Paper Things I Use

Paper Things I Use

By Artyom Bologov

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Recently, I decided to solve the problem of attention economy and tech enshittification.<br>Radically.<br>By moving away from digital tech to analog tech.<br>Including: paper (hyper)media!

I’ve gone as far as starting a No Laptop Week to try and see how long I can live without my laptop.<br>Spoiler: not long, as I’m writing this post on<br>the laptop.<br>But the goal of the challenge is already fulfilled: I moved most of my workflows away from tech and into<br>my numerous (splitter!) notebooks.

This page details what kind of paper things I use to organize my (woefully disorganized) life.<br>And all the useful resources I found along the way.

In case you prefer to read things on paper, you can print a<br>PDF version of this post<br>and read it in your comfy chair with your marginalia-specific pen.

This is a large post, here’s a Table of Contents

Workplace: Soviet Dining Table<br>Stenography / Shorthand<br>Knowledge Repository: Commonplace and Index<br>Reference Materials Wall<br>Notebooks<br>Printed Books<br>Tarot<br>See Also

Workplace: Soviet Dining Table #

Cozy, ain’t it? Yes, the cat is part of the setup!

When I was checking flats for rent, I found this nice flat in a quiet neighborhood.<br>Which was a huge factor, because I can let my cat stroll freely around there!<br>And yet another factor was… a dining table in the living room.<br>It was really sturdy and large, perfect for a workplace.<br>I abandoned my (modern yet inconvenient) desk and moved everything to the dining table.<br>Now it’s quite chaotic, but I like it anyway!

This is literally a foundation of all my paper workflows, in all their variety.

Stenography / Shorthand #

Draft of one of this post sections

Around 1949, in Ithaca, upstate New York, the throbbing which had never quite ceased, began to plague me again.<br>Combination joined inspiration with fresh zest and involved me in a new treatment of the theme, this time in English […]<br>Lolita was energetically resumed in the evenings or on cloudy days.<br>I finished copying the thing out in longhand in the spring or 1954, and at once began casting around for a publisher.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, On a Book Entitled Lolita

So stenography / shorthand is this way to write real fast.<br>Contrasted with regular cursive / longhand, which is quite suboptimal.<br>If I ever to replace digital tech with analog tech fully, I need to rival the typing speed with handwriting speed.<br>There’s only way to do that: optimizing the writing.<br>Meaning: shorthand, or as it’s called in Russia, stenography.

Being bilingual (and hoping to become trilingual or more!) I needed a system that’d work for both Russian and English.<br>I searched for Armenian shorthand,<br>but found no satisfying system.<br>So I reached for<br>Soviet stenography system called GESS.<br>Because Russian phonetic repertoire is almost a superset of English (while Armenian is a superset of both!)

I could’ve come up with a new system.<br>But I’m too dumb to make a good one, even having all of the Internet at my disposal.

So I’m currently at the stage of GESS proficiency where I can confidently write at a speed around 30 words per minute.<br>It’s not much, but is already faster than writing in longhand.<br>And, given that I’m really a slow thinker, I don’t lose much thoughts even with such a meek speed!

Not all genres and purposes require stenography, though.<br>These uses that require fast recording and can stand slow reading are fine.<br>So diaries, accounting books, and writing notebooks work with stenography.<br>But something like a Commonplace book that needs quick lookup and reading is totally not fine with stenography.<br>Speaking of which, the principal tool in my paper-oriented life:

Knowledge Repository: Commonplace and Index #

Commonplace Book and Index Book

This sturdy plastic-bound notebook always sits in the center of my table.<br>Being the main repository of quotes and reflections on things I read.<br>It’s split by initial+first-vowel pairs and has links to previous / next pages on the margins.<br>Every entry has

Tags / concepts<br>Date (to position pieces of reflections in time)<br>Quote or factoid<br>Attribution, as exact as possible (I sometimes even number the unnumbered chapters in some books!)<br>And some reflection written stenographically

The page is quite structured, actually

I have a separate notebook for indexing of the main Commonplace.<br>Because indexes need a lot of space to be useful and searchable!<br>Especially with the systems I use.

Locke index

So there’s a bunch of indexing systems one can use for a notebook or a Commonplace.<br>Some more elaborate, some less.<br>But what I settled on is a mixed Locke / Walker system.<br>Here’s a full...