“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

So said Annie Dillard in the Writing Life. This is one of those few quotes I always come back to that give me hope and motivation to keep moving forward, to keep living life. And boy have I been living life these past six months. I’m halfway through completing my goal of writing an entry a day for a full year, and I’m amused at the fact that it landed on Daylight Savings. I lost an hour, but I didn’t lose my day.

I love the path I’m on. A girl kickstarted this whole journey, but she was just the MacGuffin hiding the path I was always going to embark upon in the end. I’m not a big believer in destiny because of the simple fact that I want to feel like I control my life, not some outside force, be it intelligent or mindless. I want to live my days spent doing what I want so that I could live the life I want. The path I’ve travelled has had its ups and downs, its exciting days and long days. I’ve accomplished a lot, and I’ve worked hard, and I’ve documented it all as best and as honestly as I could, and I’m grateful for all of it.

I began it by starting my novel. I forced myself to wake up at 5 AM so that I could write at least 300 words every morning, and I haven’t deviated from that routine in 182 days. As of today, I’m 56,769 words into my novel. I recently started journalling about my novel in my beautiful Confidant notebook, and that has only increased my resilience and excitement toward this story. I’m using as many tools as I can to help me handle this project, and I’m loving every minute of it. As long as those 300 words get written, though, I’m happy. The rest is gravy.

I then focused on my health and fitness. I stopped eating out. Except for that week I went out firefighting and that other week I vacationed in San Diego, I’ve cooked every single meal I’ve consumed in the past six months. Every breakfast, every dinner, every lunch or snack has not only been prepared by me, but has also been Paleo approved. Since October 1st, I’ve been doing one Insanity program after another. From doing Insanity: the Asylum Volume 1 again in October, to the hybrid Insanity/Insanity: the Asylum Volume 1 workout in November, to Insanity: the Asylum Volume 2 in December, and to Insanity Max: 30 in January, February, and March, I’ve been as physically active and fit as I possibly could be.

And to complete the big three areas of my life — mental, physical, and spiritual — I re-developed the habit of meditating 15 minutes every morning. As of this morning, I’ve meditated for 15 minutes every morning for 162 consecutive days. To me, these three habits dictated how the rest of my day went, and colored how I live my life in a very beautiful way.

Speaking of color, I began to focus on my home during this journey. Here’s a picture of the main area of my small studio apartment. It’s colorful and pleasing and it makes me happy. I thought about every gadget, every poster, every book that is in that picture, and in the end, they all make me super happy and comfortable. I love my little studio apartment. It’s my home.

I was able to afford most of what is in that picture from the new job I got a few weeks after starting this blog. A few months before, I had quit my job of two years, and I was unemployed for two months. Luckily, I found my current job — an IT guy at a K-12 school — and the rest is history. I’m getting paid more than I’ve ever been paid in my life, and I love my job, I love my co-workers, and I love working with students. It’s really a dream job, and I’m so grateful to have it.

Finally, I started and continued to maintain this blog. I write every entry for this blog at the end of the day, after I’ve completed every single task on my todo list, after working for eight hours at work, after completing one, sometimes two, Insanity workouts, after writing my novel, after transcribing the Great Gatsby by hand, after shopping for and preparing my own food, after reading every night, after all of that, I get to write as honestly and as frankly about my day to an audience of friends and family. Sometimes all of that tires me out, so I write something really quickly, leaving typos and awkwardly constructed sentences and grammatical errors that I’m too tired to correct, but in the end, I write something, and that’s what matters. I have a collection of entries that I will cherish for the rest of my life.

And I get to spend the next six months, the next 183 days, to do it all over again. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what I’m going to accomplish, what I won’t be able to accomplish, who I might meet, or what I might do, but I’m super excited to find out. I hope to have all of you along for the ride. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

I used to be fat. I used to weigh over 230 lbs at my heaviest. I couldn’t walk outside for more than a few minutes without breaking into a sweat and losing my breath. I used to drink a couple of cans of soda a day for weeks at a time. I used to eat two bowls of cereal every morning, a bowl of cereal and a bowl of ice cream at night as a before-bed snack. The only veggies I ate were melted into the cheese of a fattening pizza. I used to look at my overweight body in the mirror and hate myself. I hated everything about how I looked, and I was constantly sad, and to feel better, I ate more. I ate when I wasn’t even hungry. I would go to the fridge between commercial breaks because I had nothing else to do. I had no control over my impulses, and I just ate because it felt good, and I just wanted to feel good.

