We had a team meeting at work recently (I joined by videoconference), and on one of the worksheets we used to review our annual goals, I doodled a little picture for each of my projects.
The little icons spoke to me far more than a title or description, so I decided to revise my little project pad. I figure the visual will make me much more likely to review these and remember the original intention of the project.
I’ve also been using a program and app called Keep Everything to save articles for reading later (versus darting from thing to thing in the moment like a hummingbird). It saves them as plain-text Markdown files (so they’re future-proof and not locked into any particular system) and backs them up to Dropbox.
I can’t trust myself to read these on the computer, though, and not be lured into looking up this and that, answering e-mails, or browsing pointlessly, so I’ve started taking these saved articles and printing them out as a ‘magazine’ for me to read offline:
(Sorry, the card I used for the cover had a *#$@ing price sticker on it that I coloured over in Sharpie, making for that weird reflection.)
I’m very close to finishing the first issue of my comic, and what I want to work on next is a guide to balancing our digital and analogue lives.
I’ve hardly solved the problem, but I’ve worked out a few things, and I want to create a fun, interactive book/cards/zine/journal/pad kit — to take things further than the books and articles that say “Social media makes you sad”, give you a bunch of studies, then don’t really give you much guidance beyond “Just stop using the thing” or “Use an app” (like interacting with the device in yet another way is going to help).