PTPL 053: Plain Text is the Vehicle, Simple Productivity the Destination
PLUS The 3 neurochemicals of fun, fear, and focus, and why they matter
Welcome to the Plain Text, Paper — Less Productivity Digest! I’m Ellane, and this is a once-a-week taster of the unusual, the helpful, and the delightfully mundane, as well as the next instalment in my quest to future proof and simplify my digital-analog workflow.
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I’ve decided to remove the paywall on all posts less than 2 weeks old. This means that when you receive an email from me, you won’t be cut off part way through! I invite you to become a paid subscriber if you appreciate my work and have the means to do so, but if not, you can still access articles as they are released.
This week —
How the neurochemicals of fun, fear, and focus are helping and hindering your work
A tiny TaskPaper to do list update (still loving it, and this is why)
The philosophy of plain text notes, and why your Why is more important than how you get there
Productivity Tips and Inspiration
The three neurochemicals of fun, fear, and focus, and why they matter
Anne-Laure recently wrote about the three neurochemicals of productivity and procrastination, and how it’s important to strike a perpetually re-adjusting balance between them if we’re to get our most important work done.
Dopamine (fun), noradrenaline (fear), and acetylcholine (focus): how do you use the states produced by these neurochemicals to help move your projects along? Each can be a positive or a negative, depending on when — and how — it’s used. When one of the three starts hogging the limelight, it can usually be pulled back into line with a healthy dose of one or more of the other two.
Understanding how they work won’t magically allow you to achieve your ambitions, but it may help you be kinder to yourself when things don’t seem to go as planned and you struggle to focus on your goals. — Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Try this: When you find your productivity slipping, see if you can identify which of the three neurochemicals might be taking the upper hand. Interstitial journaling can help with the process.
Adventures in Plain Text (and a little paper)
This week…
My everything-in-one-file to do list in the TaskPaper format now differentiates areas of responsibility from projects with a defined end-date. The former are written in all caps, while the latter are in standard sentence case.
Surprised to see just how much I like having all my projects and to do items, plus the archive of completed tasks, in the one document! There was an initial sense of power, flexibility, and control when I kept each tasks in its own document, but things quickly began to feel fragmented — and fragile. Having just one (very well backed-up) file per calendar year for my inbox, projects, tasks and archive, is a practice I’m somehow finding quite comforting.
Plain text is the vehicle, not the destination
I found it difficult to focus, this past week, and that’s got me thinking about my overall Why, and the productivity traps that trip me up time and time again.
Do you identify your collection of notes and ideas by the name of the app you created them in?
About how I tend to dive into productivity or budgeting or notebooks or writing, as a means of avoiding facing the fear of where my efforts might be leading. Too much emphasis on fun and focus; not enough healthy fear of what might happen if my fun-ship focuses on following currents that lead away from where I ultimately want to dock.
This week I posted the following on Mastodon:
My notes are plain text first, Markdown second. They’re highly portable between platforms, apps, and devices. macOS and iOS are my weapons of choice, but they’d look and work the same on Android and Windows.
They aren’t Obsidian notes, or Logseq / iaWriter / Tangent / TextEdit / Nota / AnyType / Taio / TaskPaper / vsCode notes, though I can use any of those apps as a lens to view and work with them.
They’re wild and free, and this is their theme song:
Those words came straight from my heart and I continue to stand by them, but a quick reality check tells me I may be in danger of a focus-overdose.
How tragic would it be if I devoted my entire life to building a finely-crafted system that reaches admirable pinnacles of future-proof, plain text app-agnosticism, only to realise at the end I’d neglected to actually do something worthwhile with my notes? The means are important, but they’re the vehicle, not the destination.
What about you? Do you identify your collection of notes and ideas by the name of the app you created them in? If yes, and that app has you fenced in to their proprietary format, you may need a taste of the right kind of fear to shake things up. If you’re not going to look out for the ultimate longevity and usefulness of your notes, who will?