The procrastinating part of me celebrates these words.

I want a good calendar app. One I’m excited to use, that works across devices, and is happy with multiple accounts that didn’t all originate in its own ecosystem. I want it to be lightweight.

I want a beautiful way of organizing my areas of responsibility. The difference between organizing my objectives, and executing on them is growing larger by the day, it seems. I don’t see people around me who appear to have the same struggle.

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.

Things change, so does my opinion. It turns out I like the idea of a static /uses page better.

Inspired by App Defaults, this is a list of the main tools I frequently use these days.

In addition

Identity

This category may sound strange to you. Yet, as a Black person who grew up in a white environment, I have to make a proactive effort to find community among people whose stories resonate with mine. These are spaces that help me do this:

I am notorious for never grasping how many people know how much about what. To save myself from any further embarrassment I won’t spend my time here telling you what the app is about. The team does that nicely over here. I do think I have something to say about what Scriptogr.am came exactly at the right time for me.

As we more further down the line of Web 2.0 and slowly into the abyss that is Web 3.0, I feel the definitions of web design are evolving greatly. I remember back in the day when it was just one website out of fifty that looked really beautiful, and how I would spend many hours on the site just being surrounded by all the pretty. Now, as more and more distinct design trends are emerging, looking pretty isn’t the main goal anymore. It has become a criterium. And most websites I know meet that criterium in one way or another. Now that the eyes have what they need, the user wants for the website to be up to speed with their brain.

Ryan Holiday describes the how and why of his ‘Commonplace Book’, a collection of quotes and other pieces of text written down on index cards. I, too, have been keeping such a system since I started college. I always carry a few cards when I’m out and about, held together by bulldog clips.

Incredibly handy and simple, it has turned out.

I remember it well, my transition from elementary to high school. Gone were the old days of person teaching every subject in a single classroom. Everything would be new again. New subjects, new people, teachers, supplies. It was the supplies that kept me up at night. Books were to be given the right cover, of course there would have to be a new pencil case. New notebooks. A diary.

Choosing was never my strong suit. I could stand there for hours, by the neatly arranged tables of school supplies. After all, they would have to last me the entire school year. The right supplies, this I figured, would lead to the right achievements. I was so young back then.