A recent tasks-n-notes tool spinout felt like the liminal moment between deep sleep and awakening to some disturbance. That sense before you’re fully conscious that there is something going on, but your consciousness hasn’t engaged with it yet. It’s just a weird externality in whatever dream you’re having. It was gnawing at me by the time all was said and done.

There are times when I feel okay with all the screwing around and futzing, but things have been hectic recently and I was spending my discretionary time fucking around with tools. I’m not gonna go into the why of it, but once the week had wrapped I had some clarity.

However, one thing I was doing, or at least outcome that was happening was that as I was slowly waking up to the fact that I was deferring a serious conversation with myself, I was reminded that I used to do really well when I journaled. I’ve taken several approaches to that over the years:

• Essay-length writeups about what’s going on in my head
• Quick little notes during the day about whatever passed through my field of view
• Letters to myself at the beginning and end of the day
• A “what’s going well/what’s not going well/what’s the big task for today?” morning exercise

All are fine. All work better or worse depending on what’s going on with me.

But the idea I came across was what everyone seems to be calling “interstitial logging,” which is really just … logging?

(8:00a) Looking at the calendar. It’s going to be busy.
(9:00a) ITENG standup. Someone needs to look at the Meraki/Envoy thing
(9:33a) Caught a ping about the Zoom renewal. Need to find the MSA from last time.

Some people like to toss todos in. Other people seem to just have a little diary.

I picked it up partially because I remembered that diaries help me focus and clarify what matters, and partially because I was so busy trying to figure out where to put all the stuff that I had to do that I was afraid I’d miss something if I didn’t write down everything in the simplest form possible.

Brief digression about how I’d like to behave for a bit

I’m consciously not going into how or where I decided to keep my log. Just the process of figuring that out was slightly agonized and wasteful. It’s enough to say it was sort of a grand tour of everything I’ve played around with in the last … 10 or 13 years? To write down little time-stamped notes? The meta got pretty vertiginous by the time I was done.

I did end up making myself pick something though, and it is sufficient to this narrative to say “it is just fine for writing down little time-stamped notes.” More than fine, because you could do that with any number of things, some backed by extensive cloud resources, some operating in a container on a Synology, some running on a way over-provisioned desktop machine, some, like … 3x5 cards or a giveaway vendor swag notebook or a legal pad. I picked something in between “an expensive subscription SaaS” and “the blank side of a piece of cardboard I tore off a soda can case.”

I want this to be the last time for at least a while that I comment on the tools I am using for keeping myself in order. For a few reasons:

1. After watching enough videos from people who desperately want to be tools influencers I am saturated and tired of the entire frivolous scene. Nobody should take tools advice from people whose job it is to write about tools. I say this as a former tech journalist who wrote an ungodly number of articles about tools whose efficacy I could attest to because look at how prolific I was writing about tools.
2. As with a few other creative endeavors I share, I could begin to feel the distorting effects of getting attention for the stuff I was writing about and resenting the effect it was having on me. Like, it was super cool to get a few links from an Emacs eminence, and it blew up website traffic, and I was reminded that I don’t do well with that kind of feedback.
3. There are other things that are more important to me than documenting how I tortured an AI into writing some lisp for me.

I write all this down as a sort of accountability exercise with the ever-shifting procession of faces coming in and out of focus that I think of as “whoever’s going to read this.” I am not sure who that will be because I ripped all the analytics out of my site. For at least a while, I don’t want to know.

So back to what I was saying:

I started keeping my “interstitial log.”

At first there was a little ocean boiling: How do I account for tasks? Do I use this tool or that tool? Which markup format?

I made myself knock all that off and landed on “just make a date heading, then make timestamped entries and write something when it occurs.”

Even then, for a bit the entries were about writing entries. Throat clearing. Like a dog circling its bed 20 times before it finally lies down.

