Digital Clutter

I find it a little bit funny? serendipitous? ironic? that I would make my first Scribbles post about "digital clutter". After all, to me, Scribbles is digital clutter. It's another digital “thing” to take up space in my brain.

Digital clutter is everywhere for me. It takes up so much of my brain bandwidth these days - I’m pretty sure I dreamt about AlternativeTo the other night. In fact, just while writing this, I bounced between Obsidian, Bear, and Drafts - copy/pasting my draft each time - trying to figure out which writing experience I liked more. I spent more time thinking about what tool I would use to write, than writing at all. (For those wondering, I’m currently on Bear now) The fact is, it’s easy to get bogged down in the details of “what’s the absolute best tool for the job.” I’ve written about this in the past, and I’m sure as hell going to write about it in the future.

Merlin Mann, in his 2005 essay “Because buying new running shoes is more fun than actually running”, warned us early on how easy it can be to chase one shiny object after another, in hopes that the next new app would be a remedy to all of our problems. Without understanding the utility of the tools we choose, they can be nothing but a distraction - resulting in too much time spent dicking around with nothing to show for it but some pretty dashboards and a wasted afternoon.[^1] Merlin believed it to be critical that we “understand the difference between using something because it’s fun and pretty versus understanding what behaviors and habits it can help you to improve.” We bounce from platform to platform, trying to glean all of the marginal benefits we can, without regard to our expenditure of our most valuable resource - our time.[^2]

Rather than approach new digital tools expecting all of our problems to be solved and our needs to be met - that we try to understand ourselves and how the next great tool will turn things around for us. After all, you can invest in the fanciest, most technologically advanced running shoes on the market, but they will only carry you as fast as your legs will take you. So buy those shoes, but don’t forget to also train your ability to use them.

And so we circle back to my page here on Scribbles. Do I like everything I’ve seen so far with Scribbles? Absolutely. Do I want to support independent creators like Vincent? Hell yeah. But will Scribbles remain digital clutter for me, or will it rise to the surface as the home for my words? I don’t know. All I can do is try my best to understand myself, how I write and how I think, along the way.

Update: I'm here on Scribbles to stay! And I plan on using it as a compliment of my blog for all of my short-form thoughts moving forward. If you are reading this and are not sure if you want to request an invite, I recommend you do it.

[^1]: This is how all of my attempts at adopting Notion have ended.
[^2]: Read ~Digital Minimalism~ by Cal Newport for more thoughts on this.