"But what I couldn't figure out was, what was the connection between this long corridor and Marcel Proust?"
- Haruki Murakami / Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
BY ANTHONY ROSS
In April, I invested in WorkFlowy Pro. WorkFlowy is as they say, a notebook for lists. It's free, but I needed more space, so I went pro.
So far, playing with it for these last two months with the determination that 'I've paid for it and will find the best way to use it,' has shown true promise. For personal documentation, or, to quote myself, "documenting the creative life," it is better than whiteboards, large paper calendars, Google docs, Evernote and other ways that I've attempted to keep track of things in the past.
I am currently using it as a daily log, with bullet points of what happens each day, which I can reflect on later and remember the details that happened along with each event. Something like this:
- Made smoothie
- Did dishes
- Started Master Study of Matt Smith art
- Watched Jeff Watts Master Study video X 2
- Continued Master Study - finished lay-in
- Ate quinoa and Artichokes
- Drew random stuff
And so on... It is also my daily, monthly and yearly calendar all in one. Tags are a sufficient way of organizing myself. I can tag the days that I need to @meet someone, or when I have an #event to attend. Tags are customized to whatever you put an @ or # symbol in front of. I've started to use the tags #today1, #today2, and #today3 to list the things I want to do soon with priority listing. 1 being most important and 3 being something to do soon, but less soon than 2. I also tag #today with no number for things I want to do every day, such as meditation.
It's also my organizer for everything else in my life, such as my art, writing and reading. I read in a recent post by Austin Kleon, who I've borrowed the daily #log idea from, that some woman reads five books at once and connects what she gets from each of them to each other. So I added reading to my #today (daily) lists and started on five books at the same time.
I've organized my reading as follows. These are the five books I've started reading, and I calculated how many pages I needed to read on a daily basis to get all the pages of each book read within two months.
Reading
- Frankenstein - 5 pages per day - done in 2 months (May 11th-July 11th) - 269 pages to go
- Read 5 pages #today *
- Hard-Boiled Wonderland - 7 pages a day - done in 2 months (May 11th-July 11th) - 386 pages to go
- Read 7 pages - #today *
- Super Mario - 5 pages a day - done in 2 months (May 11th - July 11th) - 291 pages to go
- Read 5 pages #today *
- Swann's Way - 10 pages a day - done in 2 months (May 11th - July 11th) - 277 pages to go
- Read 10 pages #today *
- Noble Eight-fold Path - 2 pages a day - done in 2 months (May 11th - July 11th) - 115 pages to go
- Read 2 pages #today *
It's nice to have to read only two pages on one book and have ten to read of another. I think the diversity is going to prove useful in the consistent practice of reading this amount daily. It's not much reading in a day. It's enough to do without tiring yourself out or being overwhelmed by the amount of pages before you even look at a book. Five books in two months for one year will be thirty books. Not bad compared to my usual reading year.
You can see the #today tags there and the * next to it. I've used the * to show myself when I have read my pages. WorkFlowy has a cross off feature as the application is based on making lists and that is a very listy thing to do. However, a * is simple enough for me to see that I've read today, and I will erase it before the next day's reading begins. Small steps on a daily basis work best.
No comments:
Post a Comment