Today I finished Insanity Max: 30, the fourth Insanity program I’ve accomplished. I went from Insanity, to Insanity: the Asylum Volume 1, to Insanity: the Asylum Volume 2, and now to Insanity Max: 30. I’m in the best shape of my life, and I feel great. I hated feeling so helpless back then that I decided to do something about it, and I’m glad I did. My resting heart rate hovers between 45 to 50 beats per minute. It used to hover between 65 to 70 beats per minute when I was overweight, and that was a resting heart rate. My heart was doing more work to keep me alive because I wasn’t treating my body right, and now it’s doing less and I’m doing more. I’m doing more than I’ve ever done in my life, and it feels like I’ve been given a second chance.

I used to regularly feel chest pains. They hurt and they lasted for minutes at a time, but I grew so used to them that I just let it become a part of my life. These lasted for years. I haven’t had a chest pain in a very, very long time that I completely forgot about them until just now. I never thought I’d live past 27. I’m not sure why I felt that, but it was just one of those things I believed. There was no reason for me to believe that, but I did, and for years I used that as an excuse to not do anything. Why do anything when I expected to die at 27? I wasn’t motivated to do anything, I didn’t have anyone that I could talk to, and I really felt like I had nothing to live for. I tried ending it all in college once, but I failed at that. I started seeing a therapist, and she helped me stay alive. It wasn’t until I was back home, three years after graduating college and still living with my mom, when I decided enough was enough. I needed to get my fucking life back on fucking track.

I’m now weighing in the low 170s on a regular basis. I can do ten minutes of Insanity without breaking a sweat, and I’ve noticed that when I finally do start breaking a sweat, my whole body’s burning. I know that I’m pushing myself harder and harder each time, and that just makes me stronger. The stronger I get, the more I want to do, and the more I can do. You guys who read this blog regularly know all that I’m doing. This wasn’t possible for me just three years ago. I feel like I’m making up for lost time, and now I simply want to be great. Not compared to somebody else, but great in the sense of actualizing myself to the greatest extent possible.

On Monday I start my 60 day Insanity: the Asylum hybrid workout. The toughest part of this workout isn’t going to be the actual work, but readjusting my schedule to accommodate the longer workout times. Today also marks day 181 of this blog. Tomorrow will mark the (rough) halfway point of my 365 straight days entries goal. That means I’ve kept this up for six months. I’ll have more thoughts about that tomorrow.

I can’t stop looking at myself in the mirror nowadays. I’m so different than I was just a few years ago. This was something I always wished for but never thought I’d actually accomplish. Now I feel like I can do anything, and I am, and I’m eternally grateful for that, and that I’m still here, still alive, getting the chance to do this. Life is short, and I want to live it as fully as I can.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my tools this week, and the only real conclusion that I’ve made is that I’ll never stop thinking about my tools. It’s a very recursive thought process, and I really have no answer on how to stop it. I’m a geek. I’m always going to find new tools to try out, and if one of these tools is better than a tool I’m currently using, then my entire workflow will change to accommodate it. Part of me wants to give up and just settle on something and stop worrying so much about it. That would totally make my life a lot easier, but it’ll also make it that much less exciting. I’m constantly questioning how I do things, and I think that’s a very healthy mindset to have. There’s a certain peace of mind in knowing that I’m constantly debating the tools I use because that means I’m concerned with doing my work and in finding ways to do it better.

