Apps and resources for the unscheduled life
January 4, 2020 6:35 PM   Subscribe

I'm recently curious about a life that is rich and full of meaningful activities, where one does the things one wants to do frequently enough for growth, but without scheduled/daily consistency. Think an artist without a fixed job or daily routine. I'm wondering about your favourite apps to track and journal each day of this life in order to reflect upon it and improve it, or books, articles and examples of people who live it.
posted by miaow to Education (5 answers total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
I use Trello for personal projects / todo lists, in a Kanban style setup. There are at this point a million clones of Trello, but it's good enough for personal use. The thing I like most about Trello is that it's easily customizable to your work flow. I've used it in the past at work to track projects, especially things like decomming a database with failed hardware: there's a ton of steps you need to go through, one per database, to mitigate downtime. High structure project management tools don't really help you track those, or try to force every project into the same set of steps. I have a board set up for major purchases I might make, designed around doing research and buying the best thing.

For personal projects, none of that matters and I use a single board. I have a Backlog list of all the things I want to do / write / read / learn, and then Scheduled / Doing / Review / Done columns to track progress.

The Backlog list is where all the random ideas go. I find myself repeating 'I should do this' thoughts on occasion, and having somewhere to write them down helps relieve me of that anxiety. It's fine that it grows over time -- better to be overflowing with ideas to choose from than struggling to find any!

Motivation is usually the key here. Sometimes I assign a due date, if the card is important or urgent. The danger of the unscheduled life is missing deadlines, or simply procrastinating. When I grab a book from the library, pacing myself is useful -- typically one chapter a night. I will create a card with a due date that approximately matches that pace, even though I'm not going to necessarily to be reading 30min before bed.
posted by pwnguin at 8:42 PM on January 4, 2020


I have a simple to do list app (Clear) and I created lists for days of the week. I check the list for the current day a few times a day, and also check in on the previous/next days a little bit to see what’s left over/upcoming. And if I miss something non critical one day (ie: mending my purse), it will come up again the next week.

It’s useful for roughing in project time but not pressuring myself about it.

Similarly, I have a stack of 5.5x8.5 paper (scratch paper, cut in half, mostly) that I keep in a leather folio. Those sheets of paper are generally next steps for projects and a couple specialty shopping/wish/gift lists. I like that I can reorder, add/discard pages on a whim. There are different colors/weights of paper, plus an index (bright cardstock) I use to remind myself what might be where.

In the past I’ve used that loose leaf folio for a Mental Bank Ledger (on the advice of my therapist, who also uses the system). The MBL is oriented toward prosperity/money growth, but I use it for putting a numerical value on how I’m spending my time.

The MLB does have some hypnosis woo along with its prosperity woo, but I found it very useful for tracking/reflecting, despite not being woo in either way. It’s designed to be done right before bed ever day, where you tabulate how you spent your time, note the positive outcomes of how you spent your time, and write a mantra/affirmation.

Because I’m spending 2020 pursuing art in an intuitive way rather than a project/ambitious way, I got myself a paper day planner (Unsolicited Advice by Adam Kurtz). I have a couple inches of room for every day, and a few pages of looking forward/back prompts each month. I use the inches to jot down art I made or consumed and people I spent time with.
posted by itesser at 11:35 AM on January 5, 2020 [1 favorite]


Hi, I am an artist without a fixed job or a daily routine.

I have tried various apps and whatnot but I keep coming back to a paper journal and a pen.

Ideally, I spend a little time every day when I get up on deciding what I'm going to do today using my personal variation of The Pomodoro Technique. Which is pretty much "make some checkboxes for the things I wanna do today, most checkboxes represent a half hour of work, so multiple checkboxes on a single entry are pretty common, but I also mix things like shopping lists in sometimes". I will then get dressed, hop on my bike, and go out to a cafe or park and work on stuff. Sometimes I'll do errands first, sometimes I'll choose which cafe/park I'm going to by proximity to errands I need to do.

On the days where I blow that task off then I will usually fill it in after the fact using data about my computer use gleaned from Time Sink; most of my art work happens on the computer so it's easy to deal with. I do also have a physical timer I use sometimes when I am in a slump and want to Get Some Shit Done, winding up the physical object does something to my brain that starting a timer on the computer usually does not.

If I feel a need to write about other stuff that happened then this book also functions as a diary. Usually it's just a list of Shit I Did.

I've been using an assortment of journals with shiny patterns on their covers from Paperblanks. They are completely unstructured, I don't even get ones with ruled lines for writing in, and anything explicitly designed for keeping a calendar or something is out of the question.

I also have a significant other who occasionally hassles me to do the stuff that I keep putting off because anything that is not "drawing the next page of this 90p graphic novel I'm in the last third of" tends to get put aside.
posted by egypturnash at 12:05 PM on January 5, 2020


The book The Now Habit might have some useful stuff. IIRC it’s pre-smartphone and not very computer based, but the automatable bits probably have been turned into apps.
posted by clew at 12:35 PM on January 6, 2020


I don't know from apps, but you might find some inspiration from these:

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, like it says on the tin, is a collection of short vignettes about the work lives (plus sometimes messy, fascinating details about their personal lives) of a variety of famous visual artists, musicians, writers, etc.

A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary follows his life for a year -- as a modern renaissance man, his life is very 'rich and full of meaningful activities,' from making and producing music, to a being a practicing visual artist, to art professor, to traveling the world giving lectures. "Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult."

Cal Newport has written several books about work and how to organize and maximize your time and attention in this modern, distracted era. He argues quite persuasively that apps, and smartphones, and much of the digital communication infrastructure we surround ourselves with are major obstacles to the creative life.
posted by Bron at 3:37 PM on January 6, 2020 [2 favorites]


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