does this work for? Pretty much anything where you want to choose a few options, out of many possible options.

It could be major life changes that are important to you, like:

• which job skills you want to focus on, for your next career move
• which features in a new apartment or house are most important to you
• which projects, out of several possibilities, you will take on next

It could also be personal choices that interest you, like:

• which books to bring with you on vacation
• which movies you want to watch next
• which courses you want to block time in your calendar for, this year

If you can’t figure out which of several possible options to act on, give the interest grid a whirl.

Here’s how it works:

Get a piece of paper and draw a horizontal line near the top.

Write the numbers 1 - 5 above that line.

Going down the left side, write a list of all the things you’re interested in; all the contenders for your attention, time, and / or money.

Now you’re going to rank them.

Next to each item, draw a horizontal line out to the number that reflects your interest: 1 equals little to no interest; 5 equals, YES I am very interested in this.

When you’ve drawn a horizontal line to measure your interest next to each item, wrap it up by drawing a vertical line under the number 4, from the top of the page to the bottom.

Focus on anything where the horizontal line crosses the vertical line you drew under “4.”

Ignore everything else.

Post your interest grid somewhere where you can see it, to remind yourself that you already thought it through; and now you know what you are focusing on.

Bingo.

Looks like it’s novel reading and birdwatching for me tomorrow!

Those birds won’t watch themselves, you know.

P.S. Can’t narrow it down to just one? Try this.

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…well, well, well!

I did an ink test for a set of pre-cut, pre-printed blank postcards. I’m testing some rubber stamps to see if this paper plays nicely with them.

It does! Check it out:

Because product lines shift so quickly, I’m not giving a specific brand recommendation, but if you want to order blank postcards you can use rubber stamps on*, you’re looking for:

• a standard postcard size, which is an acceptable sacrifice unto the postal gods where you live (these are 4” x 6” cards)
• heavy card stock paper (these are 14PT heavy duty un-coated card stock)
• assurance of an art-friendly, ink-friendly finish to the paper. Check out reviews and marketing text to see if people are using the brand for children’s art — how does it take watercolor paint, how does it take ink? (Contrast this to a photo postcard you find in a tourist shop: the photo side is glossy, and only the writing side is ink-friendly.)

I got these online, by searching for ‘make your own postcards.’

Now I just need to pull out my canonical address book and see who I’ll mail this to.

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NOTES

* Of course, if you can rubber stamp something, you can also draw on it, use fountain pen ink on it, or paint on it. So many entertaining options.

REFERENCES

Sizes for Postcards | Postal Explorer (no date). Available at: https://pe.usps.com/businessmail101?ViewName=Cards (Accessed: 20 January 2023).

You can make life much easier for yourself with a few personally curated documents, like keeping a canonical address book.

Another extremely useful document is what I (literally) call my “?WHERE Is It?!??” file.

It’s really just a single document. It is a great way to track important things that get moved around. It’s also great for tracking things that you rarely need, but when you need them, you NEED them.

Unlike Squirrels, We Do Not Have to Hunt for Important Things

You know how squirrels hide nuts? They don’t necessarily remember where they hide individual nuts. They run around and hide nuts in places that squirrels think are good; and then they run around and look for nuts in places where a squirrel would be likely to hide them.

So Squirrel A might hide a nut on my front porch (happens every year); and Squirrel B might be scrabbling around for nuts a few months later, and discover the nut that Squirrel A hid. All the squirrels are racing around, looking for nuts, in places that squirrels would likely hide nuts. But they’re not necessarily finding the ones they originally hid. It works for them, but if squirrels could write, they might keep “WHERE Is It” files.

A “WHERE Is It” file allows you to go straight to the right nut, instead of racing around looking in all the places you or someone else in the household might have put something important.

You Can’t Buy an Air Tag For Everything

That would get expensive, fast!

A “WHERE Is It” file is excellent for keeping track of things that get moved around, or that have several possible logical locations.

For example: I bought a yearly pass to our state parks, so we don’t have to pay a fee every time we go for a hike. They sent me a hang tag to display in our front windshield. So. WHERE is it??

The hang tag COULD logically go in the glove compartment of my car, or my husband’s car; I decided in the end to store it in my hiking backpack. We’ll always take the backpack; but we don’t always take the same car.

So, I wrote this note in my “WHERE Is It” file: “hang tag for state parks — in Anna’s hiking backpack”

Here are some other things I keep track of, in my “?WHERE Is It?!??” file (mine has lots of expressive punctuation in the name, because I get so irate when I can’t find something… perhaps you are more sanguine about such things).

• the hang tag for visiting state parks
• spare keys to car, house
• hospital badge
• COVID-19 vaccine card
• pills for the cat

The Laws of Keeping a “WHERE Is It” File

Like the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, there are commandments around operating your “WHERE Is It” file:

• Thou shalt keep one “WHERE Is It” file; and only ONE, shalt thou keep. One shall be the number thou shalt keep, and the number of the “WHERE is it” file shall be one. No more. No less. (Five is right out.)
• Keep it in a place and format where you will easily be able to update it. Sometimes you might move an item or document or loan it to someone; update your “WHERE Is It” file with a quick note about its current location.
• Be sure to put your “WHERE Is It” file somewhere where you will find reliably it again.

This is one document that I keep electronically on a notes app, that syncs to multiple devices. (I do this because I have literally four separate offices I work from, and I do not want to carry one paper file with me, all the time.)

But you could also keep a dedicated “WHERE Is It” pocket notebook that you update as you move things around.

I have found this document relieves a great deal of stress for me.

We don’t have to be like squirrels, after all.

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Get into the habit of writing the date next to your notes, and you may not need to bother with numbering pages or making a table of contents.

