PAPER THINGS I USE (#📎)
Artyom Bologov <uses-paper@aartaka.me>

Recently, I decided to solve the problem of attention economy and tech enshittification.
Radically.
By moving away from digital tech to analog tech.
Including: paper (hyper)media!

I’ve gone as far as starting a No Laptop Week to try and see how long I can live without my laptop.
Spoiler: not long, as I’m writing this post on
the laptop <uses.txt, #laptop>.
But the goal of the challenge is already fulfilled: I moved most of my workflows away from tech and into
my numerous (splitter!) notebooks <analogoffice.net/2023/06/20/lumpers-vs-splitters.html>.

This page details what kind of paper things I use to organize my (woefully disorganized) life.
And all the useful resources I found along the way.


This is a large post, here’s a Table of Contents {
  • Workplace: Soviet Dining Table <#workplace>
  • Stenography / Shorthand <#stenography>
  • Knowledge Repository: Commonplace and Index <#commonplace-and-index>
  • Reference Materials Wall <#reference>
  • Notebooks <#notebooks>
  • Printed Books <#books>
  • Tarot <#tarot>
  • See Also <#see-also>
}

WORKPLACE: SOVIET DINING TABLE (#workplace)

<assets/uses-paper/workplace.jpg> (Photo of a dining table in a moderately cringe Armenian apartment. Behind it, there is a chair with a pink blanket over it (yes, even in summer!) On the table, there’s an open notebook and some wires. In the corner of the table, there’s a wine box set on the side, used as some kind of a shelf, with more notebooks and laptops protruding from it.)
— Cozy, ain’t it? Yes, the cat is part of the setup!

When I was checking flats for rent, I found this nice flat in a quiet neighborhood.
Which was a huge factor, because I can let my cat stroll freely around there!
And yet another factor was… a dining table in the living room.
It was really sturdy and large, perfect for a workplace.
I abandoned my (modern yet inconvenient) desk and moved everything to the dining table.
Now it’s quite chaotic, but I like it anyway!

This is literally a foundation of all my paper workflows, in all their variety.

STENOGRAPHY / SHORTHAND (#stenography)

<assets/uses-paper/steno-section.jpg> (Photo of a notebook page. It has strong silhouettes of writing on the page. In black ink, there’s writing on it. It’s a GESS stenography writing, amounting to around 10 lines of really terse stenography. Some structure is apparent: there are interpunct markers for lists?)
— Draft of one of this post sections

> Around 1949, in Ithaca, upstate New York, the throbbing which had never quite ceased, began to plague me again. Combination joined inspiration with fresh zest and involved me in a new treatment of the theme, this time in English […] Lolita was energetically resumed in the evenings or on cloudy days. I finished copying the thing out in longhand in the spring or 1954, and at once began casting around for a publisher.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, On a Book Entitled Lolita

So stenography / shorthand is this way to write real fast.
Contrasted with regular cursive / longhand, which is quite suboptimal.
If I ever to replace digital tech with analog tech fully, I need to rival the typing speed with handwriting speed.
There’s only way to do that: optimizing the writing.
Meaning: shorthand, or as it’s called in Russia, stenography.

Being bilingual (and hoping to become trilingual or more!) I needed a system that’d work for both Russian and English.
I searched for Armenian shorthand <arm-shorthand-1888.txt>,
but found no satisfying system.
So I reached for
Soviet stenography system called GESS <gess.txt>.
Because Russian phonetic repertoire is almost a superset of English (while Armenian is a superset of both!)

I could’ve come up with a new system <web.archive.org/web/20260120005454/https://xahlee.info/kbd/happy_hacking_emily.html>.
But I’m too dumb to make a good one, even having all of the Internet at my disposal.

So I’m currently at the stage of GESS proficiency where I can confidently write at a speed around 30 words per minute.
It’s not much, but is already faster than writing in longhand.
And, given that I’m really a slow thinker, I don’t lose much thoughts even with such a meek speed!

Not all genres and purposes require stenography, though.
These uses that require fast recording and can stand slow reading are fine.
So diaries, accounting books <#notebooks>, and writing notebooks work with stenography.
But something like a Commonplace book that needs quick lookup and reading is totally not fine with stenography.
Speaking of which, the principal tool in my paper-oriented life:

KNOWLEDGE REPOSITORY: COMMONPLACE AND INDEX (#commonplace-and-index)

<assets/uses-paper/commonplace.jpg> (Two notebooks placed atop each other, so that labels on both can be seen. On these, the black ink says “Artyom’s Commonplace Book” (on a larger one,) and “Index Book” (on a smaller one.) Commonplace Book is a spiral-bound plastic cover A4 notebook that has somewhat thin paper, with glued-in pieces of older notebooks sometimes protruding on the side of it. The cover has a nice uneven texture of an unpolished plastic. The Index Book has a silicone spiral bind and cardboard cover. Both labels are made with paper tape that has a slightly rugged texture and nice creamy color.)
— Commonplace Book and Index Book

This sturdy plastic-bound notebook always sits in the center of my table.
Being the main repository of quotes and reflections on things I read.
It’s split by initial+first-vowel pairs and has links to previous / next pages on the margins.
Every entry has

• Tags / concepts
• Date (to position pieces of reflections in time)
• Quote or factoid
• Attribution, as exact as possible (I sometimes even number the unnumbered chapters in some books!)
• And some reflection written stenographically

<assets/uses-paper/commonplace-page.jpg> (A page in my Commonplace Book. It has a page number (31,) a dedicated letter combination (Co,) quotes grouped by concepts (the first one has “closeness, longing,”) and my reflections in GESS stenography.)
— The page is quite structured, actually

I have a separate notebook for indexing of the main Commonplace.
Because indexes need a lot of space to be useful and searchable!
Especially with the systems I use.

