Buying a pencil satisfies many needs for me. My hunter/gatherer genes get a chance to do something when shopping without spending tons of money. My brain/heart feels less guilty for stomping around a store and leaving empty-handed. My hands love it because holding a pencil is the closest thing to holding a drumstick in the stationery store.

I use them at home, work, and band practice. The only small drawback is that once they're sharpened down to shorter than your hand, the balance gets weird. At that size, they're cool for writing a tiny note or putting in an everyday carry bag. Mini-golf pencil-sized pencils are a pain for writing for five minutes straight, though.

My solution lately is that when a pencil gets shorter than hand width, it graduates to "cross-off" level. The longer pencils have to do the hard work of writing word after word on checklists and brain dumps. The short pencils get the honor of crossing off completed tasks and ideas. They stay in the flow until they sharpen away into oblivion.

Through years of flipping back and forth between paper and digital for idea capturing, I know I am into digital a lot more. But I absolutely love crossing off things on a list with a pencil or crumpling up a note when it is completed.

Woke up today thinking I need to cyborg my idea capturing system so that I can enjoy both digital and analog. So I took a ton of scrap paper and cut it all up into approximately business card size. All ideas will start on a scrap and then will get reviewed to see which ones will graduate to digital storage.

Pros

• Ideas incubate for a while
• Ideas get looked at at least twice
• Paper and pencils get used so i can get more paper and pencils
• Less digital clutter

Cons

• Extra steps capturing ideas
• Risk losing ideas that I might find useful not now but later

Being from Minnesota, it's always interesting to me when I hear someone from Indiana or Ohio say they are from the midwest.

Instink = bad instincts 

Day off today. Sitting on the couch zoning out. Watching the wind blow to the cover we put on the veranda. Listening to the rain. Trying to decide between ramen or pasta. I think I am chilling out correctly?

Trying to get myself to write a blog post with my phone. Something about it doesn't feel like I am writing.

Writing on the phone to me feels more like I am texting myself even though typing is typing.

Cliché lyrics are in the ear of the beholder for sure. We all have those phrases that make our eyes roll. It's impossible to write and make the whole world happy. You write what makes you happy and ignore people who aren't into it.

That being said, I do have a text file with a list of cliché lines from songs on it. I add to it sporatically and sparingly. It has to be a really high level cliché to make the list. I heard two today...

• "it's a choice I have to make"
• "get my feet on the ground"

I really need to note where I am finding music along with the music I am listening to. It's easy to forget the spots and really frustrating when I want to go back to them. Sometimes you can go back with an Internet search but often the source fades into the distance.

I woke up today with a note night me wrote that "it is ok to not make titles for blog posts". Morning me is thinking "have a title but make some challenge like try to boil the post down to two words".

I am able to write titles or I could get lazy and let the robots write them. Two (or three) words seems more fun. I'm also kinda curious what a list of them would look like over time.

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.