This one originally went up on my blog.
The Most Analog Thing I've Done in Years
I have a four-GPU AI rig humming in my house. I've got a homelab agent that pings my Telegram the second something breaks. I've automated chunks of my life that most people don't know can be automated.
And the single best productivity change I made this year was buying a notebook and a pen.
I know how that sounds. Believe me, I know. The guy who writes blog posts about vLLM quantization and self-hosted inference is here to tell you about.. journaling. Stay with me, because the irony is kind of the whole point.
It Started, Like Most of My Bad Decisions, at the Mall
Last year I was wandering The Galleria in Houston and walked into the Mont Blanc store. My dad always had a Mont Blanc when I was growing up, so the name had a pull on me I didn't fully understand at the time. I wasn't going to buy anything, I just wanted to look.
So of course I tested one. And it was genuinely lovely.. right up until I saw my own handwriting on the page. Mine is terrible. Always has been. Dropping Mont Blanc money to make my chicken scratch more expensive felt like buying a Ferrari to sit in traffic, so I capped the pen, set it down, and walked out.
That should have been the end of it. Then about a month ago a YouTube video about fountain pens landed in my feed and dragged the whole itch right back out. Like Betty from that video, I had no idea something so simple had so much depth. She pointed me at a Lamy Safari, which runs about half of what a Mont Blanc costs in sales tax. Sold.
Once I actually had a pen I liked, the pen stopped being the point. The writing did. I'd spent the first half of this year building out a personal "knowledge base" to finally get organized, and the idea of doing some of that thinking by hand wouldn't leave me alone.
Turns Out There's a Method to the Madness
Down the research rabbit hole I went, and I found the Bullet Journal method. It's a stupidly simple system for categorizing quick notes, and it clicked instantly because it reads like markdown for paper.
Naturally, I couldn't leave it alone. I tweaked the key until it matched the way my brain already works:
- • a task
- x task done
- / task started
- > task I'm pushing to tomorrow
- < task I canceled
- - a quick note
- * an important note (admittedly subjective)
- ○ an event
If you've ever written a markdown checklist, this is the same muscle. I'm not parsing it with a tokenizer, I'm parsing it with my eyeballs at 4 in the morning, but the instinct is identical.
One Brain, Six Boxes
Once the key felt right, I built a weekly layout. Two pages, each split into three, so six boxes total: one for every workday and a big one for the weekend.
On Sunday I sit down and rough out the week at a high level. The decision that actually changed things was refusing to separate my domains. Work, side projects, life.. all of it goes in the same six boxes. One centralized brain dump, which is sort of the entire point.
So a single week's spread might hold:
- Work: database cleanups, the weekly migration, UAT acceptance.. the usual EPC data gremlins
- Thundoria: rework the inventory system, balance some enemy NPCs, build a changelog
- Life: Kid's sporting events, important dates, the works
This sounds insultingly basic. Plan your week, write it down. And yet, looking back, I genuinely don't know how I functioned before.
Actually, I do know. I was a "vibe coder" before AI was commercialized. I executed work based on vibes and how I felt that day, hour, minute. If I woke up and felt like pivoting my fourth million-dollar SaaS idea in a completely new direction, cool, sounds fun, let's go. No plan, just vibes and caffeine.
Putting Pen to Paper (Literally)
The game changer wasn't the clever key or the six little boxes. It came down to one stupidly old phrase: putting pen to paper.
Journaling, the bullet method, the custom symbols.. none of that is the magic. They're just outlets. The actual shift was stopping, taking a breath, and thinking about what I was about to do before I did it.
That's embarrassingly hard now. We're drowning in pings. Social media notifications, Telegram messages from my homelab agent, Reddit alerts about cheap GPUs I absolutely do not need more of. Every one of those is a tiny hand reaching out to yank my attention somewhere else.
Putting the phone down and picking the pen up broke the loop. No notes app, no task manager, no productivity suite synced across six devices. Just a page that can't notify me about anything.
My 4 AM Half-Page
I get to work early. 4 to 4:30 in the morning. The first 15 minutes now belong to the notebook, and the routine is always the same half page:
- A sentence or two on me: how I slept, how I'm feeling, what the day's got waiting
- Three to five tasks I actually want to finish today, cross-checked against Sunday's weekly plan
- A quote of the day, which I get by asking Claude for something that'll resonate with me (yes, the AI guy uses the AI for his analog journal, the hypocrisy is noted)
Then I set the notebook right next to my keyboard, a glance away, and I get to work. As the day throws things at me, I log them in real time:
- Joe Shmoe needs earned value data pulled for the past week
- Jane Doe wants a UX feature added to one of the apps
- Wife called, grab bread on the way home
Little things. The exact little things that used to evaporate the second a Teams message landed on top of them.
The Part Where I Take Off the Apple Watch
This is the bit I keep coming back to, because it's where it stopped being about a notebook and started being about something bigger.
I'm 33. I've made peace with the fact that I'm scatterbrained. I do it to myself, juggling something like 48 projects at once, and I'm not proud of it.. but I genuinely work well in chaos. The notebook didn't fix that. It just gave the chaos structure.
So I kept pulling threads. I stopped opening my phone "real quick" only to surface 40 minutes later on TikTok with no memory of why I unlocked it. I took off the Apple Watch that buzzed my wrist every ten seconds and put my old analog watch back on. A watch that tells time. That's the whole feature list.
I'm an avid tech guy who looked at his own setup and decided to de-digitize parts of it. Not all of it. Just the parts that were quietly running me instead of the other way around.
Controlled Chaos
I'm not going to pretend a notebook turned me into a calm, organized person. It didn't. I'm still juggling 48 projects, still up before the sun, still one good benchmark away from buying another GPU I don't need (don't tell my wife).
The difference is that now it's controlled chaos. Same mess, but I'm holding the leash instead of getting dragged behind it.
Funny how that worked out. I spent years and a small fortune building systems to manage my brain, and the thing that finally did it was a thirty-dollar Lamy and a notebook.. no firmware, no notifications, a battery life measured in ink.
My handwriting has only gotten marginally better, for the record. But I fill that notebook every single morning now, which is more than any app on my phone can say. So maybe one of these days, once I've actually earned it, I'll walk back into that Mont Blanc store and buy the thing my dad always carried.
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