As part of the Year of Scales and Arpeggios I find myself needing to keep track of new things in new ways. The problem is that tracking things, like naming them, is hard. Maybe it’s less hard for people that don’t suffer from perfectionism. It’s hard for me. The ideal system is one which tracks itself, but those are few and far between and rarely support the other principles that matter to me.
One of the things I want to improve on is how much time I spend on my hobbies. To be clear: it’s currently not enough. I would like to spend more time on my hobbies. But I’ve got a lot of other things competing for my time, and that means left to my own devices I won’t naturally spend more time working on the things that I want to work on. So I’m tracking it. Currently the form of that tracking is a daily tick box in my 2024 Hobonichi Techo Cousin. Pro: it’s flexible to my needs. Con: it’s hard to remember to look in the planner.
I suppose I could talk about planners in general, the problem being that I absolutely adore the tactile feel of paper, but I don’t find it very useful to try to manage my mostly-digital life with mostly-analog tools. There’s occasionally value in enforcing the gap, and I think that I think better “on paper,” but I know that trying to move my calendar or todo list to paper would be foolhardy at best and catastrophic at worst.
So, better or worse, I’ve got a paper planner that I mostly don’t use for traditional planning. But it gives me room to explore the space. Maybe these checkboxes are the path forward, maybe they’re not, but they’re much easier to change if I figure out something better than if I doubled-down on an app-based solution that would only ever work “how it works,” and likely require me to test 3-5 different apps to find the one that worked the way I needed it to. In my experience, apps are rarely a solution to any problems. They are frequently the problem I’m attempting to solve.
Last week’s boxes were:
- Up by 8
- Morning planning
- Apple rings
- 40K
- Reading
- Sleep
I’ve already reworked that to:
- Awake on time
- 30 minute walk
- Hobby
- Reading
- Asleep on time
Most days I want to be up by 8, but not all, so generalizing the check makes it easier to set up my planner each week. A checkmark for whether or not I closed all my apple rings is somewhat redundant, since I can look that up at any time. Much more useful is to track whether I engaged in the behaviors that lead to the desired result. “Hobby” remains to be seen if it meets the need. The main hobby I want to do more of is Warhammer 40K, but it’s not my only hobby and there are nights where I have commitments or obligations that consume the time I might otherwise spend. I suspect that one will change again, even though I don’t yet know how I’d change it.
Reading deserves a special call-out. Arguably, it’s a hobby, but it’s one I’ve struggled to maintain to my own satisfaction for nearly 20 years. In high school I was voracious, not least of which because I was often ignoring the teachers. I wish I had something approximating Goodreads data for how many books I used to read, but subjectively I’d estimate a 2x-3x over my best year as an adult. I’ve had the best luck setting aside time before bed to read, so that’s what I’ve done again, and that’s what I’m tracking. And then, to make sure I don’t accidentally forget to sleep because “just one more chapter,” I track that I lay down to sleep on time. Midnight, for the curious.
I like that paper gives me the freedom to try to figure out the best way to track this. And it’s a physical object in the world that’s harder to accidentally forget to update. Most importantly it’s a place to start. Starting is often the hardest part.