Flow

Stumbling onto Nicholas Felton and his personal annual reports has me groping to make sense of my own life in quantifiable terms. It also led me back to thinking of index cards as an organizational tool, such as in hawkexpress' POIC. I tried a bit of that, but couldn't sustain it enough to build a useful deck.

Still, this has me planning my own 2011 Annual Report, with a timeline and lists of events and accomplishments, not as a design exercise but as a summation of what has passed which should bleed into the next year. It's far more satisfying than the vague motions that otherwise mark the turnover into the following year.

I also printed three copies of a notebook made from folding a single sheet of paper, something I've been doing with the excess paper at work. There's a website called Pocketmod, where you can make your own, complete with customized graph/lined pages and weekly/daily templates, though it requires a bit of trimming.

All throughout this year, I found myself making up my own planner templates. For the first six months, I printed a monthly calendar on cardstock, writing a word a day. And then I stopped. Later on, I made up weekly templates where I wrote my goals, such as a number of poems to write, number of minutes to walk on the treadmill and so on. So we'll see what I come up with, and if it sticks.

For now, I'm thinking of a single board beside my couch/bed, to do a manual checklist of my yearly goals. I'm so analog...