Writing
Friday, March 7, 2025
A few weeks ago, I came across this blog post about the author’s reasons for switching to a different everyday-carry notebook. I love posts like these, and this one had me clicking on websites, blog posts, and videos about notebooks and pens until long past bedtime.
For some, it can be difficult to resist the possibility that a new notebook or pen might help squeeze more insightful words onto a blank page. There’s a reason I highlighted this passage from Todd Henry’s Daily Creative:
Sometimes the feel of a new tool in your hands is all it takes to create a spark: a new keyboard for your computer, a new pen or notebook. There’s no magic in the tool; it’s how the new tool makes you feel about working, how it invites you back into your craft.
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Thursday, February 6, 2025 →
My blog had its tenth birthday last July, and I forgot to celebrate: Why Blogs Matter
Thursday, February 6, 2025
This blog had its tenth birthday last July, and I forgot to celebrate.
I had no idea what I was doing when I shared that first essay in 2014. Since then, I’ve written about a hundred more posts. Each is now swirling around the ether, a faint signal in the noise for those who share an interest in keeping a journal, or reading great books, or managing finances on a Mac, or taking better notes. Or being a better father, or living aboard a boat, or suffering an unimaginable loss.
An odd assortment, I know.
Readers from sixty countries have visited my blog. I have corresponded with dozens of people with questions or comments about what I’ve written. I’ve also become friends with other bloggers who care deeply about many of the same things. It’s a marvel of the internet age that we have this medium to find each other, rare and valuable needles in an unending hayloft.
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Monday, September 9, 2024
I’m trying out a new note-taking method. I’ve switched from Field Notes to this custom index card holder. I prefer taking notes on index cards, but I’m always misplacing them or can’t find one when I need it. This “book” solves that. I moved the ring to the top right side to accommodate my left-handedness, so it’s comfortable for writing. I take notes on books or writing ideas, and when I’m ready to process or write, I pull out the cards and arrange and rearrange them on my desk.
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Sunday, September 1, 2024 →
From Are Bookstores Just a Waste of Space? (New Yorker):
Two-thirds of the books released by the top-ten trade publishers sell fewer than a thousand copies, and less than four per cent sell more than twenty thousand.
I knew that bestselling authors dominate book sales, but these are humbling statistics for anyone contemplating the Herculean effort of writing and publishing a first book.
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
This is the second of what might become a series of posts about how I use the Bear app to improve how I leverage notes in my reading and thinking. This is not a topic that will interest many, but writing a blog offers its indulgences. Unless your interests lie in the nerdier aspects of note-taking systems, you can safely skip this one.
If you told me a year ago that I’d write a blog post about the power of Apple widgets, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here I am—writing a blog post about Apple widgets.
You might be asking, what are you even talking about? What are widgets? Apple introduced these quirky appendages in 2020 as a way to present information from apps on the home screen of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The most popular widgets provide information about weather, stocks, and news. My reaction back then was decidedly ho-hum. Why would I want to clutter the precious real estate of my iPhone screen when I could just open the app?
A particular kind of widget in Bear 2 finally convinced me of their value.
In January, I switched from Craft to Bear 2 for my reading and knowledge notes. I shared why I chose Bear in this post. The switch went so well that I soon brought over my journal from Day One and my writing from Ulysses. For the past four months, almost everything I’ve written has started and ended in Bear.
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Friday, February 23, 2024 →
After three good years with Craft, I’ve moved my reading notes and PKM to Bear. I really love Bear’s simplicity and hidden power on both Mac and iOS. No futzing, just my words. Blog post: Bear 2 for Writing and Thinking.
Friday, February 23, 2024
For the past six weeks, I’ve been evaluating an app to replace Craft for my reading notes. This post shares the reasons I’m moving away from Craft and why Bear 2 might be the best app around for writing and thinking on the Mac and iPad.
Craft and the Value of Connected Notes
I use Craft to capture the notes, quotes, and wisdom I’ve gleaned from reading and studying. Before Craft, these notes languished in the margins of books or notecards stuffed in a file box. In three years with Craft, I have written almost four hundred reading notes linked to several hundred dedicated theme notes, creating what is unfortunately called in personal knowledge management circles a “second brain.”
The lofty promises of automatic insights from smart note-taking tools are mostly overblown. I still resort to notecards or a paper notebook when I’m forced to really concentrate. A digital tool does solve the issue of near-instant retrieval, though, and there is goodness in gathering notes together in a trusted system.
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Friday, January 19, 2024
I surprised myself a little over a year ago by writing in a paper journal every morning. The surprise wasn’t that I was keeping a journal but that I was doing it by hand. I had been using the Day One journaling app to record my private thoughts for over a decade. But this was no ordinary year. After suffering an immeasurable loss, I yearned for the comfort that sometimes only flows from pen and paper.
Yet what’s even more surprising is that this was no momentary whim. I’ve kept up this daily habit of scribbling in a notebook in the morning and typing in Day One at night for over a year now. And I think I’ve pieced together why, for me, the combination of analog and digital writing has developed into the best possible journaling experience.
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Sunday, October 15, 2023
How I fell into a trance with the Indy blog service, Micro.blog, is a curious story.
