Back in November, I started keeping a notebook with the Bullet Journal technique. It’s been a slow process acclimating myself to writing things down when it occurs to me, instead of counting on my memory, or reaching for my iPhone. The earliest entries are a mishmash of things, from important ideas and notes on books, to stuff I could—and should—track elsewhere like my daily steps from my pedometer. Under one day’s entry, I have the line “Nap” for some reason. I guess Past Me took a nap that day. Good to know.

I’ve learned that a notebook isn’t good for how I do work with a larger scope and time frame, but it’s great for figuring out my day-to-day. We keep an editorial schedule at my job, and I’ve taken to writing the day’s items in my notebook each morning. That day’s entry becomes my own form of Patrick Rhone’s “Today Card,” only in a longer-lasting form. When the particular item for that day is done, a quick check in the box lets me know. If there’s any changes from the schedule, or important notes for that day’s projects, I have a way to remind myself.

I could do all of this with OmniFocus, but to capture the daily projects I do at work would be more of a pain to type them in on my iPhone or iPad than to just write the darn thing down. ¹ Plus, as nice as it is to go into the “Completed” Perspective in OmniFocus and see all the things I’ve done, having a physical archive just feels better. This is for me, not for anyone else. While it might be nice to imagine scholars or archeologists pouring over the notebooks of some 30-year old Web Producer in the mid-2010s, the benefits of an annotated life are worth it just for me. Future Me will be interested in what Past Me was doing.

Future Me, however, also needs to have things in a trusted system, ready to be viewed when he needs them, pre-broken up into little discrete nuggets of work and time. Future Me needs this so he knows what to do at 10:48 AM, when the creatives for the items on the schedule aren’t in yet. That’s where OmniFocus comes in, and where apps like Daily Routine come in. They give Future Me, who isn’t going to think to flip back a few pages in his notebook just to find the task due by 5PM today that he got two weeks ago, or the right information he needs. Because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Future Me: he’s just as forgetful as Past Me.

I recently discovered Sean Korzdorfer’s Open Notebook, and it’s provided me with some interesting reading, and thinking about the various workflows in my life. Sean puts a lot of thought into the systems he uses to make his life go, far more than I usually do. Of the nuggets of wisdom I’ve pulled from the Open Notebook are ways to better incorporate the awesome reminders tool Due.app into my day, using Daily Routine to add structure to my days, and given me a lot to think about journaling.

There’s something wonderfully old-school about the Open Notebook. It reminds me of the early days of the web, when a personal site was typically a huge mish-mash of stuff. In those wild days, your typical “home page” could as easily contain a proto-blog, links to useful freeware, recipes, and shrines to your favorite television programs. You don’t see that too often any more, and while Sean Korzdorfer’s Open Notebook is (slightly) more focused, it feels as deeply personal as those old personal pages from the 1990s—though better looking.

A while back, I commented on Frank Chimero’s post about what a personal website means in 2014. I wondered, like Frank, “How do you bring all of those silos and streams under one banner, one roof, and make it work?”. Frank’s taken a very old school, 90s personal-site approach in the intervening months, with links to different sections, putting everything under the same roof, but organized and coherent—and with 2014 calibre web design.

What makes Sean Korzdorfer’s Open Notebook different is that it’s as much a resource as it is a personal statement. He’s sharing his knowledge of what works for him, in a way that allows strangers like to me build on what he has done. It’s the same openness and share-alike philosophy that made the early web so interesting. When the web was a frontier and not yet a catalog or a bunch of social apps, people built off of each other’s knowledge and experience. How many web designers and developers got their start from using “View Source” in Netscape 3.04?

None of this has gone away, but it’s not as common or visible as it used was. It’s probably time that changed.

Yiren Lu, a CS grad student at Columbia, and startup intern, published an interesting piece on the cultural and age divide between the startup scene and established tech world. It's long, but worth reading. It describes some of the problems with the current crop of new companies dominating discussion in the tech world—but not all of them.

The first thing I found interesting about Yiren's piece is how little money factors in. Sure, there's the usual, appropriate, digs at over-inflated valuations for companies that haven't made any money, or have a revenue model. However, there's no discussion of the financial motivation behind people going into the startup world, either as employees or founders. Like high finance in the years leading up to the Great Recession, hedge funds in particular, technology startups are attracting smart, money hungry youth. If you can get $10,000,000 for your startup with a minimum of effort, why work for the man? Or, if you're not the entrepreneurial type, but you can sling code, why not take a six-figure salary and live in San Francisco?

Money isn't everyone's motivation, but it's one motivating the number of copycat startups out there. Ev Williams strategy for creating a successful company is to find a need, and make it easier for someone to get it. It's a recipe so simple, it can be copied with only minimal changes to make something that'll get a decent investment. Just take a compatible business model, and shoehorn in your niche audience: professional social networking, virtual rewards for watching cartoons, one-on-one hookups for My Little Pony fans. If you can get an L-curve in user growth, you don't even need to make money before someone offers to buy you out. Boom, you're rich overnight.

Okay, it's not as simple as I'm making it sound, nor is it guaranteed to succeed. Hedge funds might be a more secure place to strike it rich if you're a well-networked college grad with a CS degree, but they're not cool anymore. Cool factor is as important as money, sometimes even moreso. Even if I didn't get a six-figure salary and a ton of perks, saying that I worked at a startup was a point of personal pride for a while. When you combine the the two, it's going to be a dangerous cocktail.

All that money and cool chasing comes at a cost, and here is where Yiren and I agree. The money and talent being frittered away on goofy, copycat startups that prioritize growth over revenue, and exist to be bought out by someone bigger. It becomes a dangerous cycle: the more companies that fit that profile and succeed, the more money and young talent they get to trap in their web. The companies that are trying to do longer-term, less exciting, but more important work to improve the technology everyone relies on are left to fend for scraps. If you could get a six-figure signing bonus to work for Facebook, or just “market rate” at a company doing less glamorous, but more important work, what would you take?

