I’ve been bone tried all week. Grumbling to myself about it on Thursday I remembered that I was on day 10 of Covid. Which explains it. I did a 40min walk on Friday and I’ve still got quite a heavy chest, despite my symptoms only being a head cold. So glad this this round of Covid wasn’t as bad as the first time.

Anywhoos.

This week as has mostly consisted of flipping switches, tapping dials and reading gauges.

I feel like I’m back at the controls of a machine that has been set to autopilot for a long time.

This is not just the usual new years optimism, but also some ‘If not now, when?, if not you, who?’ energy. Zine subscribers will know I had ‘It’s Now or Never’ in the most recent issue. All three aphorisms are a good way of describing the process of rebooting the machine.

I like to imagine I’m sitting inside a giant jaeger, actually called a jay-ger. Just a huge giant robot version of me thats going to stomp around cities and cause billions of dollars of property damage that no one ever seems concerned about in the anime. What I’m going to destroy or stomp on in 2023 remains to be seen.

2022

I wrote up my 2022 year in review post this week:

BuJo 2023

As part of the dial tapping, over several evenings this week I got my bullet journal for 2023 sorted out .

It’s the usual layout and design.

It’s great to see all the notebooks in one place.

I got quite a bit out of reviewing 2022’s notebook to be honest. I pulled out some good ideas and other notes that needed transferring into my Notion.

It’s also funny what a year of doing a photo 365 will do to you. Compare the photo above the the one I took back in 2019 in the post about notebooks and obsessive list making.

Domains

I’ve finally consolidated all the domains I own into one registrar. I am letting 8 domains go over the course of the next couple of months. Combined with the consolidation, this whole process is going to save me over $150 bucks a year. LOL.

It takes a lot of time to unlock domains, wait for transfer codes, put in 2FA for domains. Hours in fact.

I have always been a bit of a domain hoarder and it was all a bit of a sprawling mess. now don’t get me wrong. I still own 23 domains, and a further 11 variations on those domains but since the pandemic, I’ve got that number down from 50+ unique properties.

For example: RIP surviveth.is

A domain I bought once because I thought it would be a cool name for a zine about zombies.

Everything I own now is related to things inflight, or projects/ideas I actually want to execute on in the near future. Like Family of Giants.

Permanently Moved

Lost in the Woods

After 10 years of meditation, I’ve concluded it’s not an act of self care. It’s an act of colossal self indulgence.

This years theme for 301 is absolutely over the top ridiculous. Totally unnecessary to go that hard. When was the last time you heard a show with a stoner rock intro theme? HAHAHA. I was loling to my self the whole time I was making it, then laughing even hearder when I was editing it into this weeks show.

Which by the way, if you haven’t read/listened to it yet, I personally think, it’s one of the better things I’ve written in ages.

Photo 365

You may notice this photo is labeled 360 / 365.

I decided towards the end of last year that I should count down the photos of a 365 and not up. It’s more psychologically satisfying.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Wrote a list of things I want to get done in the next 6 weeks.
• Sorted out loads of life admin
• Made 301 theme
• Updated and archived my laptop. It didn’t go very well.
• Did a boat load of house work

Terminal Access

The boys over at Agitator pod have been ramping up their patreon – I subscribed.

All my other friends seem to have been quite quiet on the internet over the last week. Maybe newsletters will spring to live next week?

Dipping the Stacks

In a Future Filled With Electric Cars, AM Radio May Be Left Behind – The New York Times

“If you can make a vehicle drive by itself,” Mr. Winnekins said, referring to the driver-assistance systems in Teslas and other vehicles, “you can make a decent radio receiver.”

Towards a theory of the creator – by Alexander Iadarola

It is too late to push back against the term “creator.” Most culture industry people I know never say it out loud, much less discuss the ways it displaces many of the things we love. But for better or worse, the creator names an important figure in our societ

Creating Community in Hybrid Festivals | by Sarah Wolozin | Dec, 2022 | Immerse

We began research in late 2021 on hybrid festivals and how they hold space for communities in “stereo reality,” to use Virilio’s term.

Consoles and Competition – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

The real shift, though, was the emergence of game engines as the dominant mode of development: instead of building a game for a specific console, it made much more sense to build a game for a specific engine which abstracted away the underlying hardware.