I’m working on something that I hope will congeal all my random and inconsistent thoughts into something a bit more solid and enlightening. I’m using Vesper (surprise surprise) to hold these notes, and I just really love using this app. There’s virtually no friction from thought to words when it comes to the app, and that’s a huge achievement for a note app, believe it or not. I’ve been working in nvAlt all week trying to whittle my notes down and organizing them in folders to separate them into different groups, and I managed to surface many old notes about ideas for stories I had. Some of these I completely forgot about, and that was one of the problems with my old system. Everything was lost in the noise. By separating everything and adding them into their own app or service specifically designed to handle that type of data has been one of those weight-off-my-shoulders events that feels good. A place for everything and everything in its place definitely applies in the digital realm.

After going through all of my digital data this week, I’ve come to appreciate paper notebooks. I’m not too concerned with tagging them or organizing them or debating whether to put it into one service or another. Each notebook serves a singular purpose (for the most part), and that just makes my life easier. Before I started journalling in my Moleskine pocket notebooks, I filled up about four of them with random notes and thoughts and dreams and whatever else one uses a notebook for. A few years ago, I spent weeks creating a table of contents for each of these notebooks, and I completely forgot about that until I found the table of contents text files. I hate that. That makes life too complicated. It should be simpler than that. This notebook is my journal, that notebook is for my novel, that notebook is for my transcribed books, etc. This focus just makes my life easier and much more pleasant, and it satisfies my geeky side by letting me try different notebooks and writing utensils just because I want to try them. Note: If you guys ever wanted to get me something but didn’t know what, get me a nice, well-made notebook and/or pen. Super simple!

I’m still experimenting. I won’t know for sure how well these tools will hold up in the long term, nor do I know how solid my ideas will be in that time, either. All I know is that I’m trying, and I’m enjoying the journey, and I feel really productive. I’m working a lot on this, and I really hope the end result is something I will love forever, especially when it comes to that project I’m working on. I hope that turns into something special. Stay tuned.

It’s easier to live with very few things in the information age and still possess a lot than in any other time in human history. I could literally grab a backpack, pack it with clothes, toiletries, a laptop, and a few other things and walk across the country and still possess more than someone doing the same thing a century ago. In my laptop—hell, replace my laptop with just an iPad—in my iPad, I could have photos of my family and more, everything I’ve ever written, and thousands of books to read, and that’s just scratching the surface. I could watch movies, listen to music, browse a freely accessible encyclopedia with all the world’s knowledge, and play chess against an intelligence artificially created to be better than me at the game. Along with my backpack, I could have an iPhone in my pocket and do everything my iPad can do, except that I can call people on this device in most places in the country, as well as take pictures, track my steps, and provide a network connection to my iPad if I’m nowhere near wi-fi. And these are all mostly just consumption activities; I can create practically anything my heart and my imagination desires. There has been no other time in history where this has been possible.

If there was a fire at my house, and I had just a few seconds to grab something to save, I’ll probably just grab my messenger bag, which is always stocked with all my important stuff, and a small box with all my journals. I will lose my furniture, my clothes, my books, and my other electronic devices if they’re not in the bag, but I don’t think I have anything else I can’t replace. Everything important has been digitized. This was a huge project I wanted to complete years ago, this transition from the analog to the digital. All my important and a lot of non-important documents are saved as PDFs in Dropbox; all my photos are saved and organized in Dropbox, although I can’t wait to try photos for Mac to organize them better; every piece of fiction I’ve written is also saved in Dropbox, and everything else I care to keep that isn’t in Dropbox is saved somewhere else in the cloud. Stuff like my Day One journal entries, my Vesper notes, my OmniFocus database, and any other thing important to me. Hell, I’ve even thought of scanning all my analog journals into PDFs and save them in Dropbox just to have a backup copy just in case the worst happens.

The goal for a very long time was to not lose anything when all my stuff burned up in a fire, if that ever happened. That’s why minimalism attracted me so much. It forced me to focus on just the essentials, and I really delved deep inside of myself to see what I really needed and what I could live without. It turned out I could live with very few things and still live a very happy and fulfilling life.¹ The downside of all this has been my insistence of thinking ten years ahead and feeling paralyzed when I didn’t know if this service or that app would be around in that time. That’s why I turned to simple text files for most of my notes and writings and PDFs for everything else. This prevented me from using apps like Vesper and Day One for so long because their data wasn’t portable. But like I wrote about yesterday, by focusing on the now and using those tools that help me with that, I can produce some of my best work, and thats what really matters.

