Paper is the real 'killer app'

https://pastebin.com/djyFiZkz

This is not on paper but I do the same thing on paper when I'm away from the computer. On my computer a cron job just pops this into a Dropbox folder as YYYY-MM-DD.md and I edit it from there.

There are some neat journaling cues available if you read e.g. "The New Diary" by Tristine Rainer. Like writing in the third person, or just viewing a diary/journal as a place to scribble down work notes and improving on it from there.

I probably change my own template every 1-2 months. You'll see on the "schedule" portion that the least productive part of my day is 1-3 p.m., so I encourage a lot of fun and relaxation during that time as a way of releasing anxiety and picking up task momentum.

Most of my work in the journal is under the "other" heading, and I don't fill out every heading every day. Most entries just have a score for the day, some notes on why I chose that score, and ideas to improve it, and then a lot of ideas under "Other".

Every Friday I do a sort of "information archaeology" thing where I go back over my paper & digital journal entries and round up reusable tips or things I've learned into a "frameworks" folder where I have separate files for things like building websites, coding, preparing for meetings, working with various types of people, possible new hobbies, etc. The recapture of these ideas has been worth quite a lot to me, as it feels like I have a better foothold next time I encounter the problem.

That is a wonderful typo.

The legibility of my writing is really sensitive to the interaction between the paper and writing utensil I'm writing. I rarely pick the pen up off the paper -- instead I use the fact that certain pens can 'skate' across certain types of paper to write in a block print that is written kind of like cursive. It's completely legible to me, and mostly legible to other people, without being too fatiguing to write.

The 'skating' effect is created by abusing the shoulder that holds the ball in a ball-point pen in place. If you look at my hand writing, there are actually depressions from the pens between the letters without ink in them, because I dragged the edge of the pen between the end of one letter and the beginning of the next.

My writing is really sensitive to both the paper I'm writing on and the pen I'm using as a result. If I write on smooth paper, like a glossy card stock, I absolutely have to write in draftsmans letters or my writing skitters all over the place. Certain pens have the shoulder in a different place, causing the connections between letters to have ink, or making some letters not appear.

Most digital writing implements don't work at all. I hold my pen at a relatively severe acute angle to the page, because I'm dragging the pen really close to the shoulder that captures the ball in a ball point pen. A lot of digital writing tools require the tool to be used more upright.

Oftentimes the issue is caused by a button' that needs to be pushed by the tip to activate the detection, and I'm binding the mechanism up because the force I'm applying to the tip is extremely off-axis. In my surface pen, in addition to this issue, the sensor is about 1.5 mm from the actual tip of the stylus, causing everything I write to be shifted rather far from where I'm intending to write.

Beyond that, I press very hard and tend to break even well-made pens. With real pens, I generally crack the tip of the pen, causing the ball to either come loose or bind inside of it. When this happens I throw out my pen and get a new one. Most styluses are much more expensive, and for whatever reason tend to be made out of much less sturdy stuff. I have broken at least 5 surface pens, which are not cheap.

The actual shape of the pen makes a difference as well, and when I tried livescribe I found the pens to be nearly impossible to use because of the shape. The occupational therapist I used to work with thinks this is probably due to a missing tendon in my right thumb, rather than dysgraphia, but it's an issue I've faced in the past.

I worked with that occupational therapist for a long time on my writing, and we set a goal of making my letters and words legible to me, and my numbers legible to everyone. I've basically achieved that goal when using pen and paper, but I have yet to find an assistive technology that doesn't make my handwriting look like a giant scribbly blob.