But things began to improve. The entries were what they were meant to be. I got rid of an overoptimization I allowed to creep in (elaborate todo stuff) in favor of making a little annotation either for a thing I wanted to come back to and rethink later, or manually transfer to my task inbox.

The equilibrium I’ve come to is more or less “keep an outline of the day, annotate for followup/recapture, allow the outline to take shape, make sure to sweep it all up to end the day, because you’re starting a new log tomorrow and don’t want to forget anything.”

Looking at a stretch of logs, I feel a lot of affection for them. They’re easy to scan. I can see all the stuff that happened. At the end of the day, because I have made it easy on myself, I can collect everything up that needs to be sorted and take a moment to do that with care, teeing up the next day.

I would like to stick with it for a while for the same reason I buy my underwear, socks, and t-shirts from three single sources, and have in the last few years bought multiples of other things that work for me but are subject to the vagaries of global supply chains and profit-squeezing sourcing fuckery: If it works, just go with that and remove another thing from the list of things you think about.

The tool isn’t why you work.

The process isn’t why you work.

The outcome is why you work.

I started a long-form followup but realized that the form of the writeup was at odds with one of my goals when I share things, so instead I am offering a collection of habits I’ve adopted and why.

Managing the phone

I keep my phone off first thing in the morning and for the last hour of the evening. Will I feel resentful if I find myself answering a mail or Slack message before I’ve even started my tea? Why give myself an opportunity to feel that way? I do fudge a little: Since I start each day with a walk, I check the weather first thing.

Instead of grazing social media, reading mail, or whatever, I read something unchallenging for 45 minutes or an hour at the end of the day. It helps me go to sleep with a quiet mind.

I put my phone away to eat. I keep my phone in my pocket when I’m in line or in a waiting room. Instead, I try to spend the time on thinking about my food or what comes to mind instead. By doing this, I’m also giving myself breaks during the day when I am simply calm and quiet.

I try to embrace boredom. Mobile devices, social media, and 24-hour news promise a world where we don’t have to be bored. Boredom provides motive force. So when I find myself tempted to go to yet another news site or re-load my RSS reader, or whatever else, I ask myself what I could be doing that would serve some purpose or goal I’ve identified. The more restless I feel and the more I wish I could find something to read or play with to still that restlessness, the more I try to lean on that question.

Sitting there with no outside inputs often causes me to have ideas. I try keep a small paper notebook and all-weather pen around as an inbox instead of my phone, so that when I jot down an idea that comes to me while I’m sitting there thinking I don’t have a reason to fall into grazing the phone.

During the day

I spend five minutes every morning writing down what I want to get out of each thing on my calendar. I jot down how I want to show up in every meeting: Supportive? Listening? Curious? Patient? Assertive? Directive? Those pre-notes are the start of my meeting notes, so I have a reminder right there when the meeting starts.

I try to limit my mail checks to beginning of the day, noon, and the end of the work day. I use Sanebox digests to help me with that: My inbox stays clear and the mail accumulates in a digest folder until I am ready to review the digest. I don’t stick to this too rigidly, but on busy or hectic days it’s helpful.

I’ve broken RSS and general news consumption into two motions: Collecting things to read from the river of news, and reading them when I plan to read. That way I spend my decision-making capacity on picking a few things instead of grazing all of it, and I remind myself that reading is important to me and should have its own time.

I’ve picked one newspaper and I subscribed to its daily “Top n stories” newsletter. I click through seldom. That’s enough news.

I ask how what I mean to share or write about is helpful or useful to the people who will have to make a decision about reading it. I try to make any act of self-promotion into an exchange of value instead of a one-way sales-pitch, telling people how did I do this, and what happened, not look at me, I did this thing.

I’m an introvert. For my purposes that means a couple of things:

Being around a lot of people doesn’t charge me up. Being 1:1 with someone, or in a small group, can. I’m not sure how typical that is of my kind, but I know my favorite parts of the work day are with “my people” in 1:1s, or with my managers. Big meetings are hard. Big social events are hard.

