lonely mountain

Going analog in the digital world

At the end of 2025 I decided to go analog in 2026 and ditch almost every possible digital thing I use for organizing the things in my life, like events, notes, lists. And I leaned fully into it. Here's why.

Somewhere around mid 2025 I have found myself having problems keeping track of the important things and priorities, not just in my personal but in my professional life. It felt like as soon as I saved it digitally, I just "disconnect" from it, and forget it faster than I wanted to. Yes, it can remind me, but it does not feel important, even if it is important. And it would create one more notification to care about, on top of all of the current ones. Beside this, I feel dumber and I cannot remember simple things. Here is what I worked with.

At my workplace we have to use Microsoft services and programs, but this is too much to organize and write things down:

In my personal life I have:

Every single one of them has its pros and cons, but it is just too much for me. I wanted to use at most 2 things for everything (or maybe I should just give up and finally use Emacs?!). Of course, I could search for a cloud solution that combines everything into one, but I do not want to pay for another one service monthly (or prepay billed for the whole year in advance) that could go down anytime. Well, I don't want to deal with that. Of course, because we live in a digital world, I cannot purge everything digital and I need at least one simple software, like for drafting blog posts, project ideas, or anything for longer writings. Because of this, I decided to buy 2 things for 2026. One weekly planner and one dotted bullet journal. The business planner has the exact structure I need, and I can write down Ideas, notes, in the bullet journal, that doesn't fit in the planner.

Here's what I learned until today

Just after 5 days after I began my analog journey in January, it felt like I can remember things more easily. When I have to remember something, I can just recall that exact information, or I somehow see the business planner/journal in front of my eyes and know where to look up that information. I do not need to search for it digitally in 5 difference places. It is just there. I can plan and manage my days way better than before. If I write something as high priority, then I'll do that task. I thought that reorganizing the tasks or days will be messy, but after 1 week I found a solution how should I manage the tasks, without needing to constantly cross things out. The main point is that every task can have one of the following symbols:

I assigned a color for each symbol, it's easier for me to see what and how. I also use these symbols when I write the monthly summary or reflection.

With the business planner I use, I can track weekly project times and sum them up to the monthly table. Even if I track the hours done for a task in DevOps, this is more comfortable for me. The projects and bigger tasks are collected in the projects section with the most important sub-tasks (as an outline) each with a dead line date. Of course every project has a documentation and notes document digitally too, where I write longer ideas, concepts or create diagrams. But the main information is written down by hand. Overall the planner (both for work and private) has the exact structure what my brain wants. I am not sure how or if I change up this routine, but currently it works better than I expected and will finish 2026 with this. Maybe at the end of this year I will write a lessons learned and change things accordingly, if needed. But for the time being this setup works for me.

What I use

If someone is interested, here are the "tools" I use for going analog, somewhat detailed:

I originally started with these 6 Stabilo Boss markers, but I ended up using only the Gray. It is more then enough to mark some important word or task. I use the Stabilo Point 88 markers to structure my writings or mark the tasks with the symbols above colors.