The July edition of the IndieWeb Carnival is about tools. Host James is interested in the relationship between tools and our creative practices.

Remember Flickr, and the way we self-published visual sneak peeks into our lives on that website, in the mid-zeroes? If we wanted a filter in our photo, we had to Photoshop it in there ourselves. We tagged our uploads, but merely to archive our materials. Our profiles all contained a link to our personal blog.

Those were the days, amirite?

When I think about tools, an immediate nostalgia is ignited within me. You may find that annoying, though I suspect — since you’re likely here because you, too, wrote an IndieWeb Carnival entry — you’re as nostalgic as I am.

I’ve been on Flickr a lot these past few weeks. It still exists, you know? They even still update their iOS app. Some of the people I was following in 2005 are still there, putting together decades of daily selfies, garden pictures, and snapshots of their ring planners.

I am, of course, there for the latter.

I got my first Filofax as a young college freshman.

I felt so boss, so executive, so put-together with my little faux leather Metropol A5. Looking back, it’s evident the main actor influencing my school supply aesthetic was the wildly popular 2001 productivity self-help book Getting Things Done.

If you’re writing down next actions and you don’t look like you came walking out of an 80s yuppie ad, are you even a professional?

Approaching two decades later, I’m now on Filofax number three. In a way this feels excessive. It’s a Cognac Zipped Personal Lockwood, almost identical to number two, with the exception that number two was A5. It was too bulky. I never took it anywhere. It made me feel dorky.

Looking like you came walking out of an 80s yuppie ad only works if you’re not trying too hard. Plus, a smaller planner means I get to take it with me wherever I go.

It also matches perfectly with the other thing I recently acquired: a diagnosis of retinal migraine. It’s not the type of color aura I get at the pinnacle of a bad headache. Rather, it’s a small ray of glitter, passing by my vision whenever I’ve been staring at a screen for too long.

Paper notetaking technology is perfect to break that habit, one page at a time. And while it feels excessive to have purchased yet another Filofax, Flickr tells me I belong to a very small minority: that of people who have fewer than fifteen Filofax covers.

As I scroll through the never-ending feed of planner pictures, I get inspired, once again, by the years I spent doing exactly what these people are doing: finding the best layout and structure to organize my days, and let me get out of my own head through writing.

What I appreciate about the good old Filofax is that it adds friction to my day.

As a Product Designer, I think about friction a lot. Friction happens when we engage with constraint; it’s a occurrence experienced daily by anybody who uses software. For a long time in Information Technology, the prime objective of any product team was to reduce friction.

In recent years, though, we’ve come to see that danger arises when friction is removed from the equation. It enables our instant gratification, makes us prone to distraction, makes it easy for people to fall victim to others, to themselves.

In my particular circumstances, writing things down instead of typing them helps me be more intentional about the things I bring into my life. I’m sure I’m not the only person whose incoming number of tasks increases rapidly with the Quick entry module offered by many productivity apps.

There’s a natural nervousness I experience when a task pops into my head and I can’t get it out of my way within two seconds. That’s probably for the best.

With my Filofax, I pause for a moment to think about what I’m doing, and what I’m giving myself to deal with at a later point. It prevents me from overloading myself with busywork, which leaves room for creativity.

I like to get my must-do tasks out of the way as quickly as possible, so I can use the rest of the day for creative problem-solving.

Sometimes, the solution is a high-fidelity interface design, sometimes it’s a research plan, or a conversation at the coffee maker. Whatever the solution, I do my best coming up with one if I have a stretch of time devoted to deep work.

The physical page restricts how much I add to it, limits my ability to time block meticulously, and thus leaves me thinking about my time and efforts in more broad-scope ways.

My Filofax is a tool that helps me organize and reorganize the various domains of my life, that lets me be creative on its pages in many different ways. Most importantly, though, it’s a tool that asks me What before I get lost in the details of How.