Tony Stubblebine, a writer and now the new CEO of Medium, wrote the article Replace Your To-Do List With Interstitial Journaling To Increase Productivity. Being a productivity fanatic, I decided to give it a go. Since I was already behind five years (he wrote the article in 2017), I wanted to get on with it straight away.
If you don’t know what interstitial journaling is (like me), it is a way of tracking your work through a journal. It idea is that a lot of time gets wasted when you transition from one task to another, so if you have a notebook handy, you take a few moments to write a few sentences about the task you just finished and then a few more about the one you are going to tackle next.
It should look something like this:
Being a rebel, mine didn’t stick with Tony’s framework and took a life of its own.
6:46 AM: Wrote four morning pages. Inspiration struck. Well-formed lines, sentences and paragraphs came flowing for the Productivity While Being Kind To Yourself Guide (not the final title). Sh*t. Only fourteen minutes left till I have to get going for the gym class. What can I do in 14 minutes? LinkedIn post? No will take much longer to do that. Check emails? No, it is a rabbit hole. Daily diary. Yes. Can do. Did it.
7:01 AM: Changed. Drove to the gym.
7:25 AM: I am five minutes early. No point going there and waiting at the door. What can I do in five minutes? LinkedIn? No. Emails? No. Five minutes meditation? Yes. Closed my eyes. Left the car engine running to keep warm. Watched the thought coming and going. Watched the people coming and going too, through my third eye. Come on. Don’t get late for the class. Last time she didn’t allow me in when I was late. So humiliating. Eyes opened.
7:28 AM: Thank god. Have two minutes to run two flights of stairs.
8:23 AM: Idea. I should get someone to take my photo in the new frog pose we did today for the LinkedIn post. Great. Asked a fellow participant. Photo taken.
8:45 AM: At home, in the garage. Idea. Another one. Found a notebook in the glove box but no pen. Quick. Write them down in Notes App on the phone. Opened the app. Wrote one. What was the second one? Damn! Already forgotten.
8:50 AM: Breakfast. Is that a task? Am I supposed to record this?
9:11 AM: Checked emails. Started reading a post by Ellie Griffin. Finally understood how Web3 and Blockchain are going to change my life in the near future. Brilliant. Worth recording here because it took a lot of time to read and reread it.
10:46 AM: Washed dishes. Another idea. Quick. Write it down. Done. Attended a phone call. Tidied the kitchen.
11:20 AM: Shower. Another idea. In fact, a full article. A funny one. Oh my god. Please don’t make me forget it as it is a really good one and I want to write funny stories. Another idea. Tangled with the previous one. Another funny story. Hang on! What was the previous one? It sounded very good. But this one is not bad either. I have to hang on to both of them till I get out of the shower and jot them down in the notebook.
11:46 AM: Phone rings. Turn the shower off. Get out of the shower. Take the call. What were those ideas? %&*# can’t remember them. #^&$ They were so good.
12:20 PM: Made a cup of tea. Sat down to write the newsletter. What the hell I am going to write about today? I have no ideas. How the hell do other people write such good newsletters.
Interstitial journaling didn’t happen the way it is intended to. But it gave me an understanding that I get plenty of ideas throughout the day, and even if I can’t capture most of them, it is okay even if I capture and act on one.
The Art Affair In Italy is a newsletter I have been subscribing to almost since its inception six months ago.
Eva is a NewZealander who has moved to Itlay to scratch the travel itch in her fifties.
Set in the raw and rugged Abruzzo region of Italy, it is the story of Eva, a Kiwi in her 50's, who went to live in a medieval village in Italy to follow her dream of becoming an artist. Each week she shared a diary entry about the things she did, including the house renovations.
She writes:
This wasn't an easy project, as each door was heavy and had to be lifted up for me to lift it off its hinges, then laid on the ground out in the street. This was the only place I could work on the doors. I used the electric sander to take off the very worn and degraded varnish. There was a lot of preparation work to do apart from sanding, they needed scraping and filling in places.
Anyway, the locals seemed to get a great kick out of seeing this strange NZ woman doing this kind of stuff out on the street.
Her story is a fascinating read. And l love her beautiful images and artwork. My particular favourite is this collage of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s epic journey to Antarctica that Eva made from actual copies of his log book.
I wholeheartedly recommend An Art Affair In Italy.
This week the book I recommend is Hyperbole and a Half - Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh.
If I could pull it through, this is the kind of book I want to write next.
What most people don’t know is that this book originated from Allie’s popular blog Hyperbole and a Half.
It was New York Times bestseller and is on Editor’s Pick on Amazon for a long time. Even Bill Gates has all the praise for it. Here are some excerpts from Bill Gates’s review that appeared on his personal blog, the Gates Notes.
“Hyperbole and a Half: by Allie Brosh is s an honest-to-goodness summer read. You will rip through it in three hours, tops. But you’ll wish it went on longer, because it’s funny and smart as hell. I must have interrupted Melinda a dozen times to read to her passages that made me laugh out loud…The book consists of brief vignettes and comic (in both senses of the word) drawings about Brosh’s young life (she’s in her late 20s)…I don’t mean to suggest that giving an outlet to our often-despicable me is a novel form of humor, but she is really good at it. Her timing and tone are consistently spot on. And so is her artwork. I’m amazed at how expressive and effective her intentionally crude drawings are…But her best stuff is the deep stuff, especially the chapters about her battles with severe depression.”
Here is a little excerpt from the book itself:
“People want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful…. You explain it again, hoping they’ll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative, like maybe you WANT to be depressed. So the positivity starts coming out in a spray—a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face.”
The was published in 2013, if you haven’t discovered it yet, it is time that you do.
And while you are at it, you might want to check FAQ on Allie’s blog.
They are hilarious.
Enjoy.
It has been an amazing week. Four participants have started writing their books with the Write Your Book In 30 Days sprint. Participants have fleshed out the book they want to write and outlined the chapters and sub-chapters. Now they are on to the writing part. Exciting. It also means that I am getting less time to devote to other projects. Which is fine because I am having a ball helping these focused, energetic bunch of people realize their dream.
That’s all from me this week.
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It is funny that they have name for almost everything. I think you need to build a habit of doing it. Otherwise it takes too much time.
For decades I've kept an "interstitial journal" but didn't know it had a name! Lol! My activities go into what I call a "log book" and my ideas into a "sketchbook". But they fit your definition of the interstitial journal. I also call it "living and thinking on paper". I find the method, whatever you call it, a good way to keep track and avoid going bovine i.e. chewing cud endlessly and in a purposeless, unproductive way. Thank you for another good post!