User:Alessia/limbo

the summer limbo parade of random, or not so random, content inspired by my instagram collections' titles

Productivity (5h)

What is productivity, little facts

Productivity is the art of getting things done, in a chosen time frame.
In business language It's a measure of economic performance indicating how efficiently inputs (material and labour) are converted into output (product).
I would say it’s all Adam Smith's fault, that contended that there were two kinds of labour, productive and unproductive. In his little nice essay The Wealth of Nations, in Book II, Chapter III we find the infamous description:

There is one sort of labour which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed; there is another which has no such effect. The former, as it produces a value, may be called productive; the latter, unproductive labour. Thus the labour of a manufacturer adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master’s profit. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing . . .

It’s not just Smith's fault, other grey curled men were involved in this shift of mentality that was indeed what brought a lot of wealth and depression.

In 1791, Benjamin Franklin created the earliest to do list, to try to find a way to offer something valuable to society each day. The list opened with the morning question, ‘what good shall be done?’ and in the evening ‘what was accomplished today?’

• Benjamin Franklin’s to do list for the day
• Teenager Summer bucket list, made by typicalMom it seems
• Example of bullet journal, track mood

Franklin was anyway doing the to-do list mainly for himself, he wasn’t trying to sell anything, he wasn’t an influencer, he was just living through the industrial revolution.

Planners were born more than two centuries ago, from planning to a whole industry moneeyyy. It started with almanacs, then spiritual diaries, then school diaries, then any kind of amazing diary and notebook to inspire, to let people follow the word of god while being more productive were born. I must say I found few fascinating stories about christian diaries, or anyway religious diaries. I always expected this kind of diary to be American, and most of the time it is exactly right, but I found out some great cool community in italy at the moment that are being revitalised. They are made of extremely catholic bigoted women that sell their catholic products through the world wide web, this includes school diaries for their kids, and I really would like one.
I will add info if I find them again (the algorithm will bring them back to me).

One interesting story is the one of the Wanamaker diary, invented by John Wanamaker that paired a daily planner with his own store catalogue, making one of the first examples of diary underwritten by ads.

This diary brought back some memories. The ‘smemoranda’ is one of the most famous and still used school diaries in Italy.
Inspired by Vitt diaries from the ‘70, it hosted comics and stories from Benito Jacovitti. Smemoranda was the first agenda to also include articles, opinions, and essays on various current topics with an emphasis on values such as environmentalism, solidarity and pacifism, but some ads as well. If you have the smemo you are cool. Anyway the smemo is still a symbol of the high school years. Last year, former Senator Pillon had considered the 2023/2024 edition of the diary dangerous because of the importance it attached to gender issues. I am not gonna say anything because I don’t respect people that use bow ties (Pillon).

Some schools started prohibiting the usage of branded diaries (not because of Pillon), some institutes started making their own personal diaries for their students, the most fashionable and memable? The one from catholic schools.
Is branding school’s diaries something common in other countries as well?

• Wanamaker diary
• a PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), PalmPilot, launched in 1996, carried digital calendars, address books, and note taking tools
• Smemo 2023-2024 edition

Returning back to the history of productivity tools. Guru’s of productivity were born later. Tom Peters, Michael Porter, Bill Smith, all wrote and analysed best run companies, studied leadership and production management.
I don’t really care about industrial productivity, even if I know it plays a role in how we I'm curious about personal tools and the dynamics of toxic productivity. Where do these pressures come from, and how can we navigate the fast pace of the 21st century?

Productivity got a bust after personal computers started existing, people started using computers because of new software about productivity, top project management tools began redefining organisation and collaboration. With task allocation, deadline reminders, and collaboration features, these tools became the backbone of team coordination and production.
Earliest office suite for personal computers includes MicroPro International's StarBurst in the early 1980s, Microsoft Office dominates the market from the 1990’s

Personal Information Managers (PIMs) have been around for some time, with programs like Lotus Agenda and Microsoft Outlook (launched in 1997) that introduced the concept of organising emails, calendars, tasks, and contacts in one single digital environment.