The other thing it means is that I’m not comfortable with a lot of spontaneous expression. I’m an internal processor.

So, when I think I’ve got to have a hard conversation with someone, I think about it a lot beforehand. I used to joke that I spent my morning commute spinning up virtual instances of people I needed to talk to so I could think through a few possible conversational directions. I though it was sort of cute to say that, but I don’t think it really leads to a good outcome.

Pre-gaming Considered Harmful

I mean, it’s okay to decide you’re going to think about what you want to say to someone before you say it, especially if carelessness with your words could hurt them. That’s fine. We should all do that. We have these little phone rooms at work that are barely big enough for a chair, and I sometimes go into them a few minutes before I need to talk to someone about something that matters a lot and think through what I’m going to say. Sometimes I even write it down in a text file. I take deep breaths and close my eyes and settle down into myself.

The “think about what you’re going to say” strategy begins to fail when you imagine what you’re going to say and then imagine them saying something back, and then what you’d say to that and then what they might say back to that, etc. etc.

It took two things to help me realize the problem there.

The first was that one day, in the middle of a period where I wasn’t sleeping much, I realized how badly the lack of sleep was affecting my perception of things around me. Passing comments suddenly seemed like they might be insults. Hanlon’s Razor sort of went out the window.

So I had a pretty good fix for that: On mornings when I’d gotten little sleep – less than six-and-a-half or seven hours – I’d spend a few minutes on my commute thinking about that and what it meant. I’d talk to myself on my bike:

“You didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. You’re going to be feeling a little paranoid and on edge. You’re going to want to take offense at things people say to you. You’re not going to be seeing things correctly.”

Then I’d get into work and try to remember to talk to myself about that a few times over the course of the day.

Things started to roll off my back more easily. It was nice.

It also started making those little conversations with virtual people go down better. I stopped anticipating the worst, or when I would anticipate the worst I’d remind myself that I wasn’t very well rested. I’d make a little joke to myself to spin that instance down and bring up another one and try again anticipating better behavior.

You’re thinking about the ways in which that’s still broken, but this is my story of self-discovery, so either skip ahead or quit reading.

Anyhow, that was my little hack that made difficult conversations with virtual people in my head go better.

I didn’t get the second piece until I went off to a sample training for a program called Conscious Leadership.

Meeting Conscious Leadership

If I had to describe Conscious Leadership in a nutshell, I’d say that it takes a lot of thinking around mindfulness and tries to make it work in a business context. If you’re at home with Zen Buddhism, you’d hear some things that are familiar to you.

I could go on and one about Conscious Leadership. I’ve given copies of the book The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership to managers who work for me and people I care about. I use its language in my daily living, and I measure myself against its standards.

The way it helped me in this specific instance was that it reminded me of how easily we can get pulled into the stories we create around things, and how we should always strive to take a story we’re telling ourselves and “explore the opposite.” Expressed as a commitment to sustainable behavior, the Conscious Leadership people put it like this:

I commit to seeing that the opposite of my story is as true as or truer than my original story. I recognize that I interpret the world around me and give my stories meaning.

I realized the ways in which my virtual instances were just stories I was telling myself. I’d made a certain peace with the worst aspects of them by taking care to remind myself of the times when I wasn’t well rested and was making the stories worse, but I was still just making up stories and arguing with them.

The thing is, as an introverted internal processor, it was pretty easy for me to slip into those conversations with virtual people in the process of just trying to figure out how to say what I wanted to say when I felt a conversation was particularly important.

I had to pick up a new habit, which is really what this whole post is about.

A walk on the beach

So, I went camping. On the last morning we were at the park I woke up pretty early and took my camera and went for a beach walk. I set out thinking I’d go down to the jetty, a few miles down the beach.

I hadn’t meant to spend much time thinking about things and mainly hoped to just take pictures, but there wasn’t a ton to shoot and I knew I was going to have to talk about something difficult, so I lapsed into thinking about that conversation, and that meant I started arguing with a virtual person. Because I was thinking about a difficult conversation, it got increasingly negative and fraught.