<assets/uses-paper/commonplace-index.jpg> (Index page of my Commonplace book. It’s split into letters (visible B-D with larger C section, and G-N, all regular sections. Each section is split into five lines, one per each vowel in Englight alphabet: aeiou.)
— Locke index

So there’s a bunch of indexing systems one can use for a notebook or a Commonplace.
Some more elaborate, some less.
But what I settled on is a mixed Locke / Walker system.
Here’s a full description:

• My first and main indexing / Commonplace technique is John Locke’s Commonplacing Method <publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685>.
  It is criticized a lot by subsequent authors,
  but I find it useful to find things at a glance and to structure pages by letters.
  The essence is: allocate a couple of pages for an alphabetic index, with subdivision by the first vowel of the word.
  And structure the rest of the notebook with every page having only one initial+vowel entries on it.
  This way, concepts can be looked up by their obvious first letters and can be found promptly.
• The second structure that I’m currently using for the Index Book is
  John Walker’s system <archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_a-new-commonplace-book-_1799>.
  The essence of it is that the whole Index Book is split over scores of letter-oriented pages,
  where certain spelled-out concepts are mapped to page / entry numbers in the actual Commonplace.
  It’s even more concept-oriented, which I like!
  And it allows for richer indices, so that multiple-concept entries
  (the majority of what I do, because I essentially tag every entry with as much concepts as I can)
  can be added to the index at will.
• I modify their system with intra-page references
  (to previous / next pages of the same letter combination and to pages with similar concepts on margins.)
• I also add tabs to the bottom of the book so that I can quickly leaf through it to the necessary page without straining the paper too much.

<assets/uses-paper/commonplace-tabs.jpg> (Corner of the Commonplace. A hand is holding the tabs protruding from the bottom. The visible tabs are “INDEX,” page 10, and page 30. All of them are made from paper tape with an office paper insert for readability.)
— My decimal tabs for the Commonplace

Most sources on the Internet recommend single-letter indices, which lose important info and are less structured.
Indexing by initial+vowel pairs like Locke and Walker is more evocative.
They knew their shit, living in paper-only world!

REFERENCE MATERIALS WALL (#reference)

As seen in the photo above <#workplace>,
I have a wall plastered with reference materials and polaroids of my cat.
These—especially cat polaroids—are important!
Because I do need some quick reference info on my wall at all times.
I’ll likely add more references, like ASCII table or Scheme standard library.
Time will tell.

NOTEBOOKS (#notebooks)

I have many notebooks really.
First, there is a bunch of notebooks I use to manage my life:

<assets/uses-paper/life-notebooks.jpg> (Photo of three notebooks, stacked on each other. Lowest one—plain black and spiral-bound—has a Russian label “Дневник (Diary) 2026-05–”. The one over it, A5 size, has cute cats on the cover, and a torn-off piece of paper tape with small “accounting” on it, while the third is something like A6 and has a “Contact Book” label. It has cute poppies all over it!)
— Life-critical notebooks: diary, accounting, contact book

I keep the diary in GESS, accounting in GESS and
Kaktovik numerals <kaktovik.txt>,
and contact book is structured after the aggregate statistics derived from my 300-entry phone contact book and some BBDB emails.
I lost the code I used for these stats, otherwise I’d show it to you.
But the gist of it is that “A” takes almost 30 pages, “E”—almost 10, “K” and “M”—5 each, “S” and “V”—10 each, “Y”—5, and the rest is mostly 1–2 pages.
That seems to be the structure for Russian names—lots of A-s.

I don’t use ready-made contact books, because their letter distribution sucks.
And because there’s not much choice of these in Armenia.

<assets/uses-paper/work-notebooks.jpg> (Photo of two notebooks. The one below is red and fancy, spiral-bound, with good paper. The one in the front has no cover, yellow pages, and is a vertical tear-off design.)
— Work notebooks

Then I have my “work” notebooks.
Which is an euphemism for a chaotic hodgepodge of writing, doodling, calculations, and whatnot.
But I try to keep writing there.
So I have a fancy red spiral-bound one that I write in at home, and where most of my drafts live.
And I have a tear-off notebook that I use to capture ideas or draft things when not at home.
Then I tear pages out of it, and either transcribe these to the laptop, or put them away until I get to the fancy notebook and continue the work.

