Anna Havron: a Fountain of Wisdom
@857@fedia.social shared a link to an answer to a reader question about open and closed lists on Analog Office. I found it intriguing and went on a wandering binge of a few dozen posts throughout Analog Office and her personal site at annahavron.com. Here are some highlights.
Do More By Making Your To-Do List Smaller
From the post answering a reader question about open and closed lists, An idea from Mark McGuinness to limit the size of one’s to-do list for a given day. He uses a 3x3 sticky note pad. Anything that won’t fit goes on the next note on the stack to be used for tomorrow’s to-do list. Anna includes a full citation to the book where Mark published the idea, which is Productivity for Creative People, which the former academic in me loves.
Truly Shared Ownership May Require Documentation
The post titled Is It Ours …Or Just Yours? How Analog Cheat Sheets Empower Everyone shares an amusing anecdote about a new, Hi-Fi stereo system that was complex enough that only one member of the household–the one who set it up–knew how to operate it. The stereo effectively belonged only to them rather than to the entire household. Only after the person with the knowledge wrote down instructions so that anyone could use the stereo did it truly belong to the entire household.
This post poses an excellent question:
Is there something in your home that theoretically belongs to the household, but in practice only belongs to you, because you’re the only one who can work it?
I couldn’t immediately think of anything but I’m sure there are things or will be in the near future. I’m the more technology-inclined between my wife and I, so I am likely to be prone to bringing things into our shared household that can only be operated by me. This post helped me realize that, and I have resolved to be on the lookout for such situations and document my knowledge so that we can truly share our things.
A Digital File Index for Paper Files
It seems counterintuitive for the Analog Office to advocate for a digital solution, but the key advantage to a digital index is searchability. There is also usually an ambiguity about how to file a given item. For example, an auto insurance document could go under ‘Auto’, ‘Car’, ‘Insurance’, or the name of the insurance company. Using a digital index allows the document to be located by searching for any of these terms.
After reading this and contemplating the idea for a while, I thought of doing something similar for physical locations of items within a home. Of course she has a post about that exact idea as well.
Draw Your Demons
Draw Your Demons shares a technique employed by Lynda Barry in her book One! Hundred! Demons!. The idea is exactly what it says. Draw pictures of “spiritual parasites” and you will soon encounter familiar faces, such as the voice in your head that tells you that you can’t do it or that you aren’t good enough or that nobody cares what you have to say.
Drawing them helps you get familiar with parts of yourself that hold you back by reifying and anthropomorphizing them. Naming and understanding the demons grants you power over them, so that you can push back against their influence more easily. Anna describes how drawing her demons and writing down what they were saying made her laugh, “And laughter is power; especially over demons.”
Demons aren’t necessarily an enemy force to be defeated in all circumstances. Anna describes beginning to feel affection towards some of them, because “Some of them are trying to protect me.” I have learned that every voice in your head or pattern of thought, no matter how much it gets in your way, comes from some circumstance where it was beneficial. To reap the benefit and avoid the downsides requires understanding what drives the behavior so that you can pick and choose when and whether to apply it.
Drawing your demons is a creative way to accomplish the necessary introspection. The next time the demon speaks up after you have drawn it, you will be able to put a face and a name to the voice, understand where it’s coming from and decide whether to heed or ignore its demands.
Tickler Files a.k.a. 43 Folders
The ‘Tickler File’ or ‘43 Folders’ is a common organizational technique popularized by David Allen and Merlin Mann in the early 2000s. This Analog Office post about tickler file techniques was my first exposure to the idea, but I immediately realized that it could be a solution to a problem that I frequently run into. The problem is about coming back to things. If I’m working on a task and hit a roadblock or need to go take care of some life responsibility like grocery shopping, I have to postpone the rest of the task. I would like to come back to it so that I can finish it, but it’s difficult for me to actually remember to do so.
I frequently set alarms as reminders, but that only works if I can figure out a specific time that would be appropriate. It also doesn’t work for reminders that are more than a week in the future because my phone doesn’t let me set alarms with a repetition period longer than a week. A tickler file would let me remind my future self more than a year in the future if necessary. The only trouble is remembering to check it, but I’m sure there’s a post about that nearby here somewhere.