I caught myself doing it and got really frustrated, because I know I’m not supposed to do that. So I’d stop for a few minutes and think about other things, but then I’d fall back into it.

Then I remembered how I coached myself about being under-rested, and took a page from that practice.

As I made my way down the beach, each time I’d get into an argument with that virtual person, rather than getting frustrated and beating myself up, I’d just stop and say out loud “this isn’t happening. That didn’t happen. You didn’t say those things.”

Conscious Leadership advocates moving your body when you’re feeling something strong and need to process it, or see it differently, so I’d shake myself a little, too.

Reader, it felt pretty good.

By the time I’d made it to the jetty, miles down the beach, I was smiling to myself because I knew what I needed to say. I knew it miles back down the beach. I’d just fallen into my old habit of wanting to think it all the way through, to know just what to say to each possible response or argument.

And of course the conversation went fine, anyhow. They usually do. I pay attention to people and how they’re feeling, and I’m careful in the initial framing and get things off on the right foot, so just taking the care at the onset is usually enough. When it’s not, well … I stay calm in the pocket, too.

Since then, though, I’ve been using that practice a lot, and it is incredibly helpful. I’m an introvert! I think about what I want to say to people before I say it! I’ve got a life-long habit of spinning up virtual people and arguing with them, which is to say a life-long habit of telling stories to myself that aren’t true. It’s tough to break, and I haven’t broken it. But I’ve added a little thing to the loop: When I catch myself doing it, I say to myself, “that didn’t happen” and it has made me feel lighter and happier each time. I think to myself “I don’t really know what they might say, but they didn’t say that, and they could say something completely different. You’ll just have to find out.”

Newport’s take on how to do that starts from what I guess you could call a naive footing, dumping everything and then considering it without a lot of preconception. I think that is fine, but I’d been giving a lot of this some thought already, have done a few declutters in the past, and had heard Newport talk before reading his book, so I colored outside the lines and skipped a few steps with some parts, but kept a few things from his approach, too.

I have a few things in mind:

I want to radically pare back the number of tools hanging from my belt. I keep a lot of things hanging around for this edge case or that, this possible scenario or that. I decided to reduce as much as possible by getting rid of things that repeated each other. For instance, I like Ulysses well enough but it repeats other things and it has a subscription fee. So, yes, it can post to micro.blog and has a few other tricks, but none that I need. I’ve also bounced back and forth between RSS readers for whatever reason, but Feedly’s native app works great for my workflow.

I’ve also built up a lot of papercuts with the things I do use regularly, such as:

• How do I block a site in Feedly so that I can keep a little serendipity with a few eclectic sources without constantly bumping into the same site with a paywall I’ll never click through?
• How do I get something into an Obsidian inbox using a shortcut to keep me from pecking around inside Obsidian and ultimately forgetting the fleeting note I wanted to create?
• Why does micro.blog pick the images it does to send when I crosspost to Twitter?
• Can I get more folders in SaneBox without paying more? How much would I have to pay to get more?
• I’ve got good automated note import into Obsidian, but am I linking ideas and and concepts adequately? (A: No.) How can I fix that?

And I want to do the sort of core thing, which is unplug my brain from all the social media inputs and stuff that doesn’t feel nutritious.

The more I thought about it all, the more I realized there was a project there. Turns out that trying to be more intentional means doing stuff like writing it all down and prioritizing.

Fixing Todos

So, realizing I needed to capture tasks, I started by cleaning up my todo situation. I’ve been living in a few places over the past few years. I recently tried to retrench on Apple’s Reminders because it has gotten pretty good, but it turns out not good enough. It’s great that you can nest reminders under each other, it is terrible that when you painstakingly set up a morning routine with subtasks and then turn on recurrence, the only thing that actually reoccurs is the parent item.