I don’t think digital permanence mattered to me as much as I thought it did. What I’m most concerned about is getting things done today. When I’m writing stuff down, whether it’s in Vesper, in a notebook, or somewhere else, I’m writing it down to remember it now. I won’t care about it ten years from having written that note. I just won’t, and I really shouldn’t concern myself with trying to safeguard this data. If we go back through history, how many notes do we actually possess? There have been millions and millions of people who have lived and died that we don’t know about. But they lived. They were people. They lived their lives day by day like us; they loved, and cried, and had fun, and experienced great tragedy, and we don’t know their stories. So many of their stories have been lost through time, and so many more will be lost, too, even if we are living in the digital age.

Why do I want my data to last? What I want is practically what I’ve been doing in my paper journals, which is a record of my thoughts that I can revisit at a later day for nostalgia reasons. Nothing more, nothing less. I don’t really care, nor should I care, to revisit random notes I took on some random day. Either I did something with it or I didn’t. If I did, then hopefully it led toward something memorable. If I didn’t, then it didn’t. How many thoughts cross my mind on a daily basis that don’t result in anything? Why should these notes be treated any differently? Like I said in the beginning, I’m writing this stuff to remember now, not later. The tools I’m using today won’t be around forever. Apple will probably stop making iPhones at some point in the future, and even if they don’t, will I still be using them a decade from now? If so, great. My workflows probably won’t change, and I’ll still be hopefully producing great work. If not, then I’m sure I’ll be using the next great device that’ll help me get my work done. But that’s a path I hopefully won’t embark on anytime soon. What I’m concerned about is the now.

I’m reading Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn. It’s a book about meditation, and I love it. I just finished reading Part 1 today, and I swear I highlighted maybe half of that section. Everything is so well-written and applicable to my life right now. Meditation concerns itself with the now, the present moment. We live through an infinite number of present moments, and that’s what we should be focusing our attention on. To stop, breathe, and take joy in the simple act of being. It’s hard, and I’m nowhere near close to understanding even a fraction of how to meditate well, but I think we can all appreciate the simple act of focusing on breathing, even for just a moment.

This book has shaped my view on a few things that have taken over my thoughts recently, if you can’t tell. I have all these tools available to me right now, and I know how to use them, and I want to use them, and I don’t want to concern myself with data portability. I want to dump all my past journal entries into Day One and backdate them appropriately because I want to experience my personal journey in a beautifully designed app. It gives me an interface that provides little friction from jumping from today to the same day five years ago. That simple contrast can teach me a lot about myself that I may not have experienced elsewhere. That stuff matters to me now, and that’s the stuff that can influence my thoughts now in a very profound way. Day One could be shut down tomorrow, or next year, or five years from now. That’s okay. That’s the way the world works right now. Pen and paper has had centuries to validate itself; we’re only a few decades into the digital world, and we’re all still learning.

All I care about is the present moment and how I can use the right tools to make me better, both personally and in the work I produce.

I’m going to try something new. I’m going to start writing in my Moleskine pocket notebook again while also updating my blog on a daily basis. I’ve been building up to this for a while now, I think, and I’m glad to finally be pulling the trigger on it. Ever since I first started this blog, I’ve been bothered by the quality of my posts. I’ve been told by friends that I shouldn’t be bothered by it because I’m doing what I need to be doing to help myself. I agree with them, but I know I can do better, and that’s the aspect that’s bothering me the most. I don’t think the quality of my posts will improve any time soon, but that’s the path I’m trying to build for myself. There are things I want to write about but they’re really personal things that I don’t want to write about publicly. Sometimes I sit in front of my laptop with an empty Byword document for 10-15 minutes trying to come up with something to write about because what I really want to write about is personal and fuzzy and all I want to do is blare my emotions out on the page and not worry about cohesion or comprehensibility. Cue my trusty Moleskine notebook.