I don’t over-organize my morning pages or my capture notebooks, but I do put the date next to each entry.

Since I often use these notebooks to map out plans, record questions, and think out logistics for myself, it’s handy to be able to refer to particular entries without having to rewrite everything.

Let’s say you have a meeting with your accountant on February 27.

And let’s say a rather involved tax-related question popped into your mind the other day and you grabbed your trusty capture notebook, wrote out your thoughts and questions about it in there, and dated the entry (let’s say it was February 5 when you thought of the question).

You can drop a note to yourself in your tickler file that reminds you on the day of the meeting: “Check out note about taxes — capture notebook, Feb 5”

Very handy.

And of course, routinely putting the date on your notes is an excuse to use one of these.

I usually just stamp the day’s date on my capture notebook each morning, and let the games begin from there.

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A tickler file is an analog reminder system: a way to deliver documents and information to your future self.

Think of it as a physical mail box, linked to your calendar. Think of it as your calendar’s snail mail service.

You might also hear other names for the tickler file: a pending file, a future file, a boomerang file, or of course, the 43 folders system.

In the early 2000s, David Allen and Merlin Mann popularized the tickler file, which has been used by administrative types since the early 20th century, if not earlier.

Merlin Mann popularized the name “43 Folders.”

Tickler Files Are the Organized Person’s Secret Weapon

Tickler files are worth all the hullabaloo. If you don’t have one, you should create one toot sweet, as we say in Texas French.

Use a tickler file for reminders, documents, and information that you will want to have your hands on, at a future date.

A tickler file is really several file folders that always stay together, in a set of 43: 12 files labeled with the names of each month in the year, plus numbered folders for each numeric date in a month, 1-31.

The numbered folders are always for the dates in the current month. The month folders are for future months.

With a tickler file, your Present Self is sending reminders or documents (sometimes even small objects, like flash drives or keys) to your future self.

What might you put in a tickler file?

Meeting agendas. Tickets or information for an upcoming event. Motivational quotes. Birthday and anniversary reminders. Dad jokes. Notes to yourself. Recurring checklists for different times of the year. (”Book vacation cottage.”)

Tickler files prepare you beautifully for work-related deadlines and household admin routines.

But they are positively genius for helping you remember birthdays and anniversaries.

How A Tickler File Can Save Your Personal Relationships

Let’s say your sister’s birthday is on August 2. Let’s say you want to snail mail a birthday card to her that arrives by August 2, and then you want to text her on the date of her birthday.

And let’s say she is a great sister, but she always feels hurt if she thinks you forgot her birthday. Which you do, every year.

Birthdays are a thing with her… and she always remembers YOUR birthday… so there’s also that.

Tickler file to the rescue!

Write a reminder for yourself, and drop that note into the “August” folder. When August 1 rolls around, you pull out all the papers in the “August” folder, and move them into the numeric slots since August is now the current month. You move the birthday reminder note to the “2” folder, since her birthday is on the second. When you look in the “2” folder, there it is, your reminder to text her on her birthday!

Nice!

But did you notice that your sister had the audacity to be born really early in the month?

And by the time you realize it is August (August 3 or 4), you have already missed her birthday — again! — and you are now in the doghouse, again?

Stand back, and watch this amazing trick: Put a note to yourself in the “July” folder: “Buy birthday card for Sister (birthday: Aug 2).”

In July, you see that note to yourself. Ha!!

And THEN: You buy the card in early July, you sign and address the card ahead of time, you stamp it so it’s all ready to mail…

…and then, you stick that card in your tickler file in, say, the “24” slot, on the date you want to mail it! Toward the end of July! On the 24th, you pull the birthday card out of the slot, drop it in a mailbox, and she gets the card on time for her August 2 birthday!

TRIUMPH!

Now, you are the best sibling ever! How cool is that?

Bonus: stick that reminder note back in the “July” slot, so you can triumph again next year.

My tickler file is why my family still speaks to me. (Many of them also had the audacity to be born very early in the month.)

I never remember people’s birthdays in time… but my tickler file does.

Now, let’s talk about how to make this easier than 43 physical paper folders.

Pfft. 43 Separate Folders Are For Office Supply Amateurs.

Now I’m going to show you how to set up a next level tickler file.

Forty-three folders is too much work. You’ve got to label them. Then you’ve got to shuffle individual folders around every day, which takes time and hand-eye coordination. Assuming you even remember to do this.

Too much friction.

Worse, you can lose things between folders. Notes and papers — especially if they are small, like appointment cards — can slip between the folders to the waiting maw of the file drawer below, and then the thing is lost forever unless you clean out your file drawer; and who does that?

Since tickler files store such mission-critical information, we don’t want any papers descending into the abyss.

Use a Chronological File Sorter as Your Tickler File

File sorters are paper engineering at its finest. I’ve written about alphabetical file sorters, which may or may not be useful for you; but I use my chronological file sorter every single day.

File sorters, with their special paper reinforcement techniques, and accordion-style expansion, outlast ordinary folders by decades. My chronological file sorter dates from the 1990s.

They also take up much less space than forty-three paper folders. File sorters are like giant books, where you slip documents between the (labeled) leaves.

Use a chronological file sorter as your tickler file.

Here is what one looks like, closed — the slots labeled with numeric dates are in the front:

Here is what one looks like, opened — the slots labeled with the names of the months are in the back:

However, we want our tickler file to sit upright, so we can wing papers into the slots as if they were regular upright folders.

So: make a Frankenstein tickler file hanger.

Get two regular file folder hangers, and then duct tape* them together to make the bottom bigger.

Then, stick your file sorter into the enlarged file hanger, and drop the whole thing onto the railings of a file drawer or portable file box.