I also gave Obsidian a shot, on the premise that it is pretty much org-mode except with Markdown, an actually good mobile app, and no dependency on Emacs. It is great, but it also has some challenges in terms of making quick entries, and the task management stuff that would take it to the next level has a lot of the same issues most plaintext todo systems have in terms of awkward and visually cluttery metadata. org-mode does a great job of hiding or restyling that stuff, but you’re still living in Emacs, and the power comes at the cost of a complex and sometimes brittle pile of configuration code and stability-threatening Emacs extensions.

What else? Omnifocus, Todoist, Remember the Milk, Trello, and Workflowy all suggested themselves. I won’t go into why not for each, but it came down to “want Apple-native, a good mobile experience, decent capture, subtasking, recurrence, decent in-task notes, and integration with my calendar.”

So, I went with Things. I’ve had a license for years, I’ve always preferred it to Omnifocus for its relative visual calm.

I could have kept my old Things tasks around and cleared them all out, but I decided to just wipe and start over, and borrowed a page from Getting Things Done by doing an initial braindump into my new trusted system (for tasks, not ideas … that’s Obsidian, but I’ll get into that some day). A lot of the things I knew I’d want to get to in my digital declutter came out during that dump. I made myself sit still, get everything out in its simplest form without trying to schedule, label, or organize.

Once I did the braindump I did start looking for organizing principles. Things has the whole “Areas” concept, so “Personal” and “Work” presented themselves as obvious candidates for top-level. I also added a “Meta” area, which I’ll get to.

So I hucked everything into either “Personal” or “Work” then started sorting into projects, subtasks, and tags.

The “Declutter” project had a lot of items, so I took advantage of Things’ ability to create headings, and broke the project into:

• Tools
• Services
• Media Outlets
• Practices
• Social Media

Into each I put all the things I use or have around, all the papercuts I’ve thought about, and all the questions I wanted to answer:

• What do you need a break from?
• What do you need to do to be intentional about this thing? Is that practical or useful?
• When you adopted this thing, what aspirational idea did you have about it?

Daily/Weekly/Monthly Routine

Recurrence in my todo tool is important to me because I want to codify a daily routine I’ve had on and off over the years, starting back when I was stationed at Ft. Bragg and started and ended the day with a pen, a legal pad, and a list of tasks:

• Morning: Write down deliverables. Start doing things.
• Evening: Make sure you crossed everything off you managed to get done. Tear off the sheet, copy over the undone stuff to tomorrow’s list and leave the pad front and center on your desk when you shut down for the day.

Since then, I’ve tended to move todos into a digital tool, but that list is just part of the daily page.

For starters, there are some prompts for morning and evening:

• What are the three most important things today?
• What are you most concerned about right now?
• What are you most happy about right now?
• What happened today?
• What went well today?
• What could have been improved today?

I also have tasks for each morning:

• Reviewing todos and blocking time in my calendar to get to them.
• Reviewing places where a deliberate break will be a good idea.
• Reviewing the day for manageability and pushing things out that aren’t time sensitive if I need some space.
• Review my email inbox

My weekly and monthly kickoffs are pretty similar in shape and intent: Try to predict where I’ll need time or space and get ahead of the week or month.

To support this routine, I tweaked Sanebox to send me work email digests at the beginning and end of the day so I can quickly sweep through and bulk archive or flag things.

Writing it down

Getting my todos straightened out and having a daily routine to stick to gave me a safe space to think in, so I turned to Obsidian and set up a few pages to write down everything I was thinking about.

I’ve got a tentative Zettelkasten-like folder and document structure using a few plugins:

• Daily pages as a recipient of fleeting notes. Fleeting notes are meant to be ephemeral, so I could have gone with a lot of things, but I also added …
• … the Lumberjack plugin, which allows me to make Shortcut actions to do quick capture under a “Fleeting Notes” heading on my current daily page. The action lives as an icon on the dock of my iPad and iPhone, and I can get at it from the task bar on my Mac.
• Zettelkasten numbering for permanent notes
• Readwise to import highlights from Pocket, Kindle, and web clippings into a “Literary Notes” folder

Thanks to Things and Obsidian having URL schemes, it’s possible to link back and forth between the two apps, so my Things declutter project can link back to the index page for the writing I’m doing about that project in Obsidian and vice versa.