I’m giving these sessions a topic which I won’t reveal publicly, unfortunately, because it’s personal, but I hope that I will improve the quality of my life tremendously by doing this. I can accomplish some great things when I’m focused on a single thing, and I hope to accomplish some great things here. It’s just a start, and I won’t see what I’ve built immediately, but if I keep at it on a daily basis for a few months, I know I’ll be able to see the progress I’ve built during that time. I’m excited, and I’m scared, and I don’t know what I’m in for. I’m adding yet another habit on top of my already crowded routine, but I hope it’ll work out in the end. I’m confident it will, in fact.

At the same time, I’m planning to steer my blog more toward the technological side of things. I enjoy writing about technology and how it helps me live the life I want. I’ve been writing notes on a few of the apps I’ve been using regularly in hopes that I can write some in-depth articles on them in the future. I want to analyze how I use apps, how they help my life, and how I can improve my workflows by studying my habits and my goals. I’ve been singing the praises of Vesper recently, a beautiful and very useful note-taking app for iOS, but every day I find a new use for it or discover that a use I thought Vesper was well suited for turned out not to be the case. I want to study that and experiment and see what I’m actually trying to have this app and apps like these help me achieve. Why do I take notes? What are their purposes, and how do they help me? And how does Vesper help me here? These are simple questions that I don’t know the answers to right now. A few of the apps I want to write more about like this are Day One, nvAlt, Pinboard, and Anki, and, of course, Vesper.

I don’t know if I will be successful with this. I don’t know if one week from now I decide that I was being too enthusiastic and decide to stop this. I am feeling excited right now, but excitement fades quickly once I’m faced with the acts of working and thinking and actually producing something worthwhile. Imagining great things is easy; actually creating great things is hard.

If it’s not hard, it’s not worth doing, right?

Before and afters can be very enlightening. Years ago I took selfies of myself when I was somewhere over 220 lbs. I now weigh somewhere in the low 170s, and I look completely different. I began my last week of Insanity Max: 30 today with Max Out Cardio and Ab Attack: 10, leaving me with five more days of exercise. This will be my fourth Insanity program I will have finished, and I owe my life to these workouts. It’s one thing to lose weight and live healthfully; it’s another thing entirely to be the best athlete I can be, and I am. I feel like I can run faster, jump higher, and lift more than I’ve ever could at any other point in my life. This victory will be short lived, though. I’ll take Sunday off, and one week from today, I’m embarking on another Insanity journey with 60 days of Insanity the Asylum Volume 1 and 2. Once I finish that? I’m considering getting P90X, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

I have this app on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac called Paprika. It’s a recipe manager that manages my recipes, obviously; but it also helps me create my own grocery lists and my own weekly meal plans. What’s even more awesome, though, is the fact that I can choose which recipes I want to make and then add all the ingredients into the grocery list. I haven’t taken advantage of that yet, but I plan to real soon. I’ve been busy adding all the Paleoish-friendly recipes from all the Insanity recipe books that came with those programs. There are some recipes in there that look delicious and are fairly easy to make. In fact, on Saturday I made some pancakes from one of those cookbooks. I modified it to replace the oatmeal with blueberries and the oil with butter. They were good, but I need more practice. This is a tool I’ve had for a long time now (maybe a year?), but I’ve never really taken advantage of. I’m changing that. Once I have a nice, long list of healthy recipes, I’m going to plan out my week methodically with meals and snacks, create shopping lists, and about twice a month, go to Safeway and buy what I need. I hope this helps me eat better and with more variety, but also help me keep my grocery bills lower than they have been. Sometimes I stop by the grocery store after work and buy a bit more than I should, and if I do that even a few times a week, that’s an extra amount of money I could’ve saved. It’s tough but manageable.

