I recently obtained a dry erase calendar and I’ve re-found the joy of planning things out in a non-digital fashion. While the digital is ideal for a number of things it doesn’t seem that the digital captures doodling very well (at least on non-touch screen) and I need to doodle to plan things out. I had forgotten that fact. While digital alarms, loud pop-up reminders, and a nice everywhere-you-need-it calendar are certainly good things I really need to plot things out in analogue once in a while. This free piece of plastic has really changed the way I think about planning.
If you read about my “Summer Woes” previously you’ll be aware that I’ve got a lot of pages to read this summer for my degree (a really large number). The problem is that this task is quite large. It is hard for me to figure it out all at once. My brain simply can’t handle it. So while I use the dry erase board for small chunks of planning I tend to use other digital tools for the bits my head has trouble wrapping itself around.
A calculating spreadsheet really helped me organize all of the books I need to read. I was able to separate them by class, organize them by page number, quickly calculate the large number of pages I need to read this summer and also keep track of the pages I’ve read. It’s quite motivating to watch that large number fall as I read entire books in long stretches of tea-drinking and lounging. I’m also using a really old computer with a low-resource GNU/Linux distribution. The computer doesn’t have wireless (no distractions) and it types up documents in a snap, saves them to a flash drive, and grants an incredibly long battery life.
In the end, I end up entering my analogue calendar into a digital one (to be carried along with me) but the barrier to actually planning my next day has been largely diminished because of the ease of picking up a marker, doodling a little, and writing out what I need to focus on for the upcoming week. If you’ve been living ONLY digital… take a walk on wild side of analogue (partially) with me!