And, what would you take if you were a college graduate in your early 20s, with a pile of student loans?

Unlike an increasing number of people, I don’t subscribe to any streaming music services. I’ve tried them from time to time, but the idea of paying for music I don’t get to keep does not appeal to me in the slightest. If I wanted to be a freeloader and listen to ads between songs, I’d just tune in to any streaming terrestrial radio station I can get online. It’s going to sound better than turning on any of the crappy AM/FM radios around me. Still, so many people I know, passionate music lovers, are streaming for most of their music listening. Buying albums (even digital albums) is feeling somewhat anacronistic.

Talk of shitty streaming royalties aside, it’s that streaming doesn’t fit with my music consumption habits. I’m the sort of music fan who, nine times out of ten, would prefer to listen to an album in full, rather than just disparate songs. While you can listen to full albums with many streaming services, it’s clear that they’re geared more for a casual, radio-like method of music consumption. I’d rather spend time in iTunes, making sure I have the right albums on my phone than burn through a data plan, or hog the wifi at the office. Besides, streaming doesn’t help me when I’m on the subway and can’t get a signal anyway. Sure, you could download stuff if you think to do it ahead of time, but it’s a kludge.

Ownership of my music library, is important to me. It gives me control. Even the digital files that comprise the vast, and growing, majority of my music collection are my files. Apple can’t take away all the music I’ve bought, at least not since dropping DRM for music in 2009. I could still lose my files in a hard drive crash, fire, or other disaster, but they’re no more fragile than LPs or CDs. They’re certainly less fragile than cassette tapes. And I back up my digital music library religiously. I’d probably save money, since I’ve been known to buy anywhere from $20 to $50 worth of iTunes music per month, but I feel like I’d get less for my money.

What are people seeing that I’m not? I’ve discussed the issue with Andrew Marvin on multiple episodes of Crush On Radio. For him, streaming is convenient and a great way to discover new music. I’ve already outlined how the convenience of streaming is inconvenient for me, but discovery is an interesting problem. I tend to find new music through either seeing bands open at shows, browsing music review sites, or hearing about it directly from friends. Streaming might make life easier.

Problem is, when I last experimented with streaming music, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the discovery aspect. This was because discovering new music relied on using streaming like a radio station or jukebox, and not in the album-oriented way I listen to music. A streaming service could be a good backup for when I’m bored of what’s on my phone, or interested in dipping my toe into a new artist without putting out the cost of an album. I just don’t see that happening terribly often, and if I was going to stream with this use case in mind, iTunes Radio would be all I need.

I’m certain that I’m an outlier in how I get my music. Streaming music services fit the consumption patterns of the majority. That’s their strength, but their weaknesses overlap neatly with how I choose to listen to music. I’ll stick with paying $9.99 or so for albums of digital files, scrounging through the stacks at used record stores, and spending hours rebuilding the playlists on my iPhone so I have a regular selection of fresh music and evergreen favorites to choose from when I need something to listen to. So be it. The kids can have their streams, just keep them off my lawn.

Though I’m a man, I can’t say I’m a fan of the push towards some modern idealized sense of “manliness.” Part of this is that “manliness” often both a parody of itself and a new form of consumerism. What irks me most about the new masculinity movement, however, s the prominent undercurrent of regression that flows just under its surface. For every article about how to properly dress and shave, how to take up manly hobbies, or learn to be a better father or husband, there’s a forum posting about wanting women to take up equally “traditional” roles as homemaker and sex object, being afraid of gays and transmen, or espousing political views just to the right of the John Birch Society.

Far be it for me to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There’s still a lot of good, practical advice on places like The Art of Manliness, and the most public of these manliness guides tend to keep the seedier aspects of the movement quiet. I’m sure there’s plenty of people, even a majority, who are looking back to traditional manhood for answers of how to handle the modern era without getting sucked up in the regressive aspects, but those regressive ones are the turd in the punchbowl. This is a large part of the reason why I’m more interest in defining myself not as a “man,” but as an adult.

Adulthood is learning how to be in the world and of the world, to take care of yourself and those close to you, and to deal with adversity in constructive ways. It’s about both self-reliance, and knowing when you’re in over your head and to ask for help. Its learning how to accept uncertainty. You can find a lot of stuff about this on manliness websites and communities, but these aren’t concepts that are exclusive to any gender. They’re what we should have learned in school, or from our parents. Maybe we were taught them, but we didn’t listen. It’s certainly not an excuse to hurt others, and act like we’re the rulers of the world simply because we have a Y chromosome.

Adulthood isn’t something you can fake by buying nice shoes, putting on a pocket square, and getting your hair cut by a fancy barber for $50. That’s half the problem. This may be why those great resources for being an adult often get wrapped up in some larger, more marketable concept that can be used to sell swag. Productivity stuff often falls into the same trap.

Few of the positive aspects of the manliness movement, if there is such a thing, are inherently masculine. Self-reliance, faith, responsibility, building healthy relationships—romantic and otherwise—are not just for men, nor have they ever been. Adulthood as a concept isn’t wound up in as much nonsense over gender, chromosomes, and what hangs (or doesn’t) between your thighs. Signifiers of gender are meaningless when it comes to defining the kind of person we want to be. Your fitness as a mate, as a parent, as an employee or businessperson, as an artist or craftsperson, none of these come from biological sex or socially defined gender. Tying up these things in gender only makes it harder for people who don’t fit those narrow molds. I’d rather be inclusive in how I choose to better myself. The more people we let in, the more support we all get.