I received a renewal invoice from HostGator notifying me that the cost of my bi-annual web hosting service was going up 58%. Quick math informed me that I was paying too much for a personal blog. Surely there must be a less expensive alternative? That question led me down many paths, most leading me in circles.
Moving to Wordpress.com seemed like a good idea until I realized its plug-in-enabled service made even HostGator’s renewal price seem like a steal. I considered Medium and Substack, but their continual pestering readers to subscribe to their respective services didn't mesh with my belief in the value of an open internet. Many other competing web hosting services offered attractive short-term teaser rates but would require constant leapfrogging from service to service to remain affordable.
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Saturday, February 26, 2022
I’ve kept a journal for most of my adult life. I got started in my early twenties filling dozens of blank journal books. Ten years ago, I went digital with an app called Day One, and I have been using an iPad to journal since then. My journal holds thousands of entries — over a million words — spanning more than thirty years of private thoughts and memories.
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Wednesday, December 15, 2021
It’s been a year since I adopted Craft as my primary research and note-taking app. I shared my impressions of Craft early on, but I thought I would provide an update on how I’m using the software and why, with all the other choices available in the personal knowledge management (PKM) space, I’m still all-in with Craft.
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Saturday, October 23, 2021
I’m a long-time subscriber of Grammarly, the subscription-based grammar checking and proofreading service. I’m the kind of writer that needs grammar and style checking. No matter how many times I review a draft, the round trip through Grammarly finds some sort of error. It’s tough to proofread your own writing, and incorporating this final check in my process has saved me from some otherwise mortifying bloopers. The cost of a premium Grammarly subscription feels low when compared to publishing articles with these dumb writing errors.
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Friday, September 24, 2021
For the past ten years, I have been on a mission to eradicate paper from my work and home life. I can now access information more quickly and from anywhere, whether at sea or at the Apple Store where I need to produce the invoice for a dead MacBook Pro. And yet, one hold-out refuses to go gently into that dark night of paper annihilation: my Field Notes notebooks. These pint-sized memo books with their quirky designs and durable paper still travel with me just about everywhere. I sometimes wonder at the irony of using a $1,000 iPad Pro as a lap desk to scribble in a $4 notebook.
With everything else in my life so digitally focused, why do I still fill one of these 48-page Field Notes every three or four weeks?
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Thursday, January 21, 2021
I’ve kept a personal journal for most of my adult life. These journals have helped me wrestle with every significant decision and manage through the many stresses of everyday life. Last month, I put down my millionth word in over 40 years of self-reflection.
I’ve written about the reasons to keep a journal, and by far the most frequent question I receive from readers is how to establish a regular habit of journaling. Many find it easy to start a journal but much more challenging to keep it up.
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Thursday, January 7, 2021
About a month ago, I started using a new Mac/iOS app called Craft to help me make sense of books I read and organize ideas and content for my own writing. I was intrigued by the potential of bringing all my disparate notes into one friction-free digital home, enabling new connections and insights from all these books and ideas. The inspiration for this came from reading Sönke Ahrens’ book How to Take Smart Notes, which introduced me to Professor Luhmann’s famed Zettelkasten system.
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Wednesday, September 25, 2019
Want to establish a consistent journaling habit and record your most important life events? Let me give you some simple advice from a long-time journal writer: scan your previous half dozen entries before you start to write. This two-minute drill will help you fight writer’s block and improve the overall content of your journals.
Let me explain.
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Friday, January 26, 2018
This is the second installment of a multi-part series on journal writing. The first post described the benefits of keeping a journal. Here, I’ll share thoughts on where to keep your journal: paper or digital.
For most of my adult life, I’ve kept a journal. I’ve always felt a calling to record my life, perhaps some homage to my love of books and reading. My earliest journals were blank hardback books, the first of which took nearly a decade of sporadic writing to fill. After I became more convinced of my journal keeping ability, I bought lovely leather-bound books with acid-free paper and a silk ribbon to mark my place. I figured I could splurge on a book that I might carry around with me daily for a year or more. I now have a shelf full of these beautiful books after two decades of near-daily writing.
How I Started Keeping a Journal
My journaling habit really took hold when I moved to Vashon 20 years ago. Vashon is an island in the middle of Puget Sound in Washington State, accessible only by ferry, so my daily commute to work each way involved thirty minutes of driving on back country roads and thirty minutes of combined waiting and sailing on a ferry boat to the mainland.
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Wednesday, January 17, 2018
You should keep a journal and ideally write in it every day. You’ve likely heard that advice already. The internet is full of articles and research on why journaling is good for you. I’ve read a lot of these myself.
One memorable take on journaling came from the Asian Efficiency Podcast last year. While I agreed with most of the points made by the hosts and was thankful to learn some new tips to improve my journal process, I chuckled at their youthful exuberance, and frankly, inexperience with journaling. Neither had kept a journal beyond a few short years, so they couldn’t speak with much conviction about the tangible benefits of journaling.
Creating and sustaining a habit of keeping a journal can be difficult, regardless of the benefits, so I thought I might share some tips from someone with more than 30 years of constant journaling.
This is the first of a multi-part series on journal-keeping. Subsequent articles will address more advanced topics, but today let’s focus on the benefits of keeping a journal. Why dedicate the time to keep a journal? Let me describe five key benefits that matter to me.
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