You want the file jacket to hold the sorter upright; but still be loose enough to allow you to flip through the date and month pages.

Now, get seven binder clips and label them for the days of the week with your trusty silver Sharpie pen.

Et voilà ! (<– real French; not Texas French.) There you go.

With a file sorter, you’re not fumbling around with multiple edges of dozens of individual folders. With a file sorter, remember, it’s like slipping a note into the leaves of a book.

You might occasionally drop something in the wrong slot; but a file sorter does not have any gaps for papers to fall through, and it’s much less ambiguous which slot is which.

Set Up ONE MORE FOLDER with Your File Sorter: a “Beyond Current Year” Folder

The 43 slots — 12 months plus 31 days — are accounted for, by my far more useful chronological file sorter. (Technically, with my file sorter, it’s 42 slots, as it uses one slot for dates 30 and 31.)

But I do use one regular paper folder. Behind my file sorter — the main tickler file — I hang a folder labeled “Beyond Current Year.”

Every January, when the calendar year changes, I plunge my hand into this folder and pull up the notes and papers. What exciting things will happen this year?

Well, this year, I need to renew my passport; and I have an eye exam in July, with a paper I need to bring for the exam.

So I drop the reminder to renew my passport into a month file which is a few months before the passport will expire; I put the eye exam information in the “July” folder.

In my “Beyond Current Year” folder I also have exciting things up to the 2030s (tetanus booster renewal). But I don’t need to pay attention to those until after 2023. They’ll wait patiently there, until I need them.

I don’t know if my current calendar or reminder apps will still be around in the 2030s, but my paper tickler file probably will.

And unlike a subscription service for an app, I only had to pay for my file sorter once. In the 1990s.

How I Remember to Use My Tickler File

Tickler files are pretty easy to set up. The hardest part is getting into the habit of actually checking your tickler file.

I’ve outsourced what I laughingly call my memory to all kinds of checklists.

I created two checklists**, one to start my work day, and one to close my work day.

My morning checklist tells me this:

• check tickler file for today’s date, and move the week day clip

My daily shut-down checklist tells me this:

• check tickler file for next day

I don’t like calendar-related surprises.

With my tickler file, I rarely have them.

————————————————

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NOTES

* Is there anything more useful than duct tape? I don’t think so.

** If you can get yourself into the habit of checking your checklists, good things will follow.

If you have no space for full-size files, you can still make this system work, by using an index card box. (Recipe boxes can work nicely, too.) Let’s say you have a document that you need to bring to a meeting on a certain date, that won’t fit into the card box. Write a note to yourself that names the document, and describes where you have stored it, and file the note in the tickler card box. Pick up some tabbed index card dividers to make it easier to label them. (You can probably even find some with month names and calendar dates.) Good quality tabbed index card dividers are made of heavier card stock than a regular index card, so they can endure some wear and tear. Thanks to @JMaxB for mentioning this!

RESOURCES

David Allen’s PDF on tickler files (Accessed: 11 January 2023)

Another excellent general article on tickler files: Tickler File (no date). Available at: https://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/tickler.html (Accessed: 10 January 2023).

Visual learners, here’s a demo of a tickler file with 43 individual folders: Tickler File Demonstration (2011). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-_Hl_Xaduc (Accessed: 11 January 2023).

Speaking of rubber stamps, the chicken stamp, featured in my previous post, and so many more, are available through Leavenworth Jackson’s catalog.

I ordered several stamps from LJ in the 1980s. Not much has changed in their mostly analog ordering process:

“In time we will add online ordering but until it’s ready, please avail yourself of the older technologies that can be accomplished by candlelight if necessary. (…) please print as clearly as if your future stamp collection depended on it.”

Custom rubber stamps feel right at home in analog offices.

Some of them also like to mark up paper sheet music.

My husband got himself this self-inking fretboard stamp:

He said the thick line at the top is the nut, the vertical lines are the strings, the horizontal lines are the frets; and then you can diagram the placement of your fingers, as you work out how to play the notes.

“Guitar people,” he said, “will know what this means.”

I only play the stereo, myself.

This fretboard grid stamp reminds me of the habit tracker and calendar grid stamps marketed to bullet journal users.

If you find yourself repeatedly drawing a grid or diagram of some kind, you might consider making it into a stamp.

Apropos of none of this, I got this lovely chicken stamp for Christmas:

She looks like a barred Plymouth Rock hen.

Chicken people will know what this means.

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I know many people who love using apps to track their health, including a relative who used his Apple watch to make some excellent lifestyle changes. He is motivated by the number tracking: calorie counts, exercise tracking, etc.

If this works for you, more power to you!

But I discovered, when I tried a Fitbit a few years ago, that I am de-motivated by health-related numbers. They bring up all kinds of emotions for me, ranging the gamut from “resentment” to “rebellion.”

When health-related numbers stream at me from an app, I feel like I am being micro-managed by a robot informed by every finger-shaking health-related article I’ve ever read.

An Apple Watch would send me straight to the couch with a bowl of Tillamook Mudslide while binge-streaming Drink Masters, because robots are not the boss of me.

So there, neener neener! I sure showed those health apps who’s in charge around here!

And… yeah… obviously I needed to figure out something else, for the health-related changes I actually did want to make.

I realized I needed to toss the apps.

What I needed, was a paper planner.

Numbers versus Narratives

For improving my health, I do MUCH better by creating a log that lets me create a narrative of my own.

I’m informed by the same health-related knowledge the apps use. I keep up with the science. I’m not resistant to health-related information per se; I’m resistant to it coming at me through an app.

Instead, I internalize health information by writing things down for myself.

