Workflowy: A Good Tool

This is not a life hack. I'm not against life hacks per se, but productivity is overrated. I prefer a little inefficiency. I want to describe a tool, not a life hack.

Choose tools carefully. Nicholas Carr writes, "a tool that simply smooths and oils our way, that speeds us to the execution of an impulsion has a deadening effect" (qtd in "Productivity And The Joy Of Doing Things The Hard Way" by Rob Walker). Wendell Berry suggests nine rules for choosing new tools:

1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately-owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance or repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

My fountain pen, kitchen knives, and coffee grinder have proven to be good tools. Writer: The Internet Typewriter is an excellent distraction-free writing tool for the computer. My running huaraches, turntable, framing hammer, and many others are tools with which I get things done.

Beginning a new job, I need a tool to help me get stuff done. I've rejected Evernote, Google Docs, and OneNote in favor of the ridiculously named Workflowy. It is a good, simple, plain tool that does one thing extremely well instead of trying to do everything.

I came into computing in the eighties with a computer with no hard drive, no mouse, and no graphics. I wrote on a bare-bones editor known as Galahad which is for some reason still available for download. Computing consisted of a blinking cursor on a monochrome screen which is about what Workflowy offers three decades later. It opens to a blank screen on which I simply typed a heading, hit enter, typed the next, and so on.

The first three are job-related. Under Personal I have created two projects by hitting enter to get a new bullet and tabbing so that new bullet becomes a subheading like in an outline. Hitting enter after that created a second subheading.

Both of those projects are broken down into small pieces by hitting enter and tabbing just as before. The resulting structure is intuitive to the point of being obvious.

The subheadings can go on and on and each thing can be struck through on completion. Completed tasks can be hidden or just collapsed out of the way. When I'm done with the amplifier repair I'll mark it done and collapse it's sub-tasks.

A good tool should be simple and intuitive like the iPod with its click wheel or the first car you drove. Those things make sense like pen and paper. We're wired for them. Workflowy feels like that. It makes sense and is useful from the word go.

I've used it for two weeks and want to keep using it. That's a good sign. Workflowy helps me get things done and feels good as I use it. So far, it's a very good tool. Not a life hack but a good tool. I'm all about that.

Problems & What To Do About Them

I spent a while yesterday bleeding. Nothing terrible or unusual. Spring and fall, my nose turns sensitive and bleeds. Yesterday my nose was a bother but cleared up eventually. More problems were to come.

Last night I put a record on my beautiful U-Turn Audio Orbit turntable, connected to a 1977 Kenwood KA-5500 integrated amplifier and Boston Acoustics A70 speakers I bought at Gordon Electronics on Erie Boulevard around 1981. (The record was Sufjan Stevens Illinois for those dying to know.) I was ready to sit with a record, really listen, and feel great. You can guess where this is going.

I turned on the amp and a horrible electrical crack erupted from the right channel speaker and continued. A capacitor in that old amp was discharging willy-nilly. Even with the volume turned down to nothing, cracked loudly enough to terrify the cat who knocked her water bowl onto herself bolting for safety. I shut the amp off and flipped the switch again. Same result. I tried other solutions, but all proved useless and my amp is out of commission until I get it repaired.

Damn it.

I stewed but not too much. Like a bloody nose, it's no big deal. Not like the storm that soon after slammed into the neighborhood. Rain went sideways, pounding the windows, siding, and roof. It's the type of storm that somehow finds its way into our dining room ceiling and runs out of it. Bloody noses are stopped with tissues and patience. Amplifier can be repaired for a hundred bucks. A new roof is in another league. I put a bucket beneath the leak. The storm blew past in half an hour, but lingered in me for hours and invaded my dreams.

I woke thinking about the roof and got good an anxious. Shaking that off for the moment, I considered the amplifier. Thinking about it wasn't enough. I needed to write in order to move from worry toward action. Stating the problem — the amp in the living room is broken so I can't play records — reminded me that only the living room amp is broken. The amp in the kitchen works and can be moved to the living room. I even have a crappy old amp in the storage closet to tide me over in the kitchen. A plan appeared on the page:

1. Take video of the amp malfunctioning to show at the repair shop.
2. Replace the kitchen amp with the crappy old one from the storage closet.
3. Disconnect the living room amp and replace it with the kitchen amp.
4. Play a record and live a life of fulfillment, transcendance, and enlightenment (something like that).
5. Take the living room amp to Ohm Electronics when I have time.

The bloody noses have stopped. The turntable sounds great. Until the next storm, the ceiling isn't leaking. I'll try the amplifier approach with the roof, breaking things down into pieces I can manage. I might be able to turn it into little more than another bother and set to making it better. That's difficult to believe at the moment, but that may have more to do with not having started working the problem than it does with the situation itself. Everything, it turns out, is easier once I begin and almost everything feels simple once I'm done.

