The Tools I Dropped and the One I Kept

My desk drawer is a small museum of systems that were going to fix me. Not the objects themselves, mostly, since most of them were software and left no trace. What remains is the feeling when I open the drawer: a low hum of good intentions.

Over about six years I tried most of what a freelance writer is supposed to try. This is the honest ledger, with no names named, because the tools were fine and I was the problem.

The ones I dropped

The notes app with tags. Beautiful for three weeks. I tagged everything with great discipline and then discovered that I had two hundred notes and no memory of writing any of them. A search box is wonderful until you have to know what you're searching for. I'd built a very tidy attic.

The full-screen editor with nothing on it. The idea was that removing every button would remove every distraction. What it removed was my ability to see the shape of a piece. I couldn't jump around, couldn't see the headings, couldn't tell whether I was in the first third or the last. A blank white page turned out to be more distracting than a busy one, because my own mind rushed in to fill it.

The project board with columns. Ideas, Drafting, With Editor, Invoiced, Paid. It looked like a small factory. It made me feel like a person with a pipeline, which is different from being a person with an essay. I spent more time moving cards across than writing the thing the card described. When I finally stopped, the board still showed a piece as "drafting" that I had delivered four months earlier.

The voice recorder. I'd talk through my ideas on walks and plan to listen later. Later never came. Forty minutes of me saying "so, the thing is" is not an asset.

Why they went

I've thought about the pattern, and it's less embarrassing than I expected. Every one of those tools asked me to keep the tool. Tags need tending. Boards need grooming. Recordings need transcribing. Each added a small second job to the first.

The things I actually use take no looking after. They either work the moment I open them or they don't earn a place.

The one I kept

A cheap spiral notebook, A5, ruled, from the shop at the end of my road. I buy them three at a time. Everything goes in it, in order, with the date at the top of the page: ideas, phone numbers, half-sentences, a shopping list, a client's note that I'd like to be rude about later.

It has real constraints, and I've come round to liking them:

• It holds one thing at a time, so I can't pretend to multitask.

• It can't be searched, so I flick back through it, and finding an old idea means meeting six others on the way.

• It's finite. When it fills up, it's over, and I get the small pleasure of a shelf that records the years.

• It doesn't need charging.

The tool I kept is the one that never asked me to maintain it.

I'm aware this reads like a smug postcard from a person who's discovered paper. I'd have found it unbearable once. And I still draft on a laptop, send my invoices from a screen, and I'd be stranded without a calendar that pings.

But the thinking, the early, ugly, unfinished part, happens in the notebook. The rest of the drawer can keep humming.