I began to clean up Pinboard a bit with fewer and better tags and a lot fewer bookmarks. I went in and destroyed bookmarks that are no longer relevant or don’t adhere to how I want to use Pinboard. I’m hoping to treat it as a modified version of a Commonplace book, which is what I was trying to create with those hundreds and hundreds of text files saved in nvAlt. The number of notes in my Notes folder just weighed heavily on my mind, and I never did anything with them or used nvAlt to its full potential. I actually went into nvAlt and exported all the Pinboard-friendly text files into another folder that I will process later. That left my nvAlt database with maybe 55-60% fewer notes, and I plan to whittle that down even more. I plan to add many notes into Day One, since many of them seem like they’ll fit in there just fine. There might be some I can add to Vesper, but I’m not so sure. The fact that I can actually see my note notes more clearly gives me a certain joy I can’t explain. Seeing it from what it was to what it is now to what it could be in the future makes me super excited.

I’m focusing my habits and routines to use the right tools for the right job, and I’m really enjoying the process. I feel like I can produce more and yet be more organized since every app I use is designed for a certain aspect of my workflow and they do a fantastic job at it. Trying to force a single program to handle more than it should have didn’t work, and it’s obvious why. The right tool for the right job. It’s so simple yet so important. Focus and hone in on the essentials and that just frees me up to produce my best work and not worry about my tools because my tools are doing the job for me. That’s exactly how it should be, and it’s liberating.

There’s the past, there’s the future, and then there’s now. Today is the first day of a new month, and I can’t help but think about where I’ve come from and where I’m going. I’m hoping to redirect a few hundred bucks this month toward paying off my credit card debt, and I plan to do that by being a bit more frugal on my groceries. I hope the Paprika app can help me plan my grocery lists along with my meal planning in a very efficient, fun, and lasting way. I did the math, and I’m planning to write an additional 9,300 words at least toward my novel. That’s a couple of chapters. The image I want to see is me sitting by my desk, Scrivener opened up on my MacBook Air, Vesper opened on my iPhone, OmniOutliner opened on my iPad, my Confidant notebook opened to my notes, and my printed novel in the center, holding everything together. That’s what I want. I want to use every single tool I have and that I’ve used contributing toward finishing the best work I can physically produce.

A few years ago I would have cringed at the thought of having so many tools scattered around me. I would have preferred to have just a laptop and that’s it. In a way, that would’ve help me focus on not only the tools I used but on the work I was trying to produce. Over the years, though, I’ve learned that all-in-one tools aren’t very good. Scrivener is fantastic for keeping the actual novel together and organized, and it has an awesome feature called Snapshots, where I just click a button and it saves everything written on whatever section of my novel I have open. I could then rewrite everything, and later, if I didn’t like my changes, I could revert back to that snapshot. That’s amazing. But Scrivener isn’t very good at outlining, no matter how hard I tried to force it to be. Instead, that’s where OmniOutliner comes in. OmniOutliner is made for just one task, and that’s to make and manage outlines, and it’s very very good at it. It’s not very good at anything else I might want it to be, like holding my novel or as a task manager.

Throughout the day, I may come up with an awesome idea I don’t want to forget. Something a character does or says or a motivation for a character or just a cool image or something are all the sorts of things I want to remember. That’s where Vesper comes in. All I have to do is press the + button, type out my thought, and tag it with Novel. Next, when I’m ready to refer to these ideas, all I have to do is press on my Novel tag, and I’ll have a list of all my ideas, nicely organized and easy to access. On the analog side, I’ve been spending the last two weeks writing in my Confidant notebook on a daily basis. I’ve written notes and thoughts and ideas and outlines and anything else that had crossed my mind that day. Many of these ideas are quickly incorporated into my daily writing sessions, but others aren’t. Some are ideas for earlier chapters or later chapters and not on the one I’m writing now. There’s something different about writing by longhand than tapping on a screen or typing on a keyboard. I access a different part of my brain, and the ideas or thoughts I get are different than when I use my digital tools. There’s science out there that describes this phenomenon more fully, which I find very interesting.