A paper planner gives me the power I apparently crave: I am making the knowledge, creating the knowledge, reviewing the knowledge, and applying the knowledge, by observing myself and jotting down a few sentences about my observations.

And although I’m not motivated by numbers, I AM motivated by drawing cat cartoons for myself: “Make Gooooooood Choices, Anna!”

So there’s that.

My planner* gives me the typical monthly calendar spreads, as well as weekly spreads with a column to write in, for each date. Also: a routine tracker layout. Slick!

Well, So? Did Using a Paper Planner Actually Help You Make Changes, Anna?

It sure did! Thanks for asking!

A couple of years ago I decided I wanted to do whatever I could, to get a good night’s sleep. (Nobody likes me when I’m sleep-deprived: not even me. Especially not me; everybody else gets to leave the room.)

I don’t care how many times an app reports that I woke up during the night, or what my heart rate is, or any of that. I don’t get a sense of meaning from health-related numbers.

I get it from describing, in writing, how my mind and body actually feel, after I wake up.

A bad night’s sleep: sluggish physically, with a defeatist mindset, eyes feeling like there’s sandpaper under the lids. A good night’s sleep: energized physically, optimistic mindset, excited to start the day.

Before I go to bed, I note down in my planner what I did that day, that might affect how I sleep: alcohol and / or caffeine consumption, whether or not I got in some exercise, whether I watched an intense movie right before bed. I also check the time on my alarm clock before I hit the lights.

The next morning I make a note about when I observed “lights out,” and what time I woke up. I count up hours of sleep and jot that down. I write a sentence or two about how well I slept: did I get up a lot? Insomnia? Or did I snooze through the night (yay)? And then a sentence or two about how I feel: do I want to drag back to bed, or do I feel excited about engaging with this day?

In order to get a good night’s sleep, over the past two years, confronted with what I recorded in my planner, I made the following changes:

• installed blackout shades in our bedroom
• stopped drinking anything caffeinated after 2 p.m.
• cut down on alcohol use
• cut down on watching intense shows before bed
• increased time outdoors
• increased exercise
• set a “lights out” bed-time for myself

I also made some compromises.

I would certainly sleep better if we didn’t allow the cats in the bedroom. However, I love those little monsters, even when the Stripey One brings me his toy bird at 4:00 a.m. (The cats don’t wake my husband; so this one was my call.)

I would also sleep better if I didn’t stay up too late reading. Working on that one, still.

It Was Harder to Dismiss a Logbook in My Own Writing, Than It Was to Dismiss Health-Related Apps

What I like about my paper planner is that it is so personal.

I can ignore an app, rationalize it away. Much more difficult to rationalize away this daily log: I’m recording actionable information, and furthermore, it’s private.

I am observing myself, making notes in my own handwriting, figuring out what does, and does not work, over time.

It shows me my limits: e.g. the evidence in my own handwriting, shows that I really can’t have coffee after dinner, if I want to sleep well that night.

Paradoxically, my planner also shows me my power.

With a paper planner, I am making the knowledge, creating the knowledge, by observing myself and jotting down a few sentences to record my observations.

Because I created the knowledge bank, this knocks away my knee-jerk resistance to health-related information.

In my own handwriting, I see that when I choose to moderate alcohol and caffeine, when I choose to get moving, when I choose to put down the mystery novel and turn out the light, I choose the way I will feel the next morning.

I see that Night-time Anna has great power over how Next Day Anna will feel.

It is not an app telling me what to do (oh, the horror!).

Instead it’s my record of observing myself over time, learning from what I observe — and then acting on it.

So, yeah.

For me at least, it works.

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NOTES

* I use an A5 Wonderland 222 planner, and as long as they make them, I will be buying them.

I buy two: one for habit tracking, one for conventional planning. These planners include Tomoe River paper for fountain pen people, thoughtfully designed layouts for yearly, quarterly, monthly planning and review — and dedicated routine and habit tracking layouts for each month. I think of this as the planner’s planner: great layouts for planning, and no inspirational quotes cluttering up my writing space thus leaving room for me to draw motivational cat cartoons for myself, as needed.

If your priorities for a planner are similar to mine (fountain pen friendly, a “let’s get down to business” design approach), check them out. I stick mine in journal covers, so I can tell the planning planner from the habit tracking planner at a glance.

Thanks to @manton for creating such wonderful bookshelves! The Analog Office is now sharing a bookshelf with some favorite resources about working, and thinking, and playing with paper … organizing information stored on paper … how paper and tech shape us … and of course, old school office tools.

In the fall of 2020, I started a blog. I write a lot for work, but found myself still restless.

I wanted to do more of my own writing; maybe even write a book one day.

I wanted to develop some ideas and share things that I had found to be useful, in hopes that others might also find them useful.

So I set up the blog, and posted some things; and then my blog started growing cobwebs. Months went by without me posting anything.

Why, if I wanted to write and publish stuff, wasn’t I writing? I knew I wanted to write my own stuff.

So what was the problem here? So frustrating.

But I’m a pragmatist to the bone.

What Do Other People Who Write and Publish a Lot, Actually Do?

The first thing I do when I find I’m struggling to do something, is to find out which things that a lot of people who do the thing I want to do, have done.

I trust general patterns more than exceptions; so I also look for things that LOTS of people do, when I want to succeed at something new to me.

I also firmly believe that what makes people improve is not so much native talent, as dogged practices.* In other words, I think if average people take on certain practices, it’s the practices that are the pole that vaults them over the bar.

Talent is common. Discipline, not so much.

I believed if I started doing the things that people who publish regularly do, I too would be able to write and publish more of my own thoughts.

I found a few practices I could try out, right away. It turns out LOTS of people who write and publish regularly do these things:

1) Set up a writing schedule. This was not hard for me; I already do this for work. So I scheduled regular time to get my personal writing done. In practice, this means my backside is in a chair and I am typing into my computer for about an hour most days.

