I’m holed up in the corner of the café where my daughters work – surrounded by a coffee, half a sausage roll, a chromebook, and a rag-tag band of people from all walks of life – either stopping by during their day to catch up with each other, or escaping from the rest of their life – as I am.
The café is far quieter, and somehow more friendly than yesterday’s pub. I’m not entirely sure why. I guess it’s down to expectation more than anything – the pub is somewhere you go with friends – the café – this café – is more for lone wanderers – such as myself, or the pretty lady sitting adjacent to me, tapping away on her laptop too.
Across the way two tradesmen are talking in some depth about something incredibly important – or so it seems. I just realised I recognise one of them – a man that used to visit the office where I worked some years ago. I’m trying to remember his name. He’s disguised in a baseball cap and a rugby shirt.
Another kindred spirit just wandered in – wearing a warm coat, and carrying a laptop.
While wandering along the road to the café (it’s a few minutes walk from my house), I passed a young woman walking a dog, and wondered what she fills the rest of her day with. I’m not doing well at “not being at work” – for some reason she brought it into focus. I’m so used to having the day mapped out, every day, that having nothing leaves an enormous vacuum. There’s a reason the shelf at home is lined with a series of bullet journals – setting out each and every day of the last however-many years.
I stumbled upon bullet journalling quite early. Ryder Carrol had not long written his book, and leuchtturm1917 had not long started printing their quite wonderful bound volumes. In the early days – no doubt swayed by influencers – I tried hard to make my bullet journal pages interesting – decorating them with all manner of embellishments. That didn’t last long. I bought Carrol’s book, and while reading the opening chapter realised it was perfectly acceptable to put minimal effort into the “second brain” – encouraged even.
I learned about “rapid logging”, and never looked back. In many ways it was similar to Norah Ephron’s observations about blogging – that what you were writing only needed to matter for as long as you were writing it. At the beginning of each day you looked back over the previous day, or the start of the month, and figured out what you might do today – compiling a to-do list of sorts, and crossing each bullet point as you made your way through the day. It worked for me – it still works for me.
While all manner of clever digital solutions have come and gone – task apps, Notion, Obsidian, OneNote, and so on – the paper notebook has remained at my side. The bullet journal has become as much a mindfulness exercise as an aide-memoire – forcing a sorting and filtering of thoughts, and retrospective reflection on past promises – a reckoning of sorts.
The café is slowly ramping up as lunchtime approaches. I imagine within the next half hour it will be time to get out of dodge. A line of office workers will arrive – impatiently waiting in line to order sandwiches, drinks, and whatever else while I guiltily sidle past with nowhere to go, and nothing to do.