How I Balance Analog & Digital Tools [WRAP 227]

Hey Reader,

About ten minutes into a live call last week, with 71 people watching and the topic being (I promise I’m not making this up) how to balance analog and digital tools, my slides died.

Not froze. Died. I’d saved that deck multiple times, and it came back missing half its images like I’d never saved it at all. My notebook, meanwhile, was sitting right there on the desk. Battery life’s great on that thing 😉

I made an obvious joke and kept going. And I’d love to tell you the moral of the story is “throw out your laptop,” but it isn’t. I spent the rest of that call switching between my Bullet Journal and Notion, showing everyone how my team and I actually run things while not getting distracted by notifications.

Before we get into it: that call was Day 3 of a free 5 Day Bullet Journal Challenge, and I’m running the whole thing again September 21–25. Thirty minutes live each morning, one piece of the setup per day, and Day 3 is this exact topic, but with working slides this time. (Probably 😅)

​Click to sign up for the 5 Day Challenge!​

If you signed up after last week’s WRAP, you’re already in. So let’s get into the big idea.

💡 One Big Idea: Double Work = Double Weight

The question I get most about analog and digital showed up word for word in a reply to one of my emails: “How do I combine digital and analog planning without doubling up and creating overwhelm?”

My answer tends to disappoint people a little. If you use both, some things are going to get written down twice. You can’t fully avoid it. But I’ve stopped seeing that as a bug, and started treating it as a feature.

Bullet journalers already know a version of this. You write a task down for Monday and don’t get to it, so you draw the little arrow and migrate it to Tuesday. Tuesday comes and goes. Now it’s on Wednesday’s list, and you’re writing the same six words for the third time, a little (or a lot) annoyed about it.

For a long time I saw that as a failure. Now I read it as the page asking me a question: why am I not doing this? Am I scared of it? Is it less important than I thought? And if it doesn’t matter but still has to get done, what’s actually in the way? That conversation isn’t always comfortable, but it’s worth having (with yourself).

Moving things between paper and screen works the same way. Every time an idea or a task crosses over, it has to earn the trip. Plenty of what I write down never makes it into Notion, and that’s my mental filter doing its job. The stuff that survives being copied twice is the stuff I’ve decided-with-my-own-hand… actually matters.

The simplest way I can put it: paper is for thinking and doing, screens are for tracking and sharing.

​The monthly layout video I published last week started as one scrawled notebook page. That page became a full production brief in Notion. Even this 5 day challenge began as a brainstorm in my bullet journal before it turned into an overview and everything else I built around it. The thinking happened on paper, every time.

But digital tools are essential when other people are involved. Jenny, Andrew, and Tracy, who help me run things, can’t see my notebook, and a stack of photos of it wouldn’t help them much either.

So a task like “send the promo review” lives in two places: on a Notion board where everyone can see it’s done, and in my notebook where I actually do it. Same with my calendar. Paper will never yap back at you when it’s time for the thing you protected time for, and that’s the one kind of notification nag I’m glad to get.

Then, once the plan is set, it comes back to the notebook, and I open Notion as little as possible. Not because Notion is distracting the way Instagram is, but because seeing the whole list pulls me off the one thing I decided mattered today.

Someone in the chat put it better than I did: “Paper helps me think in a way that I’m in charge of my mind.”

I’ve been running some version of this for at least five years, and I have acronyms for both sides of it, BEAM and POST, because of course I do. But you don’t need the acronyms to try the idea this week.

Next time something gets written down twice, skip the question of how to stop the copying and think about why it’s important enough to earn a place in your task list.

📹 Video to Watch: How I Cured My Phone Addiction With 2 Tiny Notebooks

Peter McKinnon built a huge career on cameras and screens, which is part of why this one hit hard for me. I linked straight to the part about his habit tracker, where he shows off the custom rubber stamp he had made for it.

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I’ve drawn my habit grid by hand for years, and I’m totally stealing this for my own tracker.

​Watch on YouTube​

📰 Article to Read: How to Waste a Morning Properly

All of this is about using your time well, which is why I needed this essay from Tomás Aguillar.

It’s a case for wasting a morning on purpose—slowly, deliberately, with conviction—and it has one of the best lines I’ve read in a while: “there is no virtue in rising before the sun unless you are harvesting olives or fleeing the authorities.”

As a long-time early riser (part of being a Dad is claiming the dawn because it’s probably the only time you get to yourself all day and even that isn’t guaranteed) I would disagree with the virtue of sleeping past sunrise, but this one still made me think.

This hits your inbox on a Saturday morning, so consider it permission. “You are not trying to win the morning. You are trying to enjoy it.”

​Read on Substack​

Thanks for reading the WRAP and I hope to see you in the challenge!

Talk soon,

Matt “paper has great battery life” Ragland