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Anna Havron answers a reader question about how to choose between analog and digital for our notes, and how long we should keep our notes once they’re made.
She cites two themes to keep in mind for both questions: purpose, and pleasure.
Go ahead and read the article, and see if you agree with me that the essence of it is this:
Make like a cat and follow the sparkles!
Throw out the shoulds. Choose the mode of note making that makes you smile (or makes the most sense) today, and a different one tomorrow if you like.
You get to choose!
The other day I wrote about what my hire car experience taught me about outsourcing decision making. The lesson revolves around waking up to the fact that we are in the driver’s seat of our own life-vehicle, and that departures from our regular routes are something to plan for.
You see, the better machines get, the more we might struggle when they fail — but not if we perform our daily activities with foresight and intention.
My recent Mastodon post:
Just going on record to say that plain text accounting is everything I hoped it would be. I’m keeping up to date with data entry, and finally seeing patterns that are helping me plan ahead.
No more nasty subscription surprises! I know what’s coming, and anything out of the usual is picked up very quickly and taken care of. Not like that $9.95/month sub I thought I’d cancelled, because it turned out the service wasn’t actually valid in my country.
I quickly took to double entry bookkeeping and am convinced it’s the only way to go, but figuring out how to write categories and accounts was not so easy.
Facing that at the same time as learning the command line made it all seem insurmountably hard at first.
I have much more to learn, but for what I need it’s working. I am very glad I stuck with it! And by ‘stuck with it’ I mean tried and failed and gave up multiple times before digging in reading up and getting some help.
Right now I’m using hledger, but the mindblowingly cool thing about PTA is that I could switch to Beancount at any point with minimal effort. Why consider Beancount? Because of the Fava interface and mobile app, making it more accessible to the people I need to share these figures with.
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