TikTok Cannot Afford the Music Industry

TikTok as a music killer wasting precious youth attention if not properly monetized; but if it signs the right legal contract, it can aid industry growth. Either still downplays the firm’s large losses, scrambling from business model to business model, and the crunch being felt by its most recent investors.

Reading

I finished Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I went in expecting another ‘uplift’ book. Instead I found a long extended mediation on the nature of intelligence, selfhood, being, and identity, all wrapped up on space horror. Its a really different book, but wow. If you are working at the edge of where AI stands and have read the previous two books definitely check this one out.

I’m still reading How to Read a Book by American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler. It’s such a weird book. It’s like a Tesseract that unpacks in dimensionality as you read it.

I sunk a Warhammer book in 3 days to kick off the year. I listened to Sanguinius: The Great Angel by Chris Wraight. Wraight is a great sci-fi writer and I like his cybernoir books. This book is ultimately a short character portrait of a flawed demigod. Ironically. Maybe this book has a lot of Wraight himself in the POV character?

Continuing my interest in computing history from last year I stared reading The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer – by Jane Smiley. He didn’t invent the computer of course Mauchly and Eckert did. but I’m looking forward to reading it. The lawsuits between Atanasoff and Eckert in the 1950’s were huge/high profile affairs.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

RAYE – Escapism

I know it’s unusual for me to blog about a song thats currently Number 1 in the UK. But I’m doing so to contribute to Raye’s victory lap.

Honestly bravo, good for her. Absolutely FUCK POLYDOR.

If you aren’t familiar with what happened check out this overview on the BBC.

she publicly parted ways with record label Polydor in 2021, saying she was being treated as a “rent-a-vocal” dance artist.

“Imagine this pain,” she wrote in an open letter in June 2021. “I have been signed to a major label since 2014… and I have had albums on albums of music sat in folders collecting dust, songs I am now giving away to A-list artists because I am still awaiting confirmation that I am good enough to release an album.

“I’ve done everything [Polydor] asked me, I switched genres, I worked seven days a week. I’m done being a polite pop star.”

The fact a song about substance abuse with multiple tempo changes can make it to #1 after being totally dismissed by her record label is really inspiring: Raye was told ‘people who heard the song were like, ‘Yeah, this is cool [but] it’s just something Raye needs to get out of her system’.’

This single is a triumph for independent artists and creators everywhere.

Remember Kids:

The post Flipping Switches, Tapping Dials appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Minimalist A6 Moleskine Pocket Bullet Journal Notebook for 2021.
Photoblog and set up walkthrough.

Another year another notebook.
Last years post is here.

For the third year in a row I’ve gone for the A6 Moleskine Classic Dotted Paper Notebook with a soft cover. It was really hard to get one this year as they were sold-out every everywhere I looked. But eBay saved the day.

I’ve seen some really good things in my RSS Reader from stationary blogs about the Traveler Pocket Journal from Pentalic and I’m intrigued. For another year maybe.

Apparently they will ‘archive’ better than Moleskine journals long term. But as all my notebooks end up with running repairs just to get though the year. How well they are holding up in 30 years time doesn’t concern me that much. As long as the pages aren’t falling out by October or November I’m all good.

Last Year’s Video

I put loads of effort in last year and made a flip through video of my 2020 Bullet Journal…

… for 2021 my set up is basically the same.

One question I did get asked last year was what does the notebook look like at the end of the year – with all the page folds?. Well my friends, it looks like this:

The year moves from bottom to top in the photo above.

The big chunk of folds at the beginning are the year log page folds and then you can see the month separators being in the main notebook section. As I use up varying numbers of pages per month though out the year.

I must admit, I stopped using my Bujo during the depths of lockdown 2020 for about 3 months. I stopped writing lists of things to do and fell into a fugue of undirected effort everyday with no real weekly direction or plans.

At the time I was involved in implementing Notion.so into two separate start ups. So I moved *everything* onto that app for the period my notebook sat idle. I’ve now found a happy medium where big projects that require some personal project management etc are in Notion and my day to day is managed on paper once again.