With the development of smartphones a new generation of productivity apps emerged, like Evernote (2004), Remember the milk (2004), Taskwarrior (open source, 2008), Trello (2011), Any.do (2011), Todoist (2012), Habitica (the game-to-do-list) (2013), Slack (2013), Notion (2016), Google Tasks (2018), Priority Matrix (following the eisenhower method) (2020).

Funnily enough I tried almost all of them.

The future seems bright for extreme productivity, so with an emphasis on integration and automation Services like Zapier and IFTTT (If This Then That) allow users to connect different apps and automate workflows and productivity. AI got us as well, AI driven tools like Notion, Roam Research and Microsoft 365 copilot feature natural language processive, prediction of text, and personalised task management, pushing productivity even deeper in our brain.

Is the usage of virtual assistants, predictive analytics, and automation tools beneficial for us? Mundane tasks are becoming obsolete quite easily, supposedly freeing humans to focus on innovation and strategy. But are we really sure about that?

I always had an obsession with tools for productivity, I never found the perfect one for me, that was free and ads free, now it’s practically impossible to find one that is minimal, free and easy to use. It’s easier to learn how to make your own, so here I am.

pomodori 🍅🍅🍅🍅

What got me through university is the pomodoro timer. It’s a technique developed by Francesco Cirillo during the ‘80. The name is inspired by the tool used, a kitchen timer. Usually the pomodoro timer includes a 25 minutes work interval and a short break of 5 minutes afterwards, this is called a ‘pomodoro’. After four pomodoro, you can take a long break (20-30 mins).
Cirillo always encourages a low tech approach to the method, using the physical act of winding the timer, so that flow and focus become associated with physical stimuli.

But that didn’t last, now there are plenty of application softwares for pomodoro timers.
While being an xpub1 student I figured out building timers, pomodoro timers, was the best way to start learning bash, powershell and javascript.

- Here how I did the things - add links

Aesthetic

I got to know bullet journaling by Pinterest, by aesthetic colourful images on pinterest that gave me the feeling that with bullet journaling I could overcome that, common, fear of losing something, time mostly, but anything, anything.

Bullet journaling is not just about productivity, but trying to make productivity an inviting activity, a mindfulness activity, an ordered journaling means an ordered interior life. The fact that I was always lazy to learn calligraphy and that I am messy as fuck never helped me in getting that cute sparkling aesthetic that was typically branded as real journaling.

Journaling as a concept is much more tho.
Growing up in a hotel, I met people from all over the world. Once, I met a girl who carried her journal everywhere, filling it with notes, drawings, and pieces of memories, all glued into a beautiful composition of little fragments of time. I was enchanted. I decided I wanted to do it as well, but it was quite difficult for me, at the time I felt nothing I was doing was worthy enough to be placed in a holy notebook of memories.
After starting high school I found myself in panic while trying to focus, to study enough (never enough anyway), doing things I liked in the meantime… The only anchor I found was writing down what I did each day. Every evening, I’d document my day, trying to convince myself that I was doing enough. This helped for a while, and eventually, I started using a real notebook and embarked on my planning journey.

Life was much easier.
This at some point changed when naturally life got a little more difficult, I struggled to forgive myself when I wasn’t “doing enough” or when I couldn’t fill my notebook with bullet points, materials, and little scraps for my scrap-diary.

I wasn’t feeling well, and now, years later, I understand why. A big part of the problem was that no one around me emphasized the importance of balance or even what balance looked like. It took me a long time to begin fixing this, and I’m still working on it. I know now that many people—if not almost everyone—are influenced by the rhetoric of overproductivity equaling worth. We’re all running, but what are we running toward? There’s nothing to rush toward.
Doing things is important, and starting and finishing tasks matters, but it should never come at the cost of mental and physical well-being. After investigating the roots of my feelings of worthlessness and the struggle to balance my curiosity with my well-being, I realized that I’m still the same curious person, but now I have better boundaries.

