I can't remember anything anymore. All day, shit flashes in front of my eyeballs or slinks into my ear holes, and then that shit shuffles off forever if I don't write it down. Even worse, my own sloppy, wet brain will occasionally slap an idea together that I want to hold onto. Ugh.

My favorite way to write shit down is to write it down. I have a Lamy Studio (which, by the way, outscores the Lamy 2000 in all major categories, in my view). I use spiral bound maruman notebooks at my desk. The spiral binding is essential: it takes up half the space of a saddle stitched notebook. This is nice. It's very pleasant.

Out in the world, I use pocket notebooks. I'm not precious about brand. Field Notes are fine. Moleskines are fine. A few sheets of printer paper folded and shoved in a pocket will do in a pinch.

My second favorite way to write shit down is to add it to my One Big Text File ("OBTF"). I did not come up with this.

A few years back, the top finally popped on my long-pressurizing hatred for all things Microsoft, including Microsoft Word, and I adopted Neovim for all my non-collaborative text needs. I never looked back. I won't try to convince you to switch to Vim. If you weren't already thinking about it, it's probably not for you. But if you've ever even briefly considered switching, do it. Then stick with it. Quality of life is inversely proportional to mouse usage.

My minor innovation with the OBTF is that I quick-add lines with Alfred. I wrote the absolute headsmackingly dumbest Alfred Workflow imaginable. So all I have to do is ⌘-SPACE into Alfred, type, "ob [note]", for example "ob #todo write blog post nobody will ever read," and I'm on to the next thing to inevitably forget.

The following code should only be attempted by software engineers with at least one advanced degree and no less than five years' professional experience.

#!/bin/zsh
echo "$1\n" >> ~/notes/001_OBTF.md