Gsheet Planning

I make a spreadsheet layout plan every year before starting, as the full year planner pages can be quite tight space wise. I also love spreadsheets – who doesn’t?

The as usual, I laid out the complicated pages with a grade H pencil which I find the best type of pencil (for me) to erase after using an Boldmere 0.5mm Artist Fineliner over top.

A diary at the end of the day is entirely ‘Clock Time’. A way of understanding the passing of time and the days of the year that you should drop into to interact with others in a sensible way.

For me, setting up a diary/notebook up from scratch helps me get my head around the year. The shape of the months fall in to place – when weeks and months begin and end in relation to the days of the week.

2021’s most pleasing months (to me) are February, March and November as they all begin on a Monday.

I went for less colour and even less hi-lights this year So the diary is even more minimal in appearance than last year.

Index

I usually end up filling in the index page at the end of the year to be honest with you. I ended up filling in April though Dec in 2020’s notebook as I was setting up this one.

Right hand column is used for page numbers of notes from events/conferences, phone calls etc that I may need to refer back to one day.

Minimalist Year Planner

Year planner page for 2020. No space for notes, just days weeks and dates at a glance.

Goals & Month Log

Goals are goals. I wrote about mine for 2021 here.

My month log is very minimal. Space is at an absolute premium with an A6 BuJo. Morning and Afternoon activities fall either side of the vertical calendar.

Birthdays/Death Dates are marked with scribbles of colour in the calendar at the top left and entered at the bottom of the page.

Over the page the month continues. I have a space at the bottom of the month for notes or other things that needed documenting. Usually things that have/will happened that month, Hotel addresses, flight numbers etc.

Once the month is finished/over I’ll fold the page in half and forget about it. See the video or photo up top for how this works in practice.

Month Log + Future Log

When I was writing 2022 at the top of the Future Log, I said out loud to Eve ‘so fucking sci-fi‘.

The future log has the same layout as the Year planner but without dates detail. Leaving space for important things that are happening the following year.

Future Log + Projects Pages

I like to leave a full page for a ‘project’. Usually I do the initial brain storm on this page and then manage it either in a separate notebook or use the back of my notebook working forwards turned upside down. Theres 6 pages of projects (that I still need to decide on for 2021 and fill in). I’d like to do a ‘major thing’ every 2 months in 2021 I’ll ‘Plan to finish’ in Notion.so.

General Notebook Begins

At the beginning of every month I re-write in the calendar and then fold the page in half as a bookmark. Sometimes I write a Mini Index for the month on this half page if there’s been a lot of notes.

I don’t like to have a full year planned out like other Bullet Journallers do, as my BuJo practice evolved from daily/weekly list making practice. Because I don’t know how many pages any one month is going to need the utility of the month/page fold book mark only really becomes evident as the year progresses (see the photo at the top of this post)

Inside the folded page is a perfect place for a full page habit tracker. Or as a space for ‘moduels’.

Modules

I mentioned this last year too but its worth repeating I came across this cool minimal A6 Bullet Journal set up that introduces the concept of ‘Modules’ in small notebooks.

Head over to How To Use A Pocket Journal With A Bullet Journal at Bulletjournals.wordpress.com. It’s a site thats been in my RSS for years. Love it.

I only made one mistake this year during the set up. Behold my complete failure to count! In my defence I was vibing hard to that Tropical House track Vin Diesel put out last year at the time.

Share Your Photos!

A few people sent me notes to say they set up their A6 BuJo’s inspired by my layout. It might be fun to start a little gallery on this page.

If you use my GSheet or set your A6 notebook like I do – please do share them with me I’d love to see them. Either comment below with a link or contact me via the blog.

I’ll share them in my weeknotes that at the time of writing are read by several 1000 people a month. I’ll also share them below with a link to your socials/blog/youtube/whatever.

PHOTOS WILL GO HERE IF ANYONE SENDS ME ANY THIS YEAR

UPDATE: My Girlfriend Eve / My Bullet Journal consultant wants me to include photos of her notebook here despite it being A5 and not a pocket journal. Because hers is apparently ‘better’ than mine.

The post Minimalist A6 Moleskine Pocket Bullet Journal | 2021 Setup appeared first on thejaymo.net.

