frozen octopus

Did a three day 1000s of Cats tour of Kyushu last weekend. I had two ways to get a blog post up and four ways to get thoughts out of my mind. I didn't use any of them barely at all. I was so in the moment doing the shows and looking around that documenting didn't cross my mind. Besides the work tasks I had to do, I didn't do most of my daily routine things. Stuff like morning writing and the like.

I got back at it once I got home but kind of interesting everything went out the window for a couple days. I thought I would get a lot of writing done on the Shinkansen but I was traveling with someone. Too much looking out the window and talking about the upcoming adventures.

We have another tour like this one coming up in November so I am trying to come up with a strategy. My mind keeps arriving at dictating micro thoughts with the watch and then combining them at the end of the day if I don't have morning writing time. At least it is something rather than a three day streak gap.

It also makes me curious if I should make the medium I use for morning writing randomized. The choices would be paper (then scanned), watch (voice dictation), phone (typing on small keyboard), iPad (writing with apple pencil), and laptop (typical keyboard). Probably a good idea to keep my skills up with all of them at a steady pace.

Gonna go set that up and see how it goes.

Lately I've been obsessed with seeing how small of a device I can get a thing done on and then doing it on the smallest device. The thing that prompted me to do this is all of the old radio shows I listen to. They dreamed of being able to do the things on a watch in the 1930s. There are comics and radio shows from then that can back this up.

So for them I've been trying to get as many tasks to watch level as possible. It's fun. It's a great way to dig into the device and see what it can do. Searching for answers leads to rabbit holes where I find the things I didn't think of. If a thing can't be done on the watch, it gets bumped to phone then iPad/laptop.

There is a point to this besides having fun and learning the devices. Sometimes you are stuck somewhere. I always have paper/writing device. I always have the watch. I always have the phone. With the larger screens, it is between sometimes and never. Being able to chop through little tasks when I have energy to burn because there is a typhoon outside rules. So if I can shift the little things I can do to "watch and up" level or "phone and up" then I have some things to do.

I have noticed some things are easy to get myself to do on the watch and some take a lot of willpower. Listening to podcasts and music from it for example. At the beginning it was a lot quicker to pick up the phone or turn on sound from the laptop. That's just because I am not pro at the watch yet. Also the idea of listening to something on a tiny speaker when there is a little bigger speaker close was a thing. Do I really need to listen to someone talking about tech in full lush stereo all the time though?

Getting thoughts out of the head and into a list rules on the watch. With the new os update, the Notes app is so nice to have. For as much as I like Shortcuts, I need to revisit them on the watch. They were clunky at best for me earlier but I bet that is sorted out.