2) Many people who write and publish regularly, send out a newsletter, not just a blog.** A newsletter acts as a deadline. This also was not hard for me. For work I have several regular writing deadlines. For work, I also send out email newsletters. Admittedly it was not much of a struggle for me to get this in place, either.

3) Use paper notebooks to capture their ideas. Lots of people advised carrying a paper notebook around with you everywhere, and recording random thoughts and ideas about your writing, and whatever else occurs to you.

You know what my initial gut response to this, was?

“Oh, HELL, no!”

For Developing Ideas, Paper Notebooks Are Less Efficient But More Effective

And now we come to the practice I resisted. I really struggled with this, I pushed back hard on it.

You know why I fell in love with computers? Because I didn’t ever again have to go through the tedious process of typing up my chicken-scratch handwritten paper notes, that’s why. I actually remember when I had to write papers by hand and type them up. Yeah, I’m that old. And what a pain. I’ve written what I think of as my REAL writing, on computers since the 19-coughty-coughs and never looked back.

I’ve written on computers since Word Star. Since the first screen to come up was a black DOS screen.

Use paper notebooks to record your writing ideas? That’s so… early 20th century. All right, also all the way back to the Renaissance, people have done this.

But that’s all they had!

We have antibiotics and computers!

I journaled and doodled in paper notebooks, sure; but real writing? Public writing? Writing for money, writing academic papers, writing for grants, writing for magazines, writing fiction, writing for my old parenting blog?

I did all that on the computer, of course; like a grown-up. Much less work. Much more efficient.

Who in their right mind would want to go back to handwriting their ideas, and then tediously typing them up again? Been there. Did that. (And hid from my boyfriends the fact that I knew how to type.)

Then I remembered Cal Newport; a prolific contemporary writer who uses paper notebooks to ignite all kinds of his ideas: mathematical ideas, and lifestyle ideas, and writing ideas.

What if a paper notebook actually would help me write and publish on my blog more?

The only way to know for sure, was to try it.

So I tried it.

It worked so well for me, I started another blog. Carrying a paper notebook around with me everywhere, and recording my random thoughts in it, has made me far more productive as a writer.

I didn’t write more because of my talent. I wrote more because of my new practices.

Including carrying a paper notebook everywhere I went.

Why Keeping a Paper Notebook to Capture Your Writing Ideas Works So Well

So why use paper first, instead of going straight to a device?

Some initial thoughts:

Making writing means you are making something out of nothing; out of thin air. Anything that helps to lessen the intimidation of a blank screen, matters very much. It is much easier for me to get writing into my computer when I can start with some handwritten notes from a friendly notebook.

You will also write different things into a paper notebook, than you would if you were writing on a computer. Writing on a computer feels much more public. It’s like writing while you’re at a New Year’s Eve metro street festival. You might excuse yourself to the hotel room that is the writing app on your device — but on the internet street below, are the food trucks and the jazz bands and the journalists with their cameras and microphones and all your friends wearing novelty hats and glasses with the new year printed on them, and the fireworks and the parade and all the distraction and entertainment you could possibly desire, to get away from the hard, deep work of thinking.

Writing in a notebook is a much quieter mental experience. You can hear your own thoughts better. It feels private. Personal.

If writing on a computer feels like writing in a hotel room while a street festival is blaring on below, writing in a paper notebook feels like writing in a snug cabin in the mountains on a snowy evening, with the only sound being the crackle of a cozy fire.

Writing in a paper notebook changes what you record. Because it is so private, it makes you braver, more willing to try stuff, more willing to write down a phrase or even draw something, to make it clear in your mind what happened, or what you’re thinking about. Sometimes I will draw diagrams of interactions, so I can understand what happened, better. Or little maps of places. I can’t draw things to help me think, in Scrivener.

Anyway. You will write DIFFERENT things in a notebook, than you would on a computer.

Using a paper notebook for writing ideas, for random thoughts and questions and wonderings, also serves as an editor in two ways:

• First, you’ll type some of those ideas into the computer. But not all of them: some of them will cease to resonate for you; it was enough to get them on the page, to clear them out of your mind to get to the “keepers.”

• Second, because you cannot copy-paste from a paper notebook into a digital file, as you type in or dictate ideas in that you plan to work with more, you will inevitably make some changes — you’ll think of another angle, a new question.

The iteration will only make it deeper, and better.

Try it.

————————

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NOTES

Since the fall of 2020, I have written and published 107 posts on annahavron.com and analogoffice.net, most of them long-ish. If you’re reading this, it’s now 108.

* One of my favorite quotes is from Anthony Trollope, who published dozens of books: “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”

** Why a newsletter, and not just an RSS feed? Sometimes doing something that feels less efficient, is more effective. An RSS feed feels too abstract to me: there’s no dialogue, no feedback. I’m hardly aware that the RSS is there. Knowing that one of my newsletters is going out, however, FEELS different, far more personal. One of my newsletters goes out automatically each Friday. The other is every other Friday, and I set that one up manually. Either way, I feel pressures both to produce in the first place; and then to stop endlessly tweaking and editing something because the newsletter is going out. And with a newsletter, I have the great pleasure of hearing back from people. Who in turn give me writing ideas…

Hey, let’s talk about death again! This is an anxiety-producing topic, and I am sorry for that.

My hope is to share some things you can do, now, to make a hard thing, less hard. Today I want to talk about some considerations related specifically to paper records (because we’re analog aficionados here), and to the challenges of accessing account and app information after someone dies.

If you are looking for a New Year’s resolution, making important information more accessible for your loved ones is one with a lot of impact. Also, silver lining: some of this may save you time and money, for yourself.