I still continue with journaling in a much more eclectic way. It’s a tool I use to remember places I visited, as a scrap journal, to collect stickers, doodle, plans. I don’t use it everyday, and when I’m overwhelmed, the pages remain blank. It’s funny to see blank pages here and there, and I know now that I was just too busy and that’s fine, even if I don’t remember all the things I did I’m not doomed.

“Things aren’t binary; things begin, they pause, they resume, they get moved.” says Ryder Carroll, that I will talk about later, in a New Yorker interview, he refers to it as something to take in mind when designing a bullet journal, to me this same quote means I don’t need to feel ashamed with myself I didn’t finish something, or that my energy level is not stable, as all other human beings.

Bujo

Anyway back to Bullet journaling, or Bujo, it’s a cultish notebook-organisation system, it was invented by Ryder Carroll, the famous Marie Kondo of notebooks.
Looking at the bulletjournal.com maybe you will understand why I am saying cultish, as it feels like a new wave christian cultish website, they can give out certifications to even teach the bullet journal method, professionally. I mean if something works, make it a job right?

It’s cultish because it has developed its own vocabulary, it is a growing community with few little satellite communities: BuJo for students, BuJo for mothers, BuJo for veterans, #menwhobullet (planning and organisation is seen as something feminine). An internet trend, a performative act of making pleasing aesthetical little pages to show online and never use, a ritualistic performance of listing art, for the public, for the views.
People brand themself as bullet journalists, organising gurus. There’s nothing wrong in journaling, nothing wrong in anything until it becomes clearly fake, sugarcoating of reality, obsessive. This it’s just a reminder to be inspired by online content but never trust anything, surely not when someone starts branding themself. But that’s just my take.

The bullet journal community is tied deeply with the doodle art community, the productivity community, the cute community, the notes communities, and this is wonderful. The even more wonderful part is to see the extreme fringes, the cultish behaviour patterns of these communities, might be of any communities really.
In this world it seems everyone is climbing a never ending ladder to reach the top. Tons of content glorifying organisation and planning is being consumed constantly, all those quotes with a fiery romantic background with the same flavour of justgirlything.
Despite the original bullet journaling community intentions, social media polluted it, and bujo started enforcing unrealistic standard made of pretty pastel highlighters, stickers and elegant fountain pens lines. Glamour instagrammable over function that make people that already are trying to cope with pressure with even more pressure.
This is my envy speaking, grrrrr.

Stop

The fascinating aspect of journaling, in any form, is the illusion of control it provides. I've always been intrigued by this. I’ve long known that journaling can support good mental health, offering a moment of pause from the overwhelming feelings we all encounter in daily life. But it’s also interesting to consider when journaling might not be as helpful.

The reality is that my journal is what I want it to be, so it really reflects my own inner self. I don’t like to personally use my journal as a diary to vent but more as a scrap notebook, full of trash, exactly like my mind is.

Starting journaling again during my stay in Rotterdam was a different experience.
I started using the wiki provided by the course as a kind of digital diary of things I was doing, as a notebook. It took me months to better understand how to balance the usage of the tool and my feeling of overwhelm in xpub.
The pressure I put onto myself was so high I had to boil it down and I used the wiki, the fact is that I felt overwhelmed by the amount of information that I was trying to focus on, I lost control over it, I felt guilty with myself to not be able to survive against and again the pressure after years, until I found peace in not being able to do so. Until that enlightenment it was hell.

Anyway, again, the digital bullet journal I still have on the xpub wiki can show how my journaling evolved at the same pace of my own wellbeing (being used constantly, to not being used at all because I was too busy with life outside of it). Applying the same rules to my digital journaling from the paper journaling helped a lot. The pressure I feel to be the best I can in a course that brings you on the edge because of the amount of inputs, is much less now. My personal mental trip with the wiki will still continue, changing shape as a true blob.
What’s therapeutic to me is writing down things I did but never reading them back. If I need to remember something, like when I last paid a tax or saw a friend, I can refer to it, but I don’t plan on reviewing what I’ve written. For me, this approach seems to be the healthiest.