Progress So Far

That’s a lot of table-setting, but I had some downtime today so I was able to dig in on some of the actual tasks in the project: Unsubscribing to media, deleting apps, asking questions on support forums or via help forms to address papercuts, disconnecting auto-posting tools, paring down follow lists, fixing papercuts as I was given answers or figured things out for myself, comparing features on tools in the inventory.

Something I never used with Things before but now really appreciate is the Logbook area, where completed tasks go. I’ve adopted the practice, when a task is about answering a question or learning something, to include the answer in the notes. I really like being able to end the day by going back to the Logbook and seeing everything I checked off.

Now for the hard but nice part

All of this was to get me into a place where I can unplug from social media for a month.

Things I’ll stop doing:

• Looking in on social media.
• Posting anything to social media, including automated stuff.
• Adding any new digital tools, even just to play with them.
• My nightly pre-bedtime YouTube binge.

Things I’ll keep doing:

• Reading and keeping notes

• Writing and posting small entries about what I read

• Taking pictures and posting them to my blog

• Writing about my declutter:

  • What do you need a break from?
  • What do you need to do to be intentional about this thing? Is that practical or useful?
  • What aspirational ideas do you have about this thing?

• Keep in touch with people over email, texts, Signal, etc. Hopefully even more.

• Reach out to people with whom social media is my only real contact and make sure there’s a way to stay in touch. I don’t see a bright future for Facebook in all this.

Things I’m adding:

• A daily journal practice.
• A real effort to maintain a Zettelkasten for my reading and writing. This feels intimidating for some reason. The system is easy, but I’ve only recently restarted my reading habits and I’m curious about what will emerge. I’ll be sure to document whether I’ve become an idiot.

This week, after heavy floods, I went back to the floodplain and the tree was gone. I guess it finally toppled in the flooded ground. I don’t think I ever solved it, but I did love it very much.

“Once we recognize that all things are impermanent, we have no problem enjoying them.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

I love this sentiment, which echoes a book about Enneagram I’ve been working through that talks a lot about the personality as an overlay on our essential self:

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. To the degree that we’ve been avoiding uncertainty, we’re naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms—withdrawal from always thinking that there’s a problem and that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it.

One of the core ideas of When Things Fall Apart is that of how to be alone. She talks about “cool” and “hot” loneliness in this excerpt:

Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.

“If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations I am but dimly aware of this present.” — Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Sitting in this well-lit room with the sound of the surf coming in from the balcony, it is easy to be here now.

One thing I miss about paratrooping: The moments where I had no choice but to be right where I was in time and space. The five seconds between stepping out the door and feeling the yank of the static line. The few moments I had to do the right thing when something went wrong. The exhilaration of running 75 pounds of gear and silk off the drop zone, wholly inside the animal. No thought about the choices that put me there, no next meal, no beer at the picnic table in the barracks. Just there.

Nostalgia for that is its own kind of dislocation. It’s a longing for the quiet up there in the sky between handing off the static line and stepping out the door and the five seconds before the next useful input about the situation at hand. It’s resistance to how things are here and now: The twisted risers, the feet of another jumper scrambling across your canopy, being put out over the trees. A faster fall because it’s raining and the silk got wet. Landing, but being taken aloft again by a strong gust, helpless just above the ground for a moment before being dropped, hard, seeing stars and tasting blood. Being dragged along rocks and dirt, holding wrist in hand to pull the canopy releases in case you broke something and haven’t felt it yet. Disorientation on a moonlit DZ.

Longing for a remembered state of perfect presence is to not be present with this imperfection.