I’ve talked about death previously, addressing things like why you really need a will, and listing some resources and services to help you organize your records.

First, the disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, I’m not an accountant, I’m not a security engineer. My opinions here come from working in a field where I routinely see the Kafka-esque admin situations that many survivors deal with, after a death.

On Death, Documents, and Online Accounts: As Personal Tech Increases, Critical Shared Home Information Decreases

I love technology as well as paper-based things, but as tech increases, shared information decreases.

Especially in the home.

People who document things scrupulously at work, go home and set up a smart home without documenting how to use it.

If my father dies before my mother, without printing out — on paper — simple, tested, instructions for how she can operate the heating and the lights, my sainted mother is going to be freezing in the dark.

Okay, okay — most likely, she’ll move in with one of us until somebody can figure out how to turn on the house. (And this reminds me, I have to call him again and say, “Did you write up that house stuff for us yet?” …and come to think of it, I have to write up some house stuff for my own family… )

I’m also talking about the frustrations I’ve had, in trying to share an online news account with my husband. Thirty years ago, we could get the Washington Post and the New York Times on our doorstep, and share these physical newspapers over the kitchen table.

But now, I have to argue on a yearly basis with customer service reps to restore my access to our allegedly shared “household” news account (for which we pay extra!). Why, when the subscription updates, does my email seem to fall off their radar? Why does this happen every year?

Or maybe I’ll just ask my husband to hand me his device for an hour or so each day, so I can read the “newspaper” as well.

We also had a credit card number stolen, and had to change information on lots of online accounts.

These things are all irritating.

But this is NOTHING compared to the admin wrangling and information silos that happen after someone dies.

The Admin Wrangling When Someone Dies is Exponentially Worse, Than Having to Update Your Accounts After Your Information Is Stolen

I’ve done both: dealt with admin after a death, and updated accounts after a credit card number was stolen. The red tape after a death is overwhelming, precisely at the time one is least able emotionally to deal with it.

If you have ever had to change passwords on accounts or update your payment information, think right now about the accounts you have; and now imagine that someone else will have to change or cancel EVERY single one of them, after you die.

Furthermore, that person will have to do it without being able to prove that they are you. (They will have to prove that you are dead; which is a process some organizations string out for several months, with many demands for all kinds of documents.)

With the advent of apps and streaming subscription services, the red tape for survivors has gotten so much worse.

When my grandparents died in the early 2000s, they did not have social media accounts. They didn’t subscribe to Spotify, or Netflix, or even own cell phones or computers.

Allison Engel, whose husband recently died, wrote about what it’s like in the 2020s to deal with this:

“Face recognition, voice recognition and fingerprint recognition speed up access when someone’s alive but present tremendous barriers for survivors trying to wind down accounts. When I sign in to my late husband Scott’s password manager and investment accounts, access codes are sent to his phone. Despite many tries, I find I cannot change that phone number. This means keeping Scott’s phone active, a needless expense.”

This was particularly a needless expense when she had to work — for months — to actually get the pension her husband had set up for her. (It was supposed to continue to go to her after he died; but… it didn’t.)

Engel also had great difficulty getting access to their supposedly shared credit card account:

“If you think you and your spouse share a credit card, because each of you has a card with your name on it and the same account number, guess again. That card belongs only to the person who applied for the account. Credit card companies are alerted to a death quickly by the Social Security Administration, and will freeze a survivor’s ability to view the account online. Providing a paper statement seems logical, but our bank’s representative told me, “Once you’ve opted to get online statements, our policy is you cannot go back to paper statements.” It took six full months of begging to the bank’s “Deceased Management Team” (actual name) to be mailed statements for the months following Scott’s death. And it wasn’t easy to cancel some recurring charges.”

Read the whole thing (if you can access it, that is… if you have an account…).

Things You Can Do Now, To Make a Hard Thing Slightly Less Hard for Your Loved Ones

For now: IF you currently get paper statements for credit cards, utilities, and banking, for the sake of those who must go through your accounts after you die (and someone will), do not switch to online statements. Paper statements might be the easiest way those who survive you, can find out what accounts you had, and what subscriptions will appear, maybe almost a year later, on your credit card. Most likely, they will be locked out of access to your online utility and financial accounts, and will have to plead with customer service, account by account by account.

Consider setting up your trusted person’s (partner, executor) cell phone number, and email address, as back-ups to receive access codes. And keep this up-to-date. And yeah, this opens up a whole ‘nother can of privacy and security issues, if a trusted person is not actually trustworthy. So, your call. But with joint accounts you already have, this might also help with access if someone’s phone is lost.

Use a password manager, for bank accounts, investment accounts, Social Security. And: give your trusted person a way to access the master password.

Very few people make a legacy plan for personal devices. Make sure your trusted person is able to get into your laptop, your tablet, your phone. If you unlock these now by using your fingerprint or facial recognition, how would someone access these devices after you’re gone?

Keep a list of your app subscriptions, music and entertainment subscriptions. Do this for each credit card, and keep it updated. Bonus: this might save you a LOT of money, as you realize what you’ve actually subscribed to, over the years.

If your important documents are digital, organize them so that someone who is not you, can find them. Keeping your files in digital form is not necessarily easier for someone else to sift through, than old school boxes of paper. Run some searches for your digitized account statements and legal documents. How easily did you find what someone else would actually need? Could you even open that old file, or did the software go extinct? (PDFs and plain text files are our friends.) Would your stressed-out spouse think of the same search terms you just used? How would someone who is not you find those files?

I didn’t organize my important digital files because I had too much trouble finding things. I organized them because I know my husband and kids would have had trouble finding them, among the thirty thousand cat pictures.

