Category: Uncategorized

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).

I’ve been busy with work lately and haven’t had a chance to do any diary comics, but last night I managed to catch up a bit.

The surgery went well, though not being able to see properly or drive cramped Mom’s social life for a bit.

As for the crazy dental bill, I’m just trying to be responsible: teeth-grinding, tinnitus (and damaged hearing), bone loss and gum recession, apnea — when all this stuff is diagnosed and the dangers described, it seems like it would be crazy not to do something about it.

Of course, that’s the racket, but the alternative is worse than a big bill. And now that I own a home, big bills are a regular part of life: There’s always something we should be fixing, insuring, or upgrading in order to be responsible and keep on top of things.

1) Good thing we would never risk letting another potentially world-destroying disaster happen just for financial or bureaucratic reasons, now that we’ve learned our lesson.

2) Windsor keeps coming up — in conversation, in an article about Steven Colbert growing up there (which I didn’t know), and in my memories. I feel now like it was a fine setting for my childhood, and understand why my parents chose our subdivision as a place to make our home.

I’d always wondered if I might have been “discovered” and had an easier time of capitalizing on my talents if I hadn’t lived in such out-of-the-way places. But that’s not a useful thought.

The e-mail alerts are achieving something I’ve wanted for a while but couldn’t figure out how to do: Finding out when my boss or his assistant are trying to contact me — like when we arrange to have a “sometime today” meeting.

On those days, I often end up sitting in front of the computer with nothing to do, get nothing meaningful done, and my brain feels scrambled at the end of it.

I sat down the other day, determined to figure out a solution — one that wouldn’t involve having a smartphone on me, which I do not want.

Then I discovered that my mobile phone company has an “SMS gateway” — meaning that you can send e-mails to “your phone number at service provider dot com” and they get sent to your phone as a text message.

So all I had to do was create a rule in Mail.app saying, “If I get a message from one of my VIPs, forward it to this gateway address”.

Now I can turn off the computer, confident that this setup will let me know when I need to respond. It’s a small thing, but it’ll make a big difference in my life as a remote worker.

All kinds of things occur to me during the day, so I decided to give myself a place to keep them. (Plus I wanted to make a little book.)

Here’s some stuff from last night’s Comics Club, which took place at my house — just to show that I’m still alive, although this never-ending grey May is an endurance test.

So here are some random, weird drawings…

(There was some debate about the spelling and meaning of the word. This spelling is incorrect, but much more fun.)

A Doug.

I can’t answer for the things that go through my brain.

I really like that the concept of “digital minimalism” is catching on as a possible antidote to the palm-reading zombies you see everywhere in public. The term was coined by Cal Newport, who has a book of the same name that just came out. (Of course.)

I’d like to read the book, though I also suspect from the samples I’ve read that there isn’t anything new in there for me, since I’m already a little ways down that road. (“Turn your home screen black and white.” One better, Cal: I don’t have a ‘home screen’. “Limit your use of Facebook.” Again, check: I deleted my account.)

I really want someone to come up with a coherent philosophy and strategy for this stuff. Or perhaps that’s my job, if I want a system that’s really going to fit me and my situation.

In the meantime, I’ve come up with a little form that I’m using every work day. Here are the fields in order, clockwise from upper-left:
– When I’m going to check my e-mail and RSS feeds
– What times I’m going to be unplugged (offline)
– Any activities I need to do online (state my intention, go on, do that thing, leave)
– Ideas to research (so instead of popping online to start searching and browsing, I bank these for when I choose to do that)

I’m not always sticking to it 100%, but it’s really helping me remember during the day what my ‘meta-intention’ is around using the internet.

Does it seem like I’m obsessed with this stuff? I suppose I am — but there’s so much I want to do in this life, and spending stretches of my day online tends to just leave me feeling regretful and sad.