The drum thing I am celebrating for 2024 is the letter B. B is for both. Things can be both.

I started off the year studying jazz drumming. I started noticing in the lessons that with the hands, things seemed to be Left, Right, or Both. So all my notes started to have "B" along with "L" and "R".

Slowly "B" began to creep into all my other areas of drumming (band, shortcuts, etc.).

I haven't abandoned LRK or LR. Just have the new options of LRKB and LRB.

From the outside, scraps of paper as the thing of the year seem laughable. It is laughable. I am laughing on the inside at it too.

I have a habit with paper that I got in control of in 2024.

The first is accepting that notebooks are cool, but I am not good with them. Either the blank page stops me from writing a thought down because then I need to fill the whole page with things. Then I need to fill up the whole other side before moving on. So I found myself not noting things from "page pressure".

Cut up the notebooks into index card-sized pieces.

There was less pressure, but there was still unused space to fill. I had all these half-used notecards hanging around, which felt like there was a ton of unfinished to-dos.

Then I cut the notecard-size pieces into business card-size pieces. It was like a logjam in the mental river was released. It is the perfect size for a single thought. I don't feel like I am wasting paper because the piece is so small.

Now instead of pausing at a blank canvas, I grab a scrap and write a quick thought. A bonus that happened as well is the thoughts are s.｡oO sortable and rearrangeable. The fluidness rules. I am not reading old thoughts while composing the new thought. The momentum keeps moving forward.

All the thoughts get processed during processing time.

• Sort: All the scraps are sorted by context (person, music, computer, etc.).
• Read: Spread out all the scraps in the context and read them.
• Process: Look for patterns, combine any redundant, put tasks into the to-do app, store non-tasks into a reference text file (one for each context).
• Crumple: Crumple is the new cross-out. Very satisfying crunching a processed thought.
• Throw: Throwing away a handful of crunched thoughts is also satisfying.

So cheers to you, humble scraps of paper, you are the non-drum thing of the year.