Make sure you can put your physical hands on these physical documents, now: birth and marriage certificates, adoption documents, passports, divorce documents, documents that proved military service, name change documents, Social Security cards. And keep these documents in a safe* in your home, not in a safe deposit box in a bank. People lose safe deposit keys. Banks close on the weekends. Banks might require you to have the very documents you’ve stored in the safe deposit box, to prove that you are legally able to access it. Don’t get caught in that endless loop. If you cannot lay your physical hands on these paper documents, order copies now. It may take several weeks to get them, but better to do it when it’s not already a crisis, right?

When someone dies: order at least six copies of the death certificate. We did this when my mother-in-law died. Lots of companies and organizations will require a physical, original copy of the death certificate.

Engel had to send an original death certificate to Expedia, through whom her husband had once booked a flight.

She also had to hand-deliver another original death certificate to Best Buy, to cancel her husband’s Geek Squad subscription.

They would not accept copies or scans or emailed documents. They wanted physical, paper, court-verifiable, originals.

Lots of other organizations will want them, too.

A Special Note to App Developers and Providers of Subscription Services

I know some readers here create wonderful apps and services. Thank you for reading, and thank you for making some amazing things that truly make our lives better. For some of you, I am one of your satisfied customers. I love analog, and I love tech, too.

But let me ask you this: If I meet my end on the dangerous roads around here, what would my poor grieving husband have to do, to access my accounts with you?

What would a survivor have to do, to stop getting charged or billed by you? To unsubscribe from emails or texts from you? To export data — Photos? Writing? — you’ve got on your service, that a survivor might want or need?

Have you got a way that people can register more than one email and more than one phone number with you? If those backup numbers aren’t the default, will they still actually work?

Have you got a way to make someone a beneficiary or a co-owner of the account?

Do you offer plans that allow more than one person to step up as admin?

How are you honoring your customers’ very real needs for security and privacy, while also responding with compassion to those who need to work with you after a customer dies, or becomes incapacitated?

And: is it easy to find your company’s contact information, when someone has to do these hard things?

You’ve probably already thought of these things; I’m asking you to think through it once more, especially if you’ve updated a lot since you set these systems up.

None of this that I am talking about today, is easy.

But getting these things in order is one New Year’s project which will also be a gift.

—————

References

Engel, A. (2022) ‘Perspective | After a loved one dies, red tape adds to the grief’, Washington Post, 22 November. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/11/20/death-red-tape-bureaucracy-finances/ (Accessed: 15 December 2022).

I wrote elsewhere about services to help you organize your personal documents before crisis hits. URL: https://www.annahavron.com/blog/hey-lets-talk-about-death

Notes

* When you keep documents in a home safe, especially one that is fire-proof, it will also lock moisture inside, from humidity. My relative in a sultry climate had to replace a passport because it was so moldy after being stored in an airtight (and humid, inside) safe. Open the door of the safe regularly to air it out. (I remember to do this by storing a backup drive that I update regularly; and I air out the safe then.)

Think of meetings or appointments where you are receiving the proverbial fire-hose of new information, such as:

• buying a house or a car
• job interviews
• informational meetings
• meetings where you’re joining a new team, or volunteering for a new organization
• grant or business proposals
• feedback on a major project or product

How do those meetings end?

Usually someone closes by saying, “Do you have any questions?” — and you know you will, but can’t think of any in the moment.

Or, you might think later about a point you wanted to make and forgot to bring up.

The Topics / Thoughts Log: Save Everyone from Unnecessary Follow-Up Conversations

Today I’ll show you a notes layout that saves you from realizing the next day, that you forgot to bring something important up.

The Topics / Thoughts log allows you to track the questions that arise in your mind, and any points you want to make, during meetings where a lot of new information is coming at you.

Log the topics that come up in the conversation on the left side of the page; log your thoughts that come up in the moment, on the right side.

At the end of the conversation, when they ask, “Any questions?” you say, “Just a moment, let me look at my notes.”

Review the log of your thoughts to make sure all your questions have been answered, and all your points have been made before the conversation closes.

Example: Preparing to Buy Your First Fire-Breathing Dragon

Let’s say you’re in the market for a fire-breathing dragon; just a little one, to toast some marshmallows, and start up the wood stove on a frosty morning.

But small dragons are hard to find! Most fire-breathing dragons really need to be homed with castles and serious acreage. You want a mini-dragon, and those are in high demand.

The breeders at Waggin’ Dragon Enterprises assure you they have one mini-dragon available. Since you’ve never owned a dragon before, they want to meet with you first.

You’re feeling excited, and a little nervous (what if they don’t think you can care for a dragon, and won’t sell one to you?).

Before you sit down for that important meeting, set up your Topics / Thoughts log.

Start your Thoughts / Topics log with a header including the date, the main topic, and the names of people present for the conversation. Get in the habit of making sure all your meeting notes have context.

For the actual Topics / Thoughts log, below the header, you’ll set up your notebook page with two columns:

• Topics column on the left
• Thoughts column on the right

In the left column, you’ll note down what the Waggin’ Dragon people say; you’ll keep a running log of topics as they come up in the conversation.

In the right column, you’ll note down what thoughts pop into your mind as the conversation flows: questions, concerns, things you want to bring up before the meeting ends.

In your quest to acquire a mini-dragon, the Waggin’ Dragon people bring up the following points; which you log into your Topic column:

“Some people think dragon smoke smells pleasant, like incense… Say, have you ever tried smoked toast?… We find, when it comes to something as important for your family as home heating, it’s wise to have backup fire-lighting sources on hand, like matches; it takes a lot of dragon breath to get one of those going.”

On the right side, you write down your thoughts in response to the topics that came up.