The week kicked off with a trip up in Shoreditch to see Mr Vickers and Christina Oakley Harrington of Tredwell’s Books in conversation as part of Ignota Books‘ new #Ignotahosts series. It was good to see Sarah (the other Ignota co-founder) too as she’s been away for a bit.

It was an interesting discussion. Largely around daily practice and finding the others etc. The audience was mixed. By my eye quite a few new wave witches attending. A question about banishing/clearing and white sage came up. Christina’s reply about it being an American/internet thing and you are in the UK you are better off using mugwort or hawthorn was a great reply. That comment seemed to strike the person I was sitting next to like a revelation.
The discussion also used the phrase “Pre-Internet European Magic”. Which I think I’m going to start using a lot. We all went for dinner afterwards and I had a nice time.

Dog-Ears

The week continued with a extremely weird day on the Feeds sparked by this article and a tweet from its author saying “Is it ever OK to write in books? Some books? All books? In pen or pencil? What about underlining? Book lovers have Opinions (but mostly agree: “nevernevernever” dog-ear”

Even though I’ve worked in bookshops I had never realised just how many self appointed Book Police existed. I Dog-Ear all my books. Literally all of them – since I was went to university. I have 17 years of bookshelf that is bookmarked with the following system:

The top corner of a book folded means a book mark that is useful or important inside the book. An important point, or chapter etc. It could also mean a bookmark to a good quote that I might want to come back to.

I have one of the memories where I know the thing i’m looking for is about 2/3rds of the way though on a right hand page. I don’t particularly have a very good memory for other things, but when I go looking for an important point in a book its almost a spacial memory. The book is like a landscape to be (re)navigated. The pages folded up at the top are carins or way markers to help navigate it.

I also have a second set of way markers, folding the bottom corners of the book. These markers are for when a book references something else i’ve read or something else i’m interested in. Back at uni this would mean when a book I was reading on continental philosophy references Aristotle or a pre-socratic thinker. The bottom page would get folded to indicate some kind of hyperlink to another text I’ve read.

17 years later it still means the same ‘Hyperlink’ but obviously the things i’ve read, have an interest in or know about have grown. Books on ecology that reference decolonisation. Or Ethnobotany books that reference a poem I know. all these sorts of things would get a bottom page fold.

Anyways screw the Book Police. Its my book I can do anything I want with it, its my book! If YOU lent me a book however, I wouldn’t even crack the spine.
As always, Huw Lemmey has written something thoughtful on related subject. This newsletter talks about the moving notes and annotations he found in a Spanish Encyclopedia of gays and lesbians.

I started watching GOOP LAB on Netflix last night. Its really good. No really. I highly recommend it. All the reviews I’ve read seem to be missing the woods for the trees IMO. Full review coming soon.

Lastly a big thank you to everyone thats read and shared my bullet journal post I really appreciate it. Thinking of making some more video content.

Permanently Moved

Landscapes Like Mixtapes

S3E03

Come with me, I made you a sunrise. Watch.

—

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

I really enjoyed making this episode. Ranting about Walkmans, Mixtapes and VR. It wasn’t quite what I imagined in my head when I sat down to make it but it turned out alright.

In other Podcast News

For a brief time this week Permanently Moved was in the iTunes top 50 chart for Personal Journals in the UK.

Considering that Desert Island Discs is on the top spot I’m really really happy about it. I never thought of this back in 2018 when I started.
Thanks to everyone thats listening to me prattle on every week.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Those two emails I talked about giving me anxiety last week? I still haven’t sent them 🙁

Got a cool project i’m about to start working on beginning Feb. If its successful might define the direction of my life for the next 5 years at least.

Dipping the Stacks

Dance videos from L.A. influencers show how the industry is changing – Los Angeles Times

Cavemen Were Better at Depicting Quadruped Walking than Modern Artists: Erroneous Walking Illustrations in the Fine Arts from Prehistory to Today

Our memory comes from an ancient virus, neuroscientists say

Tool manufacturer Fiskars releases debut streetwear collection

Reading

In an effort to begin my crime/noir reading this year I started off with a book called ‘The Hard Detective’. A story about Detective Chief Inspector Harriet Martens and her ‘Stop the Rot’ campaign. The book opens with the deaths of two of her officers.