I should probably get started. First step, look up some roofers. Have you got any suggestions?

Four Objects, Three Pages

On the desk are four objects and three pages trying to teach me things I struggle to learn. I'm slow and stubborn but keep going. One hopes I'll get there eventually. Where? I'm not sure, but I seem headed toward something.

The first two objects are library books, (Frederic Gros's A Philosophy Of Walking and Wendell Berry's The World Ending Fire. Both are good though neither has me glued to the pages. I want to keep reading but also have the cursed urge to finish them. This pushes me to think past the books and miss out on the experience of reading them. It's just that there are so many other books I want to read. The trouble is, no matter how much I might wish otherwise, I can't finish either book in the next hour. At best (or worst), I'll finish both this week. Four more library books wait on the shelf and at least one will likely be due before I get to it. Opportunity lost! Or something like that.

The next object is a composition book that has failed me as a writers notebook. I used to use these all the time, but the paper is terrible and the covers are made too thin. They are still inexpensive but have grown cheap. I'd retire it but forty blank pages remain and I'm unwilling to waste them. It's not that I'm stuck with the notebook so much as sticking with it to the end which won't come for weeks.

The fourth object is a Uniball Jetstream ballpoint pen. I have a box of them but don't especially enjoy them, but can't stand wasting them. I doubt I'll go through the whole box any time soon, but I've committed to writing this one pen dry. I'm curious how long such a pen lasts but mostly trying to teach myself that I can finish most anything if I keep going. I started the pen with yesterday's morning pages and have written most everything with it. I'll likely be a couple weeks writing it dry. Sigh.

All of this not finishing is discouraging. I want to be done and get where I'm going. These objects are trying to teach me the mistake of such thinking but it's the three pages of paper that are my best teachers. They are this morning's pages, ninety-three lines written in about forty minutes and kept on my desk as a reminder to write this idea, roughed out in them, that some things can't be dispatched in only a few minutes, hours, or even days. But those pages one, two, three aren't the real lesson for me. The lesson is that they aren't pages one, two and three but are instead pages 5,362 through 5,364 since I began this daily practice in 2014.

I began with the idea to write three pages that morning. That's all I could control then. The rest had to wait for the next morning and the next. Had I begun hoping only to reach page 5,364, that would have been foolish and weird. I still have no end number in mind. I let 5,000 pages pass without much notice and will likely do the same at 10,000. If I go twenty years, I'll fill 21,918 pages. At thirty years, it will be 32,877 pages in all. But there's no gain in aiming for those things. It's the process of doing that matters. Just keep going.

I'll finish my books, fill the notebook, write the pen dry. Then there will be more books to read, another notebook to fill, and always more ink. None of it will get done today. I'll have to live with that. Maybe I'll learn from it too.

More Papers, No Television or News

This morning I'm attending to a task I've considered for a couple months on and off and pretty much fixated on (without doing anything other than worry about it) for the last week. No, I'm not installing a new sewer line or even replacing the rotted window sill in the dining room. Those would be tasks from which anyone might shrink. I've just been avoiding the pile of papers on my desk. I even wrote about it this week after dealing with maybe a page and a half of stuff there. That post made it sound like I had gotten deep into the task. Writing has that effect. And yet the stack was still there this morning.

Before it seems like I've dispatched all the papers and reached self-actualization, the stack is diminished but I remain far down Maslow's hierarchy. I have read seven articles that friends have sent to me — I am blessed and cursed with friends who want me to read the good stuff they find — but have done nothing with the three essays in need of revision. So it goes. I'm not about completing things so much as giving it the old college try, whatever the hell that means.

As I finished the last of the articles which was about newspapers and kept mentioning the god-awful excuse for a human in the White House, I realized I have been reading a lot and have pretty much stopped watching television. It hasn't been a conscious decision, but I haven't missed the television and its focus on whatever is happening right now. With regard to current events, I couldn't care much less.

I suppose soon enough I'll wade back into all that. I'll resubscribe to the Post or the Times, tune into some show or other either on TV, and otherwise go back into the orange maggot's world. The piles of paper will grow. I'll stop doing the things around the house that feel good and keep things from sliding into disrepair. The books on the shelf will go unread.

It's about balance. I've gone way out on the beam, pulling it down, watching the other pan, empty and light as air, fly up and away. Down here, reading, writing, and making my way through the pile of papers, I'm in the smaller world of neighbors, family, and myself. Other stuff goes on, but the big news of my day is that I've read those articles to reduce the pile and I might revise one those lingering essay drafts.

First though, after over an hour this morning at the desk, I'm going out to see what the blue sky and gentle breeze have to say to me. I doubt they will mention politics, the news, or even remind me of the pile of papers still awaiting my attention. They will have other things to tell me if I'm willing to really listen.