I Am Not an Analog Person

And it’s frustrating as hell sometimes!

From the Kennedy Space Flight Center (KSC) control room, Apollo Program Director Lieutenant General Samuel C. Phillips monitors pre-launch activities for Apollo 11. \\ Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

If you know anything about Ninja Writers, you know that I have the privilege of working with somebody who is very analog-minded.

Shaunta is the queen of analog, and for years, she’s been sharing her tools with thousands of Ninja Writers. FRED, dockets, daily organizers, daily logs, her analog PDA, keeping notebooks on top of notebooks for tracking various things. For the last three years, I’ve been seeing rave reviews, emails from Ninja Writers who’ve gotten themselves organized thanks to Shaunta’s tools.

And I’ve tried them and they just . . . don’t work for me. I’m not an analog person.

This isn’t millennial snobbery. This isn’t me praising the digital revolution and shunning anything that’s written on paper like a heathen. I prefer actual books to ebooks. When I’m in a class, I always take my notes by hand (at least, initially). I even write most of my poems by hand before I type them up.

I’m not a digital snob. It’s just that, here in meatspace, I am terribly unorganized.

That notebook I’m supposed to be writing in every day this year? It’ll probably be lost by February. It’ll definitely have vanished into the ether by June. That FRED folder I’m supposed to be using all month? It’ll probably be torn…