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!

I stared at the instrument panel like nothing had happened. I turned to my right and saw a red truck stopped about 25 yards away, its emergency lights flashing. I turned to my left and I saw a white car doing the same thing. I turned the keys in the ignition but my engine wouldn’t start. I glazed over the gear selector and stared at the glowing R while I turned the ignition, and it didn’t hit me that I was in reverse. I put my car in park, took a breath, turned the ignition again and heard my engine roar proudly. I was parked perpendicular on the road, the front of my car in one lane, the back in the other. I had spun out of control, and it happened so fast I didn’t know that I escaped a potentially dangerous situation unscathed.

As far as I can remember, the drive to work was normal. It had snowed a little bit last night, but nothing I haven’t driven on before. I wanted today to be a good day that I even stopped at Dobson’s Coffee Company for an Americano. I treat myself to a Dobson Creek Americano about once a month, and today just happened to be that day. The speed limit on the highway is 70 MPH, but I usually max out at around 65 and set my car on cruise control. Traffic was slower today so I couldn’t do that. Everything seemed normal. I made my right toward Charlo, and drove around 60 in a 65 all the way until the 45 MPH left turn. It was around here that I stopped paying attention to the conditions on the road. I’ve driven this path so many times that everything I did was automatic. I was lost in a podcast I was listening to, and all I was thinking about was getting to work and drinking my Americano. After ending the left turn, I applied a bit a pressure to the gas pedal.

The rest is kind of fuzzy. I must have veered a little too much to the right side of the road and hit the snow that the plow missed. I think my right back tire locked up on the snow, causing me to lose control. My car started curving to the left, and my instincts must have hit because I turned my wheel to the right. This made things worse. When I realized things were getting worse, I didn’t panic. Hell, everything just became clear. I knew I had to turn toward the turn, and that’s what I did. I did a 180, saw the red truck driving and slowing down toward me before stopping, and stopped in the middle of the road. I knew what had just happened, but it didn’t hit me until later. I unbuckled my seat belt while pressing my foot on the break, and all I wanted to do was to get out of there. Once I maneuvered my car back onto the road, my seat belt still off, a bit of my Americano spilled on top of the cap, I resumed my drive to work.

The rest of the day was normal. Once I got out of my car and walked toward the teacher’s lounge to clock in, I forgot I missed a potentially dangerous accident. In fact, I completely forgot about it for the whole rest of the day at work, and I only remembered once I turned on my car again after work and knew I had to drive back home. That flash of fear lasted for only a second, and once I was back out on the road, I felt fine. The whole experience was intense but not really that scary. I wasn’t going to let myself get hurt; not like that. My uncle died in a car crash, and I’m not letting that happen to me.

I still have a lot of life yet to live. Stay tuned.

Continuing from yesterday’s post, I haven’t had any fun today. It doesn’t mean today was a bad day, per se; it was quite the normal day. I wore my very sexy green button up collared shirt with my sleeves rolled up, a pair of brown trousers with a black belt, and my blue Nike shoes. I’ve been really mixing up my color choices, and I really like the results. If someone would’ve told me a year ago what my preferred color choices for clothes would be, I would not have mentioned the colors I just mentioned. They’re subdued colors, for sure, but I used to be a guy that always wore blue jeans and black shirts. I’m evoooooooolving as a person, and I like it. Couple all that with my blue silicone iPhone case, green smart cover for my iPad, my grey denim and light brown corn leather messenger bag, my colorful inspirational posters on my wall, and my bookcase organized by color, and we’ve got a life where color really affects life’s texture.

I write about this today because I really have nothing else to write about. To be honest, I’m growing super weary of writing a daily entry. I’ll be hitting the halfway mark in a little over a week, and I don’t know if I can last another 180 days. I’m super fucking strict with myself, and any hint of failure causes me to hate myself. Not forever, but that short amount of time where I do hurts a lot. I don’t feel like the same person I was five months ago. I feel different. I feel better. I feel like I can buy a bottle of red wine again and drink it responsibly. I feel like losing all those people I lost was good for me because they sucked big old hairy man balls, and I’m better off without them. I feel like it’s okay if I eat out once a week, just to have some fun and unwind a bit. I do a lot every day, and I need to reward myself sometimes. Yes, sometimes I think the work is its own reward, but the work doesn’t taste good or make me feel like puking at 3 AM in the morning outside of a bar with six-shooters on the door.

At the same time, I have doubt. I don’t know if I should reward myself. That’s so wrong now that I’ve seen it written out, but it rings true to me. I have to be strict with myself so I can be sure I don’t stray from the path I’ve built. People will say that one drink won’t hurt me, but it’s not the drink I’m worried about; it’s the fact that I let myself give in to something I wanted to abstain from forever. One drink means I became lax with myself, and that affect my whole life. I take a drink now, maybe I don’t write tomorrow, and maybe I stop working out and start eating crappy Dairy Queen burgers again. Maybe I stop weighing myself every Monday morning, and a few months later, after washing away all the good work I’ve built up in the past five months, I decide to weigh myself again and see that I’ve gained twenty pounds and all I want to do is just shoot myself.

This is ridiculous, and I know it’s ridiculous, and even my mind thinks it’s ridiculous, but that emotional part of my brain makes me believe in all of it. That part of my brain is so strong that I find it super tough to ignore it and just be. So, for now, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. Maybe I’ll slowly start letting myself do things I’ve been preventing myself from doing, and I’ll try hard to see if I can make it work. Otherwise, I don’t know.