The book was fucking terrible. This was the review I left on Goodreads I read this whole book in an afternoon. Its absolute garbage. Poorly characterised, inexplicable motivations. Plus the book opens with the MC berating a muslim character who is referred to as “the muslim girl” – unnecessary.

So I think I’m going to stick to reading the best of the best/classics. Rather than reading this pro plod Islamophobic drivel.

Music

The first signals for a new musical trend are in for 2020. New indie rock sounds just like the old indie rock.

Here’s Brit band More’s Single Sorry

And here’s US based Snarls debut single Marbles

One is more poppy than the other obviously. But I hear a thread, especially in terms of lyrical content and simple rock guitar style.

The Sorry track reminds me for some reason of: I (heart) Hiroshima’s 2006 classic ‘London In Love’

Remember Kids:

The post The City Completes The Village appeared first on thejaymo.net.

My 2021 Journal Set Up Post: Is Here

If you have watched my Minimalist 2020 A6 Moleskine Pocket Bullet Journal flip though video. Then you will already know my Bullet Journal has quite a simple setup.

I’ve tried a lot of the A6 Moleskine Pocket Journals over the years. I always make the decision and then stick with the chosen type for a whole year a proper road test. The three pack Cahier journals, the 2 pack Volants, flip up reporters notebooks, hard cover, soft cover, starwars editions. But it’s always been a Moleskine. I have more notebooks going back passed 2013 to university but they are boxed up right now.

I use A5 notebooks for specific projects so the project stays self contained. I like Leuchtturms for them. You can see a picture of some on them on in this blog post about how I like lists.

I tend to favour A4 notebooks when I am at work in an office. They never leave the building and always sit on my desk. I’m not fussed about about brand. Even pound-shop is fine as I burn though so many in a year. (This is mainly because I have the rule: ‘If you don’t see me write it down it doesn’t exist’. But for the daily driver: the always about my person, in the back pocket, life organisation, notes over coffee or week planing has to be A6 for me.

This is my Minimalist A6 Moleskine Pocket Bullet Journal 2020 set up.

Contact Details

I always make sure I fill in my contact details. When I see people in mid June or July without their contact details written in, my palms begin to itch.

Key / Index

I don’t use the ‘official’ Bullet Journal symbols. I’ve tried, but I always end up defaulting to the home grown ones I have always used.

You can see what a typical page of my notebook looks like in this post. I have the mental organisation of a Madman. It’s either that or lists.

Minimalist Year Planner

Obviously this is just the year planner page for 2020. No space for notes, just days weeks and dates at a glance. I planned the whole thing out in Google sheets before hand as I didn’t want to mess anything up. Even in pencil.

Goals & Month Log

Goals are goals. No explanation needed here really. Though I do tend to favour OKR (objective and key result) style life goals than vague ‘Drink More Water’ – though defiantly you should. Go get yourself a glass right now, I’ll wait…

With space being at a premium, my Month Log has to be minimal. This does have some downsides. Up the top is the repeated month details on the left and the Month name on the top right.

Days of the week and Dates go down the middle of the page, leaving room for Morning and Afternoon activities either side. I also have peoples Birthdays/Death Dates written in but they take up a lot of room/space but I think they are important.

Over the page the month continues. I have a space at the bottom of each page for notes or other things that need documenting, either things that have/will happened that month, Hotel addresses, flight numbers etc.

Once the month is finished/over I will fold the page in half and forget about it. (see the video) This means the first full/non-folded page in the Month Log section will always be the current one. It helps with finding things quickly.

I really only use this section as a partial diary. I know a lot of BuJo fans like everything offline, but I have a hybrid approach with a detailed GCal. That also includes travel times etc. Using this as your only diary might be ok if you aren’t very busy.

Future Log + Projects

Above and below you can see that after the Month Logs, I have my 2021 Future Log. Its the same layout as the Year planner but without the days/dates detail. Leaving room things that are happening next year. Since taking the photos already have 2 weddings in on these pages!

I like to leave a little room for projects at the front of my notebook. I have 6 things I’d like to pour time and energy into this year. So I’ve left a page for each one. The first one will be a long read essay. I hope to get it out mid Feb!

