I kept thinking after yesterday, and I think what I’m looking for is something like a “mission log” tool, a bit like how Mark Watney would periodically sit down to lay out what he’s been doing in The Martian. It’s part official record, part thinking out loud (or in text in this case) and part pseudo-public memoir, like a blog with a potential audience, but probably not a real one. Mark’s log is written initially to the people who he assumes will discover his base after he’s dead, so he writes it like someone will read it but like nobody is currently reading it.
This log is a good way to do this, but there are some personal details I’d rather not put out publicly, but that could benefit from a thinking-through in writing like this. So maybe I am looking for a solution that’s:
- private
- feels pseudo-public
- supports the daily log format (one or more entries/day, append only, maybe merge the day’s entries)
- markdown-based
I have a few candidates in mind, like Bear, Agenda, or even a second git repo.
What really matters is the feeling of a closed loop, the feeling of hitting “publish”. So a private git repo is better than a note taking or writing app. But a private blog would be even better! Something password protected, but it still feels like I might be able to make it public at some point, and until then it still feels like I publish, so there is a natural state of “finishedness” to each day’s log.
A good way to do this would be to have a writing app that has a publishing action to the private blog, so during the day it syncs through cloud, not manual git pushing and pulling whenever I switch devices, and at the end of the day I still hit publish.
After thinking about this for a while, I think a simple hugo and git based setup would work. I think having cloud sync plus a good git workflow would be nice but then I lose the clarity of published vs not published. Instead, I can just do the same as fono.day, except it’s private. Could even be a subpage of fono.day, behind a password, if I can set that up with hugo.
Well, anyways.
What happened to the “computer desk”? I don’t mean the type of furniture, of course that’s around in its newest cyborg iteration, whirring itself higher and lower as if you were ever going to use it as a standing desk. I mean the small desk tucked away in a corner or maybe even a separate room of your house that the computer lived on. It was tiny, just big enough to hold a CRT screen and some post-it notes, and it had a slideout keyboard drawer for hiding even your peripherals when you weren’t actively using them.
When computers lived in specific physical locations, the internet did, too. We used to have to specifically choose to go to the computer and switch it on to do computer stuff and internet stuff. Of course we still have desktops and even my laptop is mostly sitting tethered to a large screen and external drives on my desk. But that’s just one specific computer. “Computer” and “internet” are always with us now. I don’t think that’s something I can (or want to) fight necessarily, but I don’t like how I default to staring at one of many differently sized computer screens whenever I’m not actively engaged in a task for a couple seconds.
What I mean by “defaulting” is that whenever I would normally need to think a moment about what to do next or when sitting with no stimuli for a few seconds would get my brain going, I instinctively reach for my phone or unlock my laptop. Since I haven’t yet decided what’s next to do, I open email, Instagram, Facebook, the two news sites I read, Instagram again, Facebook again, YouTube and finally land on scrolling through short videos on one of these platforms. This is where my sense of focus, time and purpose usually switch off completely. How long I spend scrolling like this depends on how intense the growing panic in my chest gets. Because I know I shouldn’t be doing this, I don’t want to do this and I’m still aware of the mountain of other things I wanted to do before I got sucked in, a deep anxious feeling starts building, a mix of self hatred, a sense of doom and increasing fear and overwhelm. Eventually this blossoms into full-fledged panic, which, when it gets intense enough, will finally kick me out of the scrolling daze I got sucked into. It’s like a gravity well that these devices and these situations have. I get too close, and I get pulled in, and I need a lot of external energy to get up to escape velocity and be able to break orbit.
The concept is not fully formed yet, but I think this is the beginning of a solution to this issue: I need a new default that’s about thinking through things, not passively consuming stuff to stop my brain from spinning out.
I have this log that always feels good to write in. It feels good because it’s simple, it’s public (so I write stuff out), and it feels final. The loop closes regularly, nothing lives in a permanent draft state like in most notetaking setups I tried. This is stream of consciousness mostly, and it helps me actively process. I think by writing, and this writing feels “serious” enough to get me to properly walk through chains of thought and write them out fully. These are the keys: a built in closing of the loop with publishing at the end of the day, and an assumed (or imagined) audience that’s not me, so I explain stuff fully, which helps me actually think complete thoughts.
The missing piece is how to make this the default? Ideally, opening my laptop or iPad or phone would open straight to the current day’s draft log entry, so whenever I’m in “default mode”, the first thing in front of me is the day’s log. Wherever I go digitally, it should follow me, always sitting open on my desk, always at the side of any screen I look at. Always at hand to use as a way to clear my mind, untangle half-formed, anxious thoughts.
What I’m missing then is simply a technical solution: I need the git repo behind this log to sync to every device, sync fast and smoothly so I can always pick up where I left off on a different device. This needs a tool that’s capable of git-based syncing, especially on the phone. (On desktop I can just keep a terminal window open with lazygit and quickly push/pull when I’m swithcing devices)
It might be good to have this set up on my Windows based work laptop as well, so when I’m at work, it also follows me there.
Alternatively, and this tickles the gadget-freak in me, a portable devices just for this, with a good keyboard, long battery life and a small enough form factor that I can easily carry it around the house or shove in a fanny pack when I go out. That’s probably a pipedream though, I’ve been down this particular research rabbithole many times. This ideal device doesn’t exist, and the ones that come even a little close are hugely expensive.
The Minimal Phone is one device that kind of fits, or the Astro Slide by Planet Computers (a Psion-inspired device), but they went out of business a while back.
Alternatively a standalone device, even an older thing like a Psion, with an easy way to push text from it to a phone or laptop so I can publish from there. Or even a standalone device that only does this, like a sort of digital typewriter, something old even. It would feel weird to not have text backed up to the cloud, I’m so used to everything being pushed up instantly. Having text “locked” in a dedicated device, even having to wait to get home to be able to get it out of the device, all that feels super weird. But I think it would be good for me, get me to disengage from the always-online assumptions I have so gotten used to.
A GPD pocket could work, but it’s pretty expensive. Pomera looks great, although $500, just like the Minimal Phone. A Freewrite Traveller is a similar gadget, maybe not as good as the Pomera though.
Well, anyways.