Finally, my printed novel. It’s one thing to know I’ve written 54,000 words words; it’s an entirely different thing seeing 54,000 words printed out. I’ve come to enjoy reading my work on paper and making notes or crossing stuff out or adding stuff in with my mechanical pencil. My job then is to make everything better. Make each chapter better, each paragraph better, each sentence better, each word better. And I can’t do that without all these tools I love to use. I can’t imagine trying to do it any other way.

Sometimes I hesitate to write about my writing because I haven’t shipped anything. Like, who am I to talk about my writing? I’m a nobody! I’m some poseur trying to seem more than I really am! First of all, to them, fuck off. Second of all, I’m not writing for them, I’m writing for myself. I’m learning. I’m learning what works for me, what doesn’t work for me, all in an effort to produce my best work. I’m loving this setup today, but next week? Next month? My next novel? I could do something completely different. All I know is that I want to finish my novel, and all these tools are helping me do that. Just do what you love and nothing else matters.

In this entry, I’m going to think aloud about something that not only took over my thoughts today, but has regularly occupied them for the past few years. I’m always thinking through how I do things, and I’m always wondering how I can do them better. For a few years, I loved Evernote, and I devoted hours and hours of my life to dump as many aspects of my life into it. A few years ago, though, once Evernote began to feel bloated and overloaded with junk of my own creation, I started to think about other ways I could manage this information. Around the same time, I bought my first Mac, so I also began my journey toward engrossing myself in all things Apple. After a few months I’d say, I discovered an app called nvAlt. nvAlt is a simple app that manages text files in three sections: a search bar, a list of all the notes in its database, and a text editor itself. That’s it. Because it is simple it is fast. That was one reason why I fell in love with it; the other reason was because text files were and are future-proof. Text files will last forever, and one thing that has always concerned me was the lifespan of all my digital detritus.

Evernote locked everything into its own propriety database that was super difficult to export my data from. That didn’t stop me, though. I exported all my text notes¹ into HTML format, which I then converted to text files using an awesome Automator workflow, and for the next year or so, I spent god knows how many hours processing and organizing through my literally thousands of notes and adding them into nvAlt. This project felt awesome once I finished it. However, once I did, in the back of my mind I would notice how I didn’t do anything with these notes. They just lied dormant waiting for me to read them or process them or do something with them. In the meantime, I kept adding more notes and more notes, and my whole collection of notes just kept growing and growing, and I still don’t know what to do with them. I have tasks in OmniFocus telling me to organize them one day, but I don’t think that day will ever come. It’s one thing to ensure my stuff can last forever; it’s another thing to actually do something with that stuff.

So I ran up into a crossroads of sorts. Do I want to spend all my time managing and organizing text files that will last forever but that I’m not really using, or do I want to risk going all in into a system that may not last forever, may not be exportable, but will help me do stuff with all this information now? Obviously I chose the latter option, and it involves a combination of apps and services. When I first broke up with Evernote, I replaced it with Dropbox, nvAlt, Byword and Drafts on my iPhone and iPad. Unfortunately, these services really didn’t help me be any more productive. All it did was ensure my stuff can follow me around everywhere and be around for a long time, which satisfied the requirements I set for myself all those years ago. But I want something that will actually help me be more productive. I want tools that are a pleasure to use and simply help me be better.

For about the past three months, I’ve been slowly falling in love with an iPhone app called Vesper. It’s a very simple yet very well designed and beautiful notes app. That’s all it does. Vesper was updated yesterday to support the iPad (finally), and that’s the reason I’ve begun to think more seriously about the tools I use. The guys over at Vesper are working on a Mac app, which isn’t out yet and who knows when it will, but all I know is that I want most of my notes in there. I use Vesper a lot, and I didn’t realize how awesome that feeling is. One day I’m going to write a review of Vesper and possibly a lot of my current tools, but not today. A big subject, for lack of a better word, of my text file notes are clippings from web sites I read. I have hundreds of these type of notes, but I never refer to them or anything. They’re just sitting there. Over the summer, I became a member of Pinboard, a bookmarking service like Delicious used to be but way better. I didn’t incorporate Pinboard into my workflow until fairly recently, and now that I have, I can’t live without it. All the reasons I used text files for have slowly been replaced by simply bookmarking them in Pinboard and copying the relevant passages in the notes field. I’m planning to transfer all my text files with URLs into Pinboard and deleting the text files. This, hopefully, won’t take me a full year, but I know it’s going to take an annoyingly long time. Ditto with transferring notes into Vesper, especially without a Mac app.