General Notebook

At the beginning of every month I always write in the calendar and then fold the page in half. Sometimes I write a Mini Index for the month on this half page too. Inside the folded page I write work related things like time tracking for bill clients. Its also a perfect place for a habit tracker.

The utility of folding the page (I also do this in A5 and A4 notebooks) in half to start the month in the note book only really becomes apparent with time.

As the year goes on you’ll end up with clear psychical delineation where months sit in side your notebook. This is really useful towards the back end of the year if you need to find old notes . Its even more useful if you know went to a conference in July 2016 and need to quickly find/reference the notes you took many years later.

Other Page folding Hax

Diaries

I have folded the pages of my diary in different ways since I was about 14/15. When a week was completed in my school diary, I would fold it diagonally alternately so you end up with a deep triangle V. Its really weird, I can’t find any photos of this online. I havn’t used a week planner in years so don’t have any examples to hand.

A4

When I’m using A4 notebooks ( I get though 4ish a year if i have a full time job) I’ll have different styles of page dividers depending on the project or whatever.

There’s loads of cool page divider folding examples on Youtube. Some are serious origami.

A6 Journals

Whilst I’ve always folded my notebook pages to create dividers etc.

A few years ago I came across a cool minimal A6 Bullet Journal set up that introduces the concept of ‘Modules’.

I really recommend heading over to the article How To Use A Pocket Journal With A Bullet Journal at Bulletjournals.wordpress.com. It’s a really good in depth post on choosing your notebook, setting up a minimal notebook etc

Share your own video!

This is the first ‘proper’ video I’ve ever made. I’m really pleased with it how it turned out. It was cool to have all the things I needed just lying around the house. Tripods, lights, fabric etc.

There are loads of things I’ve learnt:

• Whilst the cloth on the table instantly made the set up look nicer to the eye in person. I shouldn’t have used a off-cut of fabric that wasn’t herringbone as it looks strange on film.
• I wish I’d spent more time fiddling with the white balance before I shot the video. Next time I think I’ll shoot in raw and then colour correct video.
• When shooting video the camera I was using cropped the image so the pencil ended up out of shot.
• I’m going to get a ‘cool white’ LED bulb for my desk lamp so I have a pure white bulb on hand if I ever need to shoot something like that again.
• Next time I think I would write the script first, so I know roughly how long I need to spend shooting each page. Exporting freeze frames or massaging the playback speed to make the footage fit the narration was a nightmare.
• Shotcut is a very capable piece of open source software, if a little buggy. YMMV.
• Making my own background music was fun. I think it turned out alright.

My favourite part of the whole experience was actually setting up the table etc. I’d like to shoot my EDC or perhaps all my Stationary as product photos. I might do this as a little project in the spring when there’s a bit more natural daylight.

The post Minimalist A6 Moleskine Pocket Bullet Journal | My Setup appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I have always been a ‘notebook guy’ – since I was about 16 . I carry one and a parker jotter pen literally everywhere. Perhaps it started as an emo diaries thing or just an affectation that I thought would look ‘cool’. But the thing is, there is a natural law which goes something like: ‘If you carry a note book and a pen you will end up using it’.

I’ve had a lot of types of notebooks over the years and switched over to Moleskine’s variants in 2013. Since then they have all developed a fairly consistent archive aesthetic.

So this week for the first time (perhaps) this year I wrote a list of 21 things to do this week and when I hit post on this blogpost I will have done 18 of them.

Thats not a bad score for the first week back in to giving a shit mode.

I’ve archived over 10k emails in gmail this week, everything is tagged and filed. SO SO GOOD!

I’ve always run my life from lists. My general policy when I’m in a workplace is ‘if you didn’t see me write it down then it is not going to happen’. This has been an extremely useful rule at several startups i’ve worked in. To the point where close colleagues will say ‘write that down’ to me.

Sometimes, people who are younger than me (an occurrence that is increasingly more and more common to me much to my creeping horror – I was always the youngest person in the room since going right the way back to helping run the Geekscene DIY collective in Margate at 15ish) laugh at me about that rule. But they quickly understand that I’m not joking – I’m a week late on something, they chase me and I say “Argh I didn’t write it down”.

