Analogging

It only takes a few seconds to write something down in a notebook, and look what it gets you. It gets you an immutable, permanent record of something in a cool, personally unique format. It produces a physical artifact that will last for generations.

For a few years, I recorded each movie I watched and each book I read in a large notebook…just one line for each entry. But, as often happens, I was sucked into doing it digitally instead because convenience or search or whatever. This is a shame because what do I get for having a text file or Roam graph with a bunch of movies listed? I get a boring, digital, ephemeral text file that doesn’t really exist anywhere as a thing.

I really want to have that thing. But I kind of also want a searchable, sharable record at the same time. So, I did some math.

Let’s say that it takes 2 whole minutes to go get the notebook, record a book or movie in it, and put the notebook back on the shelf. And let’s estimate that I read two books each month and watch 4 movies each week. That’s what, 18 entries per month. Assuming I enter each one as it happens, that’s 36 minutes per month. In reality, I probably enter everything all at once each week rather than one thing at a time. This knocks it down to maybe 10 or 15 minutes per month.

I think I can find an extra 15 minutes per month for such a lovely permanent record. And if I can find another 15 minutes I can record everything digitally as well, for when I want something to search.


What might I use Craft for?

Kevin asks, “I’m curious to know what kind of stuff you are tinkering with in Craft Editor?”. Good question, but I don’t have a great answer yet.

The short version is, not much.

Craft is a new-ish notetaking app for the Mac and iOS. It’s quite pretty and rather fancy. I of course try every new app for notes, so I have been playing with Craft for a couple of weeks.

Craft immediately reminded me of Notion.so, but I don’t like using Notion, so I dismissed it at first. After tinkering a bit, I grew to see it as a simpler, faster tool than Notion. It seemed to include the useful bits without all the hoo-ha of Notion.

So how might I use it? Well it’s certainly not going to be a replacement for Roam Research.

Roam has transformed the way I keep records and take notes. None of its competitors have tempted me away for any length of time.

I remain all-in with Roam for my daily notes.

Then, there’s Emacs.

For a few years I used Emacs for everything. Too many things, if I’m honest. Today I’m down to using it for notes on certain projects and for document creation. I’d like to move away from Emacs eventually.

I love LaTeX and Org-mode, but man, what a pain it all is to get right. I tweak and I tweak and I tweak. Personally, I love the way LaTeX renders and typesets documents. The people I share those documents with are less enthusiastic. I get, “Can’t you just send me a Google Doc?” a lot. No, I can’t send you a Google Doc. I don’t like Google or its Docs, so Craft could be a good option for the document creation tasks I now use Emacs for.

Craft makes it easy to create and share good-looking and easy-to-use documents, so to answer Kevin’s question, I’m considering Craft for creating documents I intend to share. I don’t know yet if that will be worth paying for, but it’s where I’m headed.

(I also posted this as a Craft document, but I’ve copied it here in case I delete my account.)