Spiral Findings

learn, share, grow

Tools

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I was inspired by this post on Tammy Strobel’s page where she went through the tools she uses for fostering her creativity.

I was thinking I’d like to share a few of the tools that I use:

  • Daily Planner:  I’m currently using a Passion Planner, but I’m also evaluating the Desire Map Daily Planner – the Evergreen Version.  I’m trying to decide if I like a week to view planner or a day by day view.
  • Midori – Regular Size (Brown): I use two inserts – one to capture notes from books or blogs that I am reading or topics I am learning about and the second as a bullet journal for work.
  • Midori – Passport Size (Star Edition): I use two inserts – one as a gratitude journal and one for daily musings & morning pages.

Occasionally, I will pick up a separate notebook for special purposes – a course I’m taking, or a thicker paper midori insert for art journaling, a sketchbook for an illustrated discovery journal, or a binder for creative dream journalling.

As an aside, I really love Goulet Pens as a company.  They really understand how to delight their customers – especially with how they pack their products to make sure they aren’t damaged during shipping.  🙂

Note: I am only recommending products that I enjoy using myself.  I have recently become a passion planner rep, which gets me credits if you purchase through my link and saves you 10%.  

 

Minimalism & Books

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When I first started exploring minimalism, I had a real question of whether or not I could minimize my incredibly large stock pile of books.  I don’t know what it is about books, but I love them, and I had made up my mind to simplify, but to hold off on attacking my personal library.  I have tons of books from childhood story books to college text books to books I don’t think are even mine but that I inherited from family or friends and books I love to read over and over and over again because I really enjoy the story as well as books I’m fairly certain I’ll never read and I’m not even sure where or when I bought them and then there is the occasional book that I bought just because everyone else was reading it but I’m pretty sure I’ve never even cracked the binding.  There are bookshelves full of books and bins full to the brim of them as well.  I also have an unhealthy amount of notebooks from school that I haven’t quite let go of yet either.

Recently, after considering yet another move, and moving all of these books again, I decided enough is enough – at least for the notebooks, and I’m scanning them in so I have a digital version.  I tried to do this myself, but it’s much too cumbersome and I’m not sure I really want to spend hours doing this so I am going to give Blue Leaf Scanning a try.  I’m not sure how expensive it will be but I’ll do the math.  Regardless, it’ll be much cheaper than moving all those notebooks again, of that I’m sure.  I’m quite proud of my notebooks (as you can see, I’ve created a whole blog about it) so just pitching them doesn’t sit well with me.

On the book front, I’m still not that comfortable with the idea of purging my book collection however I have found a couple resources that have me warming to the idea which I’ll share with you below.  First off, libraries are great.  I’ve found that most of them have a digital catalog as well, and I’ve been taking advantage and downloading content to my kindle to read.  I’ve also found a non-profit company that takes book donations and in turn runs a book store/cafe that teaches local youth in need how to run a business.  The proceeds of the book/cafe sales go to paying the wages of those youth in their employ.  I feel like donating my books to this cause will give new life to those books and maybe help someone in need.

  • My friend Xandra had the same philosophy of minimalism but excluding books which she discusses in her blog post.
  • Courtney Carver recently posted on the joy of reading, and letting go of books.  My favorite quote from these posts is:

    The joy of books isn’t found in organizing them alphabetically, storing them on shelves or in boxes, or moving them from home to home. – Courtney Carver, Be More With Less

  • Tammy Strobel wrote an article on her blog and for AOL about letting go of paper and books which I think started me thinking about this whole concept in the first place.
  • The Minimalists also talk about how getting rid of books actually got them to start reading more in this post.

I hope you have a great weekend, and happy reading! 🙂

Paper versus Electronic Notes

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Alejandro Escamilla via Unsplash

Photo Credit: Alejandro Escamilla, Unsplash

There is something about sitting down with a piece of paper and a pen, and physically writing something down that has a different feeling than taking notes electronically.

I started using a popular note-taking tool for taking electronic notes on my computer or mobile device.  I found that I just wasn’t able to retain the information the same way as if I wrote it down by hand.  It was so much easier to take the notes electronically – I can type a lot quicker than I can write, but there was something lost in the process of hearing or reading the information, and then the process of internalizing and transcribing it that caused me to miss the message that I was trying to capture.  It became less about internalizing the information, and more about just capturing it for review later.  Often that “review later” never happened.

I started reflecting on this when I found Susannah Conway’s site and flirted with the idea of taking her e-course Journal Your Life.  By simply watching the video and reading about her experience with journalling, I remembered how therapeutic it can be.  I picked it up again – electronically and on paper.  The same philosophy I found worked for me here as well – journalling on paper versus electronically had such a different feel to it and it served the purpose of being mindful about what I was writing.

Everyone processes information differently, and I still value having an electronic location for to-do lists and for my calendars, but I’m realizing that there is value in having an old-fashioned pen and paper when processing or internalizing is necessary.  And its so much more fun when you have tons of colored pens, new notebooks, and fresh clean sheets of paper to use!  🙂