Scraps of paper are RAM and notebooks are ROM. I had a bunch of small notebooks that sat on a shelf unused for a couple years. I tore them up into scrap paper and now it's almost all used up. For me, putting something into book form is really inhibiting. When I switched to scraps of paper, ideas started flowing like water.

I got to the end of all the 1950s Blue Note albums today. Each morning I’d start with an album.

It was an awesome way to start the day but I am a little fried on that era for a while. Once you get past the famous names, there is a lot of cool stuff that I never heard before that I am stoked to revisit someday.

Time to find a new morning ritual. That one was a good one.

I made a new shortcut in Apple Shortcuts to help me get on top of posting our shows online. We have about ten spots we need to update with each show.

With the shortcut, I answer a series of questions about the event. the shortcut then sets up to dos in Things 3 for each spot I need to post on.

It sets multiple to-dos actually. For a show, I am going with a post two weeks before, one week before, three days before,
day before, and day of.

It rules having a steal post schedule and getting all of that out of my mind.
The next step will be to start writing basic content in advance. ay It will be super basic content with room to customize it.

Show tomorrow and I have a setlist to write. I was trying to think of a way to describe my setlist pacing philosophy and then realized there is an emoji for it.

✨📈✨

Ideas seem to be flowing a little faster when I start writing them down on a notecard with a 6B pencil. Even though a 6B pencil is the arch enemy of a left-handed person, the line it makes is a thing of beauty. It's like if writing with a pencil felt like writing with a Sharpie marker.

Getting ideas off the notecard and to the posted stage has a couple extra steps. After the first time I tried it though, I am seeing how valuable they are.

The first is scanning the notecard with the camera app and getting the thought to the laptop. I thought I would hate this step by I am now seeing the light about it. This barrier of entry is keeping a lot of mental clutter out of my laptop. Some people keep every thought as a trigger to make connections for new ideas. I tend to find the old ideas distracting and having them around makes me tidy files instead of generate ideas.

The next step is cleaning the borked text after I scan it. This step forces me to read what I wrote. Self-editing is the least fun thing for me so this dreaded step actually happens when I use analog and digital together instead of one or the other.

This is a work in progress but hopefully it will help with the trouble I was having yesterday.