Getting Back to Paper

The point of the journey is not to arrive.
-Neil Peart, from the song "Prime Mover" off the album Hold Your Fire

It started as a complex query to Claude AI, from Anthropic.

It ended with a piece of paper.

And while I appreciate the destination I arrived at, the journey was the interesting part.

Readers will know I have a complicated relationship with task management. That continues. I haven't found a new task management panacea in the last few months. I've continued to play around with different tools, giving up on some of these new trials almost as soon as I downloaded them.

But I've had a bigger dragon to slay: project management.

Particularly, managing my big creative projects. I'm preparing to write another novel, have this blog/newsletter that I am working on, as well as the YouTube channel. I also have goals to be reading, both fiction and nonfiction.

All of these are activities that I can be working on in my "free time".

But having too many options, too many things swirling around in a nebulous nature in my brain, hasn't been helpful. I've played around with many tools: Obsidian, Notion, Trello, and Todoist, to mention some of them.

Nothing has clicked.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Many are tech-related, and those have been inundated lately with commentary about all the amazing things AI tools can do. And it is impressive what people are using them for. This led to a question: could I use an AI tool to help me craft the system that would be perfect for me?

Filled with excitement, I sat down and popped open Claude.

I described my situation, and Claude offered some feedback. Over the course of numerous interactions, it started to become obvious that, while I likely could use something like Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex to actually build an application to do what I was looking for, it would be more work than I was interested in putting in. At least right now.

But it was very helpful.

Talking about where I was getting hung up helped me to understand my problem.

Conversation led to clarity.

And that clarity led me to a simple solution: a piece of paper.

Over a year ago, I aspirationally ordered the Sidekick Notepad from Cortex Brand. I used a few pages, but it mostly sat, tucked away, gathering dust. But that blank page offered an elegant opportunity.

On Sunday, I made a header for each of the major creative projects I am working on, and one key task for each of those that I wanted to accomplish this week. I jotted down some other ideas that came to me while I was writing down these key tasks.

And then I put those items on my calendar.

I blocked time each day for one of those tasks. And that made all the difference in the world.

Having time set aside and labeled for a specific task brought a level of clarity that had been missing. I kept the notepad on my desk, visible all week. And what I wanted to work on was visible each day when I looked at my schedule.

Too often, when I have free time, I struggle to decide which creative or learning activity I want to focus my time and energy on. But this week, I'd already decided. So when the time arrived, I didn't have to waste any energy trying to decide what to work on. I just looked at my calendar and then did that.

This isn't some new idea. We've all heard about the importance of having the decision made before we reach the actual moment of choice.

But the freedom and clarity I found in simplifying my tools and making the decision in advance have been a powerful change in my approach to free time.

Sometimes the best tools really are the most basic.

Don't underestimate the power of a piece of paper.