A month ago, eagerly test running my new smoker, I overestimated my abilities, underestimated the darkness, and earned myself some nice food poisoning. As a result, the coffee ritual I have been so faithfully running for three or four years came to an abrupt end. Coffee aggravates the intestines and is a big no-no while trying to get them back to normal, much to my dismay.

Since I was still firmly addicted to coffee and experiencing withdrawal it prompted me to switch to black and green tea for the (albeit lower) caffeine content. Savannah has delightfully supplied me with many varieties of tea and the associated knowledge.

During the days shortly after The Incident, my friend Dave stopped by and we got to talking about the differences between journaling and writing by hand. We’d been trading notes on journaling and writing for some years now, and it was interesting to know he’d been enjoying writing by hand for its slowness and clarity.

So I figured; I’ve already changed a core ritual, why not go all the way and add in journaling by hand as well and see what happens. I would also move my weekly review practice into handwriting for those weeks.

Some reflections:

• Everything is slower, everything has more intention. I can only write so fast, some of it is the natural spacing of a page, some of it is the cramping of my hand after a while, and some of it is the speed of which I can actually write.
  • There was a marked reduction in how much I could get out every morning, and it forced me to focus on the most essential things. Whereas with typing I can really zoom and get out a bunch of fluff; with writing I’m led to shorten condense and summarize.
  • This means the stuff I’m writing about becomes a bit more potent and less fluffy, it’s easier to get to the thing that I’m wrangling, because I can’t beat around the bush and type thousands of words about it.
• I feel a bit less than neurotic in the mornings. This is probably more than due to the lack of coffee than the handwriting, but there is a natural limit to how much I can fit on one page. So when I try to plan out my day on my page, I can’t actually fit that much. It’s a very fast feedback loop to realize that maybe I’m over-planning and over- committing
• Text is text. Text is bullet points and line breaks and paragraphs but ultimately - text is just text. Writing is also text, but it’s also doodles, diagrams, mini maps, scribbles, and more.
  • There is a creative freedom to expression a page gives you that almost digital apps fail to achieve. Especially when accounting for battery life, visibility outside, price and availability, and frankly just reliability.
• Writing with pen has a simultaneous permanence (no undo) and an ephemerality (a dog can eat my notebook). I didn’t experiment with any sort of OCR, photos, archives of my writing. It’s just there in my notebook. It was helpful to realize that beyond my weekly review ritual, I don’t need to access my old writing with any sense of urgency, and sometimes I fret about my Obisidan sync status and making sure everything is in the right place and archived and backed up correctly.
  • That being said, doing a weekly review on a page while flipping back to read the previous 7-10 pages and then flipping forward to write on the review is terrible ergonomics and makes me really appreciate our window managers on our computer letting us look at multiple files at a time. Also, copy/paste is magical!
• When journaling digitally, distractions are just a command-tab away. With paper, my phone is still nearby; but it feels like a very distinct transition: going from analog paper to my digital phone feels quite a bit more jarring.
• I really, really miss coffee. I had a decaf americano a few weeks back and while it was good… it wasn’t the thing.
• I’ve expanded my tea horizons! For all my bemoaning of missing coffee, I have deepened my appreciation for tea: earl grey meets my desire for a darker / bitter; and sakura cherry green tea to be an absolute delight with a splash of honey. I’m still not much of a matcha person (sorry).
• It feels more respectful to look at a paper notebook during a meeting than a digital device. How true this one is to experience in today’s age for others, I’m not sure. I do get a little annoyed when people in a meeting are lost in their digital devices - are they writing notes, talking to ai, or looking at tiktok silently?
  • Much as our world is in the digital now, presence is precious and curious and grounded attention is one of the most valuable assets we have to offer each other. I don’t want to squander other people’s attention.

So, where to next? I’m typing this post on my computer and the past few days have seen me return to daily journaling on the computer. The weather is warming up and I’m excited to take my Daylight to the park. I’ve begun carrying around a Maruman A5 notebook with a pen wherever I go. My plan for the week is written by hand because nothing beats the satisfaction of crossing things out when I finish them. And I’m glad I have an appreciation for more of the differences between paper and digital and how my brain responds to them.

Also I can’t wait to get back to coffee. But I’m in no hurry. That will happen when it does.