PTPL 084: Getting Ready For 2024 With Nothing But Folders and Plain Text
PTPL 084: Getting Ready For 2024 With Nothing But Folders and Plain Text
Plus a two-pronged principle to help you decide between a manual or automated approach
Welcome! I’m Ellane, and this is a weekly, garage-door-up summary of how I’m learning to simplify and future-proof my digital-analog workflow. It’s a busy, family and event-centred time of year for many of us, so this and next week’s editions are coming to you a day or so later than usual.
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Folders and plain text inspiration to help you get ready for the new year
If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you’re reading this after the bulk of the festivities are over, and you’re looking to gently evaluate the year that’s been, while preparing for the one that’s nearly upon us.
Geet Duggal has written a 25 minute Medium article that’s 110% worth your time if you’re looking for inspiration for improving your hand-made task management system. If you’re not on Medium, I’m truly sorry I can’t yet share a Friend link. (FYI, I’m working on it)
I’ll be going over it a couple more times to learn from his method for capturing tasks in one big, messy pile, and revisiting these to determine what needs doing next.
His system, like mine, relies on plain text files and folders. It’s old and new at the same time:
Therefore, nothing I say here is terribly original. Except it is. It’s my take with its own unique twist that may or may not resonate with you. The same holds for your approach to productivity.
Geet and I both believe that —
Having one primary, trusted source of truth for captured tasks is worth striving for.
Duplication when capturing tasks is good. It shows you what’s important enough to your brain to repeat.
Captured tasks should be revisited often.
Keeping reminders of tasks in more than one place can be a good idea, e.g. sticky notes, placing the item you need to bring with you in front of the door.
…the single largest de-motivator when working on a project like this is the urge to just do it all at once. I call that “do big”, and that approach can make doing anything substantial overwhelming and uninspiring. So this is the way I think now: Think big. Do small. Small will add to big.
The article is looong, but presented in a way that’s easy to digest and review. I’m so pleased to see the emergence of more voices writing about simplicity, flexibility, portability and autonomy in the plain text realm!
Plain text budgeting
Has it really only been a week since I last wrote about my adventures with plain text budgeting? I’ve spent several hours a day diving in over the past week and really feeling out how to do this. The manual nature of tracking financial data is helping me to see the larger consequences of a series of smaller actions.
A lot of people are going to prefer an app or a spreadsheet for this, but I know for certain I’m not alone in benefiting from doing the deep dive with my sleeves rolled up.
Here’s the two-pronged principle:
There’s no point outsourcing something (to a formula, or an app) when the benefits from being totally hands-on far outweigh the time saved and a pretty UI, and there’s no medal for doing things the hard way, when the easier way would be a better fit.
Keeping my records by hand is the perfect solution for me, where I am today. I could write up how to do it, package it up nicely with pictures (and maybe one day I will), but that’s not going to help you if it’s the wrong size for your productivity frame. As always, I encourage you to do the work of discovering what you as an individual need, at this point in your life, when it comes to personal knowledge management.
See last week’s missive if you’re new to the concept of budgeting on digital paper. Further to that, Stowe Boyd kindly pointed me in the direction of the CalcCraft plugin, that looks very promising when it comes to calculations in Markdown tables!
Ellane loves helping simplicity-focused Apple users to plan and learn effectively and autonomously.
This post is also on Medium, and includes a Friend link for non-paying subscribers. Plain Text; Paper — Less posts are paywall-free for the first four weeks after publication. Subscribe to receive them as soon as they come out.
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