Indeed Alex from Common Knowledge chased me up this week for a testimonial and I realised I hadn’t written it down as he asked me in the Dark Forest whilst I was away in the Netherlands last week.

I started writing lists properly very soon after getting my first proper job out of uni. Before then I’d only worked in retail and many of the tasks daily/weekly were routine and could be held in your head, scribbled in the shop diary the day before by another supervisor. I found very quickly in the office environment that I just couldn’t keep all the things i needed to do in my head, and getting in trouble for not doing something sucked.

Eventually when I was a team leader in the shared service centre I worked in. My todo list would be written out every morning, and I’d carry over about 1 column of a 2 column A4 page every day. By the end of the day I’d have filled the whole page and marked off a lot. A running list of 100 things to do however is an endless task and not very psychologically healthy.

I should also note: There is absolutely no point in staying late or working yourself to the bone in a start up environment – Especially if you are in the senior layer but you actually have very little influence over anything super important. Don’t get manipulated to finish one more thing before you leave – The endless list of things to do will still be endless the following morning.

I sometimes wonder what sort of person I would have been if I’d found the secret of lists before I was an ‘proper’ adult. At school or university even. My life could have been very different.

I reckon if I was growing up now, I’d be extremely into bullet journaling (my notebook kinda looks like one anyway see below)

I can see how/way I got in to project management and implementation consulting and eventually operations management. It’s a natural progression from being a ‘list guy’. Offloading your tasks one layer of abstraction higher into a project plan is obvious in a techno social institution like a company. AND as a result of being ‘The keeper of the list” you get to tell other people when and what they need to do as well.

But this week I’ve surprised myself by how easy it is to return to the feeling of having wrestled back some control just by having a list of things to do.

I have been running the last 18months with a daily chore list – meditate, write diary, write LAP or some fiction, Make my podcast on a Friday etc but doing that means you feel satisfied having done the bare minimum. As i understand it daily habit building is supposed to build on everything else you do daily so you can do more – not the bare minimum.

The running list in physical pen and paper zeros/zooms in on immediate priorities.

I did a GTD course years ago as a project manager and it changed my life. I am not naturally an organised person at all but GTD combined with project management training were vital skills that I took on board and it changed my day to day. However I very rarely apply them outside of the work environment to my own life. With the exception of all my bills and utility filing system.

Seeing as I’ve been freelance for 18months now perhaps i should … Anyway this is a long way about saying that i feel good about the last week and want to carry the momentum into next week – buy writing another magic list.

Permanently Moved

The Anthropogreen

S2E12

Catching up the last two weeks. I cover some of what I said at Bordersessions festival in The Hague.

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You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Dipping the Stacks

Does Neven’s Law Describe Quantum Computing’s Rise? | Quanta Magazine

The Era of Quantum Computing Is Here. Outlook: Cloudy | Quanta Magazine

Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing Reflect on the Plantationocene

Attorney General ‘awkwardly uncomfortable’ about plans to legalise Obeah | News | Jamaica Gleaner

The Ministry

Yeah fuck loads of stuff got done this week. The first of the samizdat PDFs coming soon. By encouragement from m1k3y

Reading

I re-red dark night of the soul by John of the Cross this week. Its full amazing lines.

Silence is God’s first language.

Is one of the truest lines i’ve ever read and makes me belive that my meditation practice is actually getting somewhere. As i know this to be true.

Music

Louis Center returned to twitter this week. But in the Dark Forest he sent me a link to this track. Its amazing if you are in need of a dose of Super Sweet Glitchy Chiptune in your life right now.

I’ve been listening to it non stop this week. Even going as far as making it my alarm clock music. (RIP rollin’ by limp bizkit)

I also bought a USB to 3/4 inch jack cable this week. For the first time ever I can plug a guitar into my laptop with no external device. I’m not really sure about the build quality of the cable but for 11 quid on amazon its already been worth the money. I might do a proper review of it at some point.

Remember kids:

The post Notebook share – Being a ‘List Guy’ appeared first on thejaymo.net.

August 10, 2018

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞 | Stationery ✒️

Episode 18

Thinking out loud about Genius Loci, Kitchens, Workshops, Desks, Mise en place and Knolling.

Magical Geography begins soon over on http://runesoup.com/ so sign up if it floats your boat!