Nothing to do but make another cup of tea, follow the sun out to the balcony. Turn back to my book. Be here, now.

1. I started an early rise routine a few months ago, mostly to make the commutes for the occasional 7 a.m. meeting feel less onerous. I have mostly kept the routine but without the 45-minute commute. I have so much time in the morning before work, now.

2. That time often goes to making good breakfasts for Ben. Play a podcast, make the pancakes or biscuits and gravy, drink tea.

3. I love my office. I’m surrounded by my pictures, I have the lighting dialed in. It’s bright and welcoming. There’s decent sound. My mood improves when I walk in first thing. At the end of the day, I sit in the lounge chair in the corner with the lights low and think about nothing.

4. We have a lot of discrete spaces now that the weather is turning: bedroom balcony/porch, front porch, little back patio with sun sail, our offices, and the living room. It’s great to just go out and sit on the balcony in between meetings and get a little sun and breeze.

5. Our patterns throughout the day take us in and out of offices/rooms. Sometimes we all end up in the living room; Ben sewing or playing a game, Alison and me working. It’s companionable. After a while a phone call or whatever breaks up the moment and we drift away.

6. It is easier to consider what’s next during the day. At first home is a distraction, but after a while it’s back to deeply familiar and comfortable. Grab a glass of water, sit on the porch for ten minutes and think about what’s important for that next meeting or work sprint.

7. It’s so quiet now. You can see more stars at night.

8. People are masked and all skirting wide, but the friendly little wave–a sort of manual curtsy–is back in vogue. I was a friendly little waver when we moved here 20 years ago, but the move to the sorta WASPy, chilly northeast Portland beat it out of me, and Lents people are more about the uptilted “sup?” chin, which is less a greeting and more a fleeting nonaggression pact.

9. I see more of Ben and he wants to talk more.

10. In the quiet and relative calm I’ve carved out around me, I have space to remember people are not at their best. Sometimes people aren’t at their best sort of at me, and it has become easier over the past few weeks to return to center afterward. We’re all sort of alone with our egos right now. People succumb. They need understanding and patience, and a sincere belief on my part that there is nothing to forgive.

11. No commute home at night. Just that last email or Slack, a quick check for invoices or purchase orders or expense reports, then gather up the mug or glass, lights out, and head downstairs.

12. People reaching out and being closer in the isolation.

13. Space to sit in the dark and grieve, or feel shitty, or cry, or worry.

14. Writing more feels like an adaptive behavior, at the slight cost of coming to believe meetings are best for the truly novel, but not being sure how to address that.

15. I have finally found the sweet spot between keeping handwritten notes and capturing actions reliably. It’s simple: Take notes, annotate actions with “!!!” and then sweep that into Things at the end of the meeting, which is easier when you’re not rushing down a floor and across the building to get to the next thing.

16. Ben’s room is a marvel to me. He understands comfort and coziness in a way I was incapable of at his age. Throw pillows, big blankets, fairy lights, candles. I poke my head in and my heart melts. He learned how to figure out what he loves and he surrounds himself with it. It took me forever–well into my forties– to stop being angry and hard on myself, and to learn how to find things that brought joy or comfort. I’m really proud that he just has that.

This is a hard time. Sometimes I think it could swallow me. I worry for people I care about, and people I don’t even know. I sense inside me a resistance to listening to angry people because they are a demand on my reserves, so I worry that I might starve my own pet anger and begin to forget important things.

So this wasn’t an act of “it’s all fine!” It was an enumeration of things that are good because of so much that is bad. It is a reminder of how much I have. I’m grateful for it.

I’ve known for a while that it’s good for me to have some sort of journaling to help deal with ADHD. I slip in and out of it, and use a variety of means to journal, including this blog, plain text files, and physical notebooks .

For a while, my practice involved a pair of daily entries meant to help me figure out the day ahead, then retrospect. It evolved from something I learned from one of my commanders at Fort Bragg, who started and ended each day with a sheet of legal paper she kept by her keyboard.