“Ooooh, hadn’t thought of that; I’m glad dragon smoke smells relatively pleasant … Smoked toast. Hmmm. What about toasted toast? This is the second time they’ve brought up the topic of smoke, instead of fire… But… I want the dragon to light the fire… wait a minute… “

“Any questions?” asks the Waggin’ Dragon rep brightly.

So you clear your throat and say, “I just want to clarify something: you’ve brought up the benefits of dragon smoke a few times, but can your mini-dragon reliably breathe fire …?”

And good luck with finding the right dragon!

It’s out there for you, I know it.

NOTES

Normally I hand-write my meeting notes; which keeps me focused. In the example photo above, however, I typed the notes so you could read them.

Deep thoughts about paper clips today.

I rarely use paper clips the way they are marketed to be used.

Paper clips are sold as a) a way to attach papers together, without b) damaging them.

But that’s not actually true, in my experience.

If you want to attach a couple of papers securely, the papers will still show dents or marks from the paper clip. If you try to keep the pages undamaged by putting on the paper clip loosely, the pages frequently give the clip the slip, and hit the floor.

When I want to securely attach two or more pieces of paper together, I don’t bother with paper clips. I reach for my stapler.

If it’s other people’s important papers and I have to be very careful with them, I might sigh and use a paper clip; but I’m more likely to put them in a document holder for good measure, to keep them pristine.

But you know where paper clips shine?

They make marvelous page markers in notebooks without ribbon markers (or, in my house, notebooks with useless, chewed-off ribbons thanks to our enthusiastic home shredder).

Here is my morning pages notebook, with a paper clip marking the blank pages I’ll start writing in, tomorrow morning.

If you look around, you can find some nifty paper clips to play with.

The set of cat-shaped paper clips was a much-loved Christmas gift; I use them for page markers in my meeting notebook.

You can also test your hand-eye coordination by making one of these:

Store your paper clip chain next to your rubber band ball.

Gaaaah, numbering notebook pages.

How tedious is that? Maybe your idea of fun is not sitting around numbering the pages of a notebook (unless you have one of these, of course).

Maybe your idea of fun is using notebooks without page numbering, just you and the naked page.

You’re a free bird, a free spirit, a freewheeler, a free thinker, a freehand writer, free to be! Me, too!

But you still want to find stuff in your notebook.

Yeah… me, too.

Fore-edge indexing is a free-form note tagging system that can be done on the fly, to help you find specific pages in your notebook, without numbering the pages or organizing anything else ahead of time.

Drawback: you have to have a bit of hand-eye coordination, and perhaps a grid or lined notebook to make this work; especially if you have lots of topics you want to find again.

Fore-edge Indexing: The Index That Lives on the Outside of Your Books

Let’s start with a little book anatomy: the fore-edge of a book is opposite the book’s spine; the longest edge of the pages in most books.

Here are two books published with fore-edge indexing: a 5-year diary, where the fore-edges mark the months, and a medical dictionary with thumb indexing for the alphabet:

And speaking of that diary above, since popular Japanese planner notebooks like the Hobonichi Techo use fore-edge indexes to mark the months, some people refer to this system as “Japanese indexing.”

Okay, so it makes sense to use fore-edge indexing for consecutive series like the months of the year, or the letters of the alphabet for a dictionary. (Address books often have fore-edge indexes, too.)

But what if you want to be able to quickly go back to a few notes that aren’t in any kind of sequence; notes that are random?

Fore-edge indexing is really useful for this.

Finding a Few Useful Notes: How I Use Fore-edge Indexing

Below is the capture notebook that I currently fling into my purse.

I used fore-edge indexing to mark the Secret Route to my husband’s office, the one that the GPS never shows.

I made a mark on the page with the directions, and then I marked the back page, making a line at the same point on the page that the directions are. Then I wrote down a title: “Back Road Directions to (husband’s office).”

Before I use up the notebook, let’s say I write down two more things I want to refer back to, quickly, without going through the effort of making a more formal table of contents.

I’ve already got Note 1: the directions, where I made a mark near the top of the notebook page; and its corresponding mark at the same location near the top, on my index page.

If I make a Note 2, I could make a mark halfway down the page on Note 2; and a matching one halfway down the index page, with a title for my second note.

For a Note 3, I could make a mark almost to the bottom of the page, with its matching mark also low down on the index page.

I like this system because for me, it’s my seat-of-the-pants way to find a few notes again.

But you can do a lot more with this elegant little system.

Check out this excellent guide to do some next-level organizing with a fore-edge index. Also check out Austin Kleon’s post here, to see different uses for your notebook’s fore-edge.

And speaking of fore-edges, wouldn’t it be cool if we still did this?

—————————

REFERENCES

Barnum, G. (2018) ‘About Thumb Indexes’, American Printing History Association, 22 February. Available at: https://printinghistory.org/about-thumb-indexes/ (Accessed: 14 November 2022).

The High five Notebook (no date). Available at: https://www.highfivehq.com/ (Accessed: 15 July 2022).

Fore-edge painting and indexing - Austin Kleon (2022). Available at: https://austinkleon.com/2022/04/21/fore-edge-painting-and-indexing/ (Accessed: 14 November 2022).

Remarkable invention: fore-edge, the ‘disappearing painting’ on the edge of a book, now an endangered art form (2018) thevintagenews. Available at: www.thevintagenews.com/2018/03/0… (Accessed: 14 November 2022).

Still experiencing some newsletter hiccups: newsletter subscribers, here is that 6-second video, missing from last week’s edition, of our cat Posey preparing to shred some cardboard for us.

(Note that she has already ripped off the corner behind her.) She’s the only paper shredder we’ll keep in this house.