These tools and others — oh god, believe me there are others — may not be around forever. Pinboard may one day shut down and all those bookmarks with all those awesome² highlights could be lost forever. Vesper could one day shut down and there might not be an easy way to export all my notes out of it. Some notes I may not want to keep forever, though. Isn’t that the definition of a note, as simply an aid to memory? Which brings me to the entire theme of this entry and my whole thought process on this matter: digital permanence.

Do I want everything to last forever, especially when I have my memory and hopefully a completed piece of work that will last longer than these notes? What will the world look like when many of the world’s most important records are simply a series of 1s and 0s? We have written records that have stood the test of time, and we’re all the richer for it; but what about their digital counterparts? 1,000 years from now, will people even care to read the digital notes and bookmarks of some guy, let alone a famous author or politician or philosopher? What does a world like that look like?

I’m still alive, and I danced to some disco. No, literally, I danced to some disco. My hips where shaking, my shoulders were doing something that somewhat resembled rhythmic movement, and my feet — I have no idea what my feet were doing. But I felt good, I felt loose, and I felt amazing. It had been a while since I danced, even just a little bit, and I forget how uplifting it can be. Too bad none of you guys will ever see it!¹

I’ve had this strong itch to make movies again. Part of it is that I want to tell a story in a different medium. Focusing all my energies on my novel can be draining and mixing my routine up some seems enticing. All I have is my iPhone to shoot with, but I think that’s all I really need. I’ve been thinking of getting something like the Gorillapod for ages now, and maybe now might be a good time to invest in something like that. I like the limitations of the iPhone, and I really want to edit something using my iPad. It seems super intuitive and fun, and it’ll give me some experience with all these tools for when my class starts in April. I also had this idea of making a little short where all we see is the screen of the iPhone. Apps like the Camera, Photos, FaceTime, Messages, Calendar, Phone, and a multitude of third-party apps to tell a story with seems super fun and super challenging to do. Technology is a huge part of my life, and who knows how many hours I spend staring at screens every day. It just seems like everything happens behind a screen nowadays, and there’s a richness there that I want to explore.

I’m also eager to finally relax on my really harsh and really strict rules I’ve imposed on myself. I really don’t think I’ll be able to make it 365 days because not only will firefighting this summer make that near impossible for me to sustain, but also because I’m burning out. There are some days where I really have nothing to say, and I would rather spend those days writing a first draft of something that would become something better later. Instead, I post every random piece of shit thought that crosses my mind because I have to post something to keep that streak alive. I’ve had ideas of posting some really long and thoughtful pieces on all the tools (both digital and analog) that I use because I want to understand everything I do and use and see if I can’t improve something or cut something that isn’t really adding anything to my life. And I can’t do that with the amount of planning and time I give my current entries (which is not at all). Then I bought myself those frosted apple pie treats at the grocery store today because I didn’t want to keep depriving myself of these treats for the rest of my life. Yes, I’m not going to be eating these things every day, every week, or even every month, but every once in a while? Sure! I deserved it. I finish Insanity Max: 30 next week, for crissakes.

At the same time, I want to keep pushing myself as hard as I can until I can’t any longer. I want to know that if I stop at day 200 or day 250 or day 300, I want to know I tried my best. And if I go out to eat somewhere unhealthy or give in and drink a little bit of wine with some friends or family somewhere, I want to feel okay about it. I don’t want to feel burdened by doing so, like I failed myself or something. I want to know that I can handle myself and that these little acts of indulgence are just that, an indulgence and not a drastic lifestyle change. My lifestyle is to be as healthy, productive, creative, and hard-working as I possibly can be. Sometimes I forget that I’m allowed to have fun.

So everyone, let’s dance!