Over the past month, though, I’ve come to use journaling as a way to capture thoughts and feelings quickly and as on the spot as I can manage. I’ve adopted an informal template, making sure to capture most of the classic five W’s. My journaling tool supports hashtags, so I have a loose taxonomy to connect related entries. Sometimes I’ll make an explicit link between entries, too, if time allows or if an entry is so fragmentary that I want to make sure to connect it to one with context.

An entry usually involves what I was thinking about, how I felt about that (the emotional truth), what I think about that (the considered response), and what I want from all of it, either as an outcome/resolution, or a next step. I try not to self-censor if I can help it, avoiding the quiet temptation to record my best self in these entries.

I guess there are a few kinds of value to be gleaned:

First, I can see the ways in which the inner story-teller is always trying to impose a narrative, even in a moment of relative remove.

Second, I can see the ways in which thoughts and feelings are always changing. It’s a “two steps forward, one step back” sort of thing. Sometimes they refine and improve, sometimes they’re not super worthy. Getting that—understanding and embracing that variability, acknowledging my own messiness—makes it easier to engage a more objective self. I know about the messiness and imperfection of other people. Stepping back from myself long enough to see my own messiness—the messiness I forgive other people for all the time—makes it easier to cut to the ethical heart of hard things. I’m just another human. What would I tell another human if they asked me about this problem? What things would I remind them of? How would I counsel them to act?

It has helped me a few times so far in the past month. It has created a book-ending joy to go with the joy of those moments where I catch myself making up a story in my head and manage to stop doing it.

Journal for the Mission

I’m more kind to others than I am to myself, but my inner- and outer-directed kindness are never too far away from each other. My ability to be kind to others seems to have a ceiling set by how kind I can be to myself. The connection between those two capacities for kindness can be a liability, or it can be leveraged.

When I’m not objective about myself—when I allow uncomfortable or messy truths about myself to go unconsidered and unforgiven—I’m harder on others. I guess the ego casts about outside itself when it’s not comfortable with what it sees in itself. It distracts and comforts itself with the failings of others.

When I think about that small gap between my inner- and outer-directed kindness and try to apply the forgiveness I can muster for others to myself, then the ceiling on my kindness to others goes up that much more the next time around.

That’s important.

When I was pretty young, my dad took me to our church’s annual conference. I don’t embrace that church or its kind of spirituality any longer, but the mission statement for the conference that year has stayed with me:

Do justice. Love tenderly. Walk humbly.

It’s a paraphrase of a verse in Micah, and it has become a sort of meditational anchor over the years. I think a lot about the ways those three directives depend on each other:

Justice without kindness or humility is cruel.

Love depends on fairness and humility, or it becomes mere neediness.

We must temper humility with fairness and kindness to ourselves. We must understand the ways in which unconsidered self-effacement can be deeply unfair and ultimately cruel to others.

It seems to me that the more I can participate in a cycle of reciprocal kindness, to others and to myself, the more readily I can accomplish that mission.

A Few Notes on Day One

DayOne is a journaling app available for both MacOS and iOS. It offers a few key features that have made it great for this practice:

• The ability to make quick entries, with a keyboard shortcut from the Mac desktop, or with a long press on the iOS icon
• Fast, transparent cloud sync between devices/computers
• Passcode/Touch ID security, end-to-end encryption
• Hashtags
• Inter-entry linking

It also understands Markdown, and automatically records location and weather in each entry.

I love being able to make a quick entry anywhere, from whatever device I’m using: Quick, thumbed entries on my phone, or longer and more considered entries with a real keyboard on my iPad or desktop machine.

I like knowing the security is pretty strong. If I switch away from the app on iOS, I can set it to require a thumbprint right away. If I sleep my computer, it’ll require a password before opening. That’s all less about security and more about having a strong sense of privacy: I record a lot of stuff in there. If you picked a random entry to read, who knows what you’d get.