The organization of our daily life, logistics, is the first order of business for any life change.

Before this project, my online logistics were split between three apps: Notion, Google Calendar (GCal), and the clock app. I used Notion as a personal wiki that included a daily journal, tasks for the day, records of programming progress, and a reading list, among other things. GCal tracked times for classes and appointments. The clock app woke me up in the morning. In this article I'll walk through how to convert each of these to analog solutions, going down the list in increasing order of complexity.

Alarms and Timers

A wind-up mechanical alarm clock was the standard way to start the day for over a century after it was patented in 1847. I got one from my great uncle. Winding it up every day is a nice little chore, and a way to greet the day. The clanging rattle it makes is obnoxiously effective. Since I'm not woken up by my phone anymore, I don't start the day with distracted scrolling™ or looking at my phone. That alone is a massive quality of life improvement.

For the Pomodoro Technique, I use an egg timer. I like that it can't be paused so I'm forced to focus on the task without any breaks until the end of the alarm period.

Calendar

I replaced GCal with a paper calendar in the office. To my surprise, this turned out to be one of the best improvements of this post. That's for a couple of reasons. First, my weeks in Google Calendar looked too uniform. Since I had weekly events like classes and clubs marked on the calendar, each week hardly looked any different from any other. This disincentivised checking the calendar regularly, which meant that I missed singleton appointments frustratingly often. Now singleton appointments and homework due dates are esconced in the calendar, safely separate from weekly events in the journal calendar.

The second strength of paper calendars is flexibility of presentation. Now I can wake up and see an organized stretch of time a month outward. I order everything about this stretch, not just the information, but also how it's presented, which words are miniscule and which are all caps, which are bold and which are underlined, which are on top and which are on the bottom. Drawing and scratching out add an extra layer of physicality. None of this is available on GCal.

The only thing I lose by switching to a paper calendar is periodic reminders on my phone. These were aimed at helping me avoid forgetting classes and meetings. However, they were also a crutch. I'm trying to check my journal more often and write everything down.

Daily Journal

This brings us to the journal, the most important technique in the whole project. Its importance derives from the importance of the thing it replaced. For the past five or so years, I've used personal wiki software to organize almost everything in life. For years it was Tiddlywiki, more recently it was Notion. The usecases included daily journaling, recording ideas, and keeping a reading list, just to pick out a few examples. Tearing myself away from software I had relied on so completely was a daunting task, but necessary for the sake of the project. I experimented with a blank Leuchturm journal as a replacement.

The journal came with me everywhere. It recorded single-day events, helping to replace GCal. It grew rapidly and easily to accomadate my needs, absorbing a journaling section, a senior thesis section, and another section for planning essays, among quite a few others.

It's hard to exaggerate how valuable this is. I no longer needed a screen or internet access for general logistics. I loved adding doodles and scribbles to my logistical planning. It's the aspect of this experiment that I'll adopt most thoroughly after it's over.

There are a few drawbacks that keep me from wanting to transfer all my data from Notion onto paper. The space efficiency of paper is far worse, and so in the long term I'd have a whole shelf of journals to archive. Lookup is cumbersome and the data are vulnerable to fire: a hard drive can be quickly carried out from a fire; a shelf of books can't be. The lack of search raises the importance of careful manual organization. The idea of fully indexed, atomic note units presents itself.

Lists & Zettelkasten

The prolific social scientist Niklas Luhmann kept an analog knowledge wiki in the form of thousands of index cards kept in filing cabinets. This "Zettelkasten" could be considered a precursor to the modern digital wiki. I've wanted to try Zettelkasten for a long time, as it has a few advantages compared to digital wikis. All cloud solutions offer convenience at the steep cost of corporate surveillance and losing ownership. Cloud solutions only work as far as you trust the company providing them. That's why I liked Tiddlywiki, a local solution. The problem is that software didn't scale well. After about two years of continuous use, my old TIddlywiki groaned under the weight of megabytes of data. It chugged slower and slower with each new card until it shut down completely.

The owner of a paper Zettelkasten can cheerfully "overlook" it, seeing many cards at once and thusly grasping its overall shape and form. With paper you can also make drawings, diagrams, graphs, and equations with equal ease, something I missed in Notion. If I do start a physical card cabinet, I'll update this page with the results.

Cash

Oh, and there's just one more thing. I pay with cash instead of credit cards. The visceral feeling of handing away paper outshines the ease of tapping a card, motivating you to spend less.You can curb impulse buys by only carrying a specific amount of cash with you.

Conclusion

As we compare analog and high-tech solutions, a common theme jumps out: control. You have control over the analog tech. It won't change on your or get any unexpected updates. Its owners can't sell your data. All the parameters of experience are in your hands.

Take the calendar for example. The greater control of analog solutions goes much farther than the text format. If I wanted to change to the French Republican Calendar, I could do it. It'd be easy to print out, or if it isn't, to draw a new one. I can't do it with GCal unless Google adds it in as an update, something that I'm sure will definitely, absolutely happen. When it comes to creating and formatting information, the user of analog tech has far more control over their own experience vs the user of monolithic cloud-based services.

I'm not saying that this big-brother characterization extends to all tech. Open-source software explicitly prioritizes user control. Most of this software is extremely customizable, thanks to hundreds of finicky hackers who couldn't get it to do what they wanted and coded the dang feature themselves.

The cost of open-source is accessibility. For the average person, coding has a reputation almost as scary as math. While nearly everyone can learn both with a bit of cleverness and work, not everyone has the time to. Another objection is that, in some cases, open source software can't compete with the best proprietary software on the market. Gimp is fantastic, but it's still not as powerful as Photoshop.

To use digital technology is to be distracted. Therefore, to use analog tech is to be liberated from distraction. Now, I often draw when completely bored— a great improvement over distracted scrolling. Abandoning your phone returns your attention span back to you.

Going analog is a continuum. One who switches more to analog tech goes further. Logistics was, for me, only the first step along the path. But it was also the foundational step. The cell phone resulted in a profound change in the shape of everyday life. Leaving it behind reverses that change. Everyone should try it for at least a week.

Next time, I'll cover how to have a social life without digital technology.