Thanks this week to @ar7w1n and http://farmerversusfox.blog/ for long conversations about this over the years.

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Mise en place

 So one of the things that’s coming up this quarter in runesoup.com’s premium members section is a new course on magical geography. If that’s the sort of thing that interests you, then I definitely recommend going over there and signing up for the 10 bucks a month and diving straight in. But because the course hasn’t started yet, I thought I’d get some of my own thoughts down in audio and maybe revisit them once the course is completed and see if I’ve changed my mind about anything.

Don’t worry if that’s the sort of thing that doesn’t interest you, as I’m not going to be talking about magical wells. Instead, I’m going to be talking about kitchens.

First, some of my favourite places to visit are working workshops and studios of artists and artisans. And I think a lot of other people do.

I mean, I think there’s a reason why Casey Neistat’s studio tour videos regularly crack up 3, 4, 5 million views on YouTube.

Because these spaces are inhabited functional spaces. So let’s analyze them just for a little bit.

These spaces are bounded by their geography. This means how wide the walls are apart, how high the ceilings are, and just how much stuff can you fit in it. What can you bring in? What do you have to build inside? What can be taken out? Some places, like metalworking studios or forges, have fixed elements that cannot be moved. And in fact, sometimes we’re placed there to consider the prevailing winds outside of the building.

So you have these spaces that you can enter, and spend a lot of time inside. Through doing so, you relate to the space. You get to know it, it becomes familiar to you, and because of the layout of the place, it begins to develop a personality. And the placement of certain objects within the space is a negotiation between you and the personality of the space that you’re in.

We keep these storage boxes over here by the door, all these nails and screws live in boxes labeled above the workbench. Some of these locations have the people who are inhabiting the space. Like when you go back to your parents house and you’re looking for something and you open a drawer and you think, why on earth is all of this stuff here?

Or think about the personality of a highly trafficked part of your house. Might be a hallway, or a doorway, but regardless, because it’s highly trafficked, it’s also frequently cleaned. But I know. That you know that there is a little corner tucked away somewhere that is full of dust bunnies, and you see it every time you walk through that particular space.

It has nothing to do with how often you clean, but the personality of the space is that’s where the dust bunnies collect. So in some sense then, you are in relation or negotiation with the space. At some point, an asshole boss has probably said to you, Tidy desk, tidy mind. But that’s a load of bollocks, because what it should be is a well negotiated space results in a better relationship between you and the environment within which you can carry out tasks.

Which isn’t as pithy or memorable, I’ll admit. And just because it turns out that some of these spaces are tidy, Doesn’t necessarily follow that yours needs to be under certain negotiated conditions I’m sure we all know people with offices or desks with papers piled up high but they know where absolutely Everything is or which book is under which pile on which bookshelf and let me be clear i’m talking about working spaces here.

Tidy your room. No excuses.

Consider spaces that are inherited. I was lucky enough to go on the Whitechapel Bell Foundry tour before it closed. This is a workshop that had been in use for 500 years. And one of my questions was, why is anything where it is? I asked about some buckets, and he said, “Well, that’s where we’ve always kept them, ever since I was a boy.”

But he thought about it for a little longer, and then stepped, and stepped again, and then said, “Well, these buckets are no less than five steps from anywhere where you might need a bucket.”

And that seems obvious when you think about it, but it is my contention to you that the space dictated where the bucket should be kept, not where the individual people who were working in the space Which brings me on to the subject of the French term mise en place.

A chef’s term for everything has its place. The layout of your tools before you begin a task.

The popular internet term of knolling also falls into this category. Have you ever walked into someone’s kitchen who cooks a lot? And known exactly where the knives were kept, or that the bowls were in this particular cupboard, it was the kitchen that told you where they were.

Take a moment and think about it next time it happens to you. And it’s always surprising. Or next time you’re working at your desk or workbench, and you lean your hand out and pick something up without looking at it, and go back to your work. A subconscious act. Because somewhere, You had negotiated with the place to keep it there.

And of course there’s more to say on this stuff about why you have favourite pens or why certain tools develop personalities. But that’s for another day.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved is a 301-second personal podcast, written, recorded, and edited by @thejaymo.

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