>ideas on paper scraps
for a time i would always write things i want to do on scraps of paper and just place them somewhere close, hoping they would magically get done later and then they never got done magically later. took me years to get past that. i kept and kept doing this without things i wrote getting done.

sometimes i would try using paper calendars instead of scraps but unless i was using them to count working hours, i would never follow through with using them because i never even looked inside my calendar.

>to do lists didn't work all that good

sometimes little piles of scrap would form and then sometimes i would make todo lists out of that pile and place those todo lists somewhere close and then often forgot about them.

i only ever did a few of the things and barely ever everything and what i wanted to do just grew cancerously while i would ignore it. for decades my systems were shit. i only got done very little.

i still don't like to-do lists. i have something now that is pretty close to a todo list but when i first started i encountered something i hated that i still hate. i would have a todo list and do a few things and then i would want to start another list while the old list was still incomplete. i guess i hated the idea of having two lists so i would always carry over everything i didn't do from the old list to the new list. i still consider this agony! this is so awful it almost wants to make me go digital with it but i don't want to involve electricity in my planning when everything else is already electric. and there is a reason for it:

>ideas sometimes fly away from me so fast that literally every second counts.
having to wake a computer or phone out of sleep and then opening the file or the app or the file explorer where the file is in SOMETIMES is already enough of a burden for the idea to fly away again. yes my creativity is this brittle, volatile and delicate. i could get distracted with something else i have open or i could habitually visit some website or open some app and poof half the idea might already be gone, then i would feel that the idea has lost some weight and i would be angry about it POOF half or the remaining half gone too! this was worse when i had apps installed where i could just scroll my phone forever to get interesting pictures. i don't have this anymore because i hated how i would do this any time i had 5 seconds of idleness.

after understanding this i knew i wanted a system that is always reliable, free of distraction and not dependent on having battery remaining or electricity working.