I don’t know.

Regular readers¹ will have noticed my not very hidden depressed mood these past few entries. Simply, I’ve been down. There was no external event that caused me to feel this way; I was just sad. I honestly don’t think I still suffer from depression, but this randomness is a common symptom of it. Actually, part of me thinks there is a reason for my sadness, but I’m not being introspective enough to really pinpoint the cause. It could be that I was lonely or tired of my routine or in need of a new routine or the food I did or didn’t eat or a combination of some or none of these. All I have to say is that fuck all of that. Life is too short for me to feel sad for no reason.

My moods are so fucking fickle, though. I had a great day, but it wasn’t that different from the past few days. I had a typical day at work, I had a great workout, had dinner, read, and watched some TV. The only thing different from today from most other days was that I made that girl I have a tiny crush on laugh, and it was amazing. But I truthfully don’t think that had anything to do with it because it happened early in the morning and my day was too busy to think about that later.

One thing I’m being a bit more active than before is with my food. I’m adding many recipes from the cookbooks that came with the various Insanity programs into my recipe app of choice, Paprika. Many of these recipes are very simple to make, cheap, and very nutritious. I bought some groceries these past few days that will help me make something new to eat, and that has me excited. I actually created a brand spanking new dessert that no one has ever tried and is super delicious and everyone will love me now for sharing this for free to you guys: grab a banana, grab a spoon, slather almond butter all over that banana, then drizzle some honey over all of it. Then eat it. It’s good. So so good. Oh my god it’s delicious. Tomorrow I’m going to add half an avocado to my protein shake and see what that tastes like. I may also make pancakes with my Primal Fuel, which sounds amazing, sometime this weekend. I might take pictures if they turn out pretty. Who cares if it tastes good, as long as it’s pretty, amirite?²

Hey guys, guess what? You know what happens next Saturday, the 7th of March? I finish Insanity Max: 30. Crazy, right? But you know what happens after that? Another 60 days of Insanity, this time a hybrid between the Asylum volume 1 and volume 2. That’s going to fun. Remember those 200+ days of Insanity I was bragging about way back when? Well shit’s getting done, you guys. Other than that week I missed because I was sick and literally couldn’t move, I’ve been working my ass off since September. Maybe that’s why I’ve been feeling down.

I haven’t given myself a god damn mother fucking break! Other than the time I drove down to San Diego and back and returned with a whole new home and all my books and other stuff and memories and credit card debt I’m still paying off. Yeah… I need to have some Fun. Capital F fun. Anyone wanna be my friend and do something with me?

Anyone?

Enough with the moody shit. Lets talk about something fun. How I’m using my pocket notebook!

Every man should carry a notebook and a pen with him at all times. That’s something I read somewhere and started believing immediately, because I’m a man and I wanted others to see me that way. Not that they wouldn’t think that once they saw me, but whatever. So I carry a Moleskine Cahier Notebook that’s covered up by this beautiful Hellbrand Leatherworks Field Notes Cover. My pen is a standard Pilot G2 pen, which I like because it writes well. Simple as that, really. I have been thinking about dipping my toes into the whole fountain pen craze that’s going on out there on the internet, but that’s a hobby I’m not yet ready for financially. So these are my tools. What do I actually do with them?

Simply, every morning, after planning out my day in OmniFocus, I grab my pen, I open up my notebook, and I write the date. Beneath that, I choose at least three tasks I want to have accomplished by the end of the day. If nothing else gets done but these three tasks, then I consider my day successful. That’s pretty much it. Sometimes I refer back to this list throughout the days; sometimes I don’t. The simple act of writing them down reinforces those tasks in my mind, so when I refer to my list in OmniFocus, I know to focus my attention on those tasks more so than the others. Has it actually helped me be more productive?

Writing tasks down has helped me develop and keep habits I thought would help my life in some way. For the past week or so, these three tasks has included the habit of working on my novel every day in the afternoon. It’s on my todo list, and it’s in my notebook, and it’s in my calendar. This is something I wanted to implement and incorporate into my daily routine, and I think I’m on my way toward fully integrating it into my life. I’m still learning how best to do this task in a way that satisfies me, but at least I’m actually trying it out and feeling it out and seeing what works for me. That’s a big deal because that’s the only way I know how to refine my habits and make them the best I possibly can.

Other than that, I don’t really use my notebook for anything else. Sometimes I would write down tasks or notes to my tasks as my day goes on, but it’s not a regular thing I do. When I complete one of those tasks, I grab my pen and cross that task off my list. It’s very satisfying. Sometimes, though, I don’t complete a task, and when that happens, I put a circle around the dash before the task. A circle means I didn’t do it. Over the course of a month or so, I can look back and see how many circles and how many crossed out tasks I have, and I could quickly see when I was most productive and when I wasn’t. That’s something a digital todo list app like OmniFocus doesn’t really provide.

My notebook complements OmniFocus. Before I started using my notebook this way, I would carry it around with me and never write in it. I think I liked the idea of carrying a pen and notebook with me everywhere, but I hated the fact that I never used it. Now I do, and I think this system works for me for now. There’s a lot more I want to do, like maybe writing more notes about each task or maybe even writing weekly and monthly goals in there to help me focus my tasks a bit better, but that’s something for a later day. Like Tomorrow. I’m thinking of doing this tomorrow. I wrote a note about that in my notebook.

That’s how I use my pocket notebook.