Of course, both work notebooks use GESS stenography and Kaktovik numerals.

What’s missing in this list is some way to manage TODOs.
I don’t have any.
Because

• I’m bipolar and things go sideways more often than not
• I have N24, so time is mostly irrelevant to me
• I’m on my sabbatical so I don’t have any hard deadlines or goals to accomplish
• I have a single-threaded mind, so anything I do—I do until it’s done or until I’m bored; no TODOs necessary
• I get bored too often, so I switch between notebooks, Commonplace, and books

PRINTED BOOKS (#books)

So I’m a huge reader, since early life really.
I abandoned reading when I joined my last job.
But I quit since and started to read again—to much joy.

I prefer printed books.
Yeah I know—not environmentally responsible.
But printed word reads better.
Strains eyes much less.
And has affordances like dog-earing and page doodling—built in.

So I tend to buy Collins and Penguin books because other publishing houses are expensive on Armenian market.
These are not the most indexable books—unlike publishers like Ad Marginem.
But it’s unstructured fiction anyway, so who cares?
Yeah, I mostly read fiction, because I think in stories and not in facts <wiki.txt>.

My reading is usually split over different genres / purposes to not overload my brain with just one of them:

• Small pocket books (Penguin Pocket Classics, usually) for reading on the bus or in queues (there are lots in Armenia!)
• Bigger fiction books at home, for calm reading with pencils and Commonplace.
• Serious things like math and stenography prints, right at my desk for immediate work and interaction.

My workflow with fiction books then is:

• Read a chapter or another unit of the book.
• Dog-ear pages with important info and highlight the salient passages.
• If there are unfamiliar words in the text, write them out on the back of the book or dog-ear and underline.
• Once the chapter is done, transfer the quotes to the Commonplace and reflect on them.
  I lose some insight this way, but it’s more optimal than interrupting the process with endless recording.

TAROT (#tarot)

I do not believe in Tarot divination.
Yet, I love Tarot!
Because it’s a nice story generator and a source of randomness.
I write Tarot stories <tarot/stories/index.txt>,
which is an euphemism for “generated by prompting the (undoubtedly intelligent) deck of cards and hallucinating the story.”

<assets/uses-paper/tarot.jpg> (Photo of a Tarot deck and its box. The box says “Крайон / Таро Уэйта: 78 карт и руководство для гадания от Божественного Духа” (Krayon / Waite Tarot: 78 cards and Divine Spirit divination recommendations))
— Russian sect Tarot deck!

This deck found me (every Tarot person says that) in one of the Yerevan bookshops, being the last Tarot deck they had left.
It’s bright, it’s undetailed, it’s promoting a Russian orthodox sect.
And it’s incredibly crappy quality wise.
Yet, I love it and write stories based on it!

I tend to just pull out a card.
Read the interpretation (I have these printed out.)
And fantasize about what story / character this might be about.

Sometimes I do spreads, making longer stories with episodes based on individual cards.
But I really like shorter one-card stories, so expect more of that!

SEE ALSO (#see-also)

That’s about it for my current analog setup!
It might not be satisfactory if you expected a full external brain Zettelkasten thing.
But I’m a chaotic story person and not an academic.
Anyways, here are some more references to build your own analog brain:

• How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums <academic.oup.com/book/43782>
  is a huge repository of knowledge on Commonplace books in pre-digital times.
  That’s where I found the reference to John Walker’s method and many others.
  I haven’t yet finished reading it, but I anticipate many useful findings yet!

• Analog Office <analogoffice.net/archive>
  is a treasure trove of references, with Office Toy: the A-Z Sorter <analogoffice.net/2022/01/26/office-toy-the.html> and
  How to Set Up a Table of Contents or an Index <analogoffice.net/2022/06/17/make-your-paper.html>
  being the richest in references.
  The systems Anna describes and links to are quite primitive.
  But what I inherited from these was the alphabetic distribution of words, which I use to add extra pages to my Index Book and Commonplace index spread.
  The heuristic is: twice the pages for C, and a couple of additional pages for S and T.

• Lion’s How to Record Every Thought <www.speakeasy.org/~lion/nb>
  is a really elaborate system for recording thoughts and references.
  I couldn’t ever dream of ever rivaling this system, but I don’t have to!
  Give it a read, well worth it.

• Ellane’s Plain Text. Paper, Less cycle <ellanew.com/tagged/ptpl>
  is another huge repository of knowledge, including Johny.Decimal, dash-plus, and indexing entries, among many others.
  I haven’t got to reading all of it yet.
  But I will!

• Writing at Large <writingatlarge.com>,
  despite the name, is a blog on sketching, drawing, and art supplies.
  And less about writing and information structuring.

• How to manage your Moleskine <discover.hubpages.com/art/How-to-manage-your-moleskine>
  is a Moleskine-focused resource with many references collected from Moleskine community.
  (I neither support nor endorse Moleskine due to animal cruelty they promote, but you do you.)

Go analog, reject computerized gentrification!


CC-BY 4.0 <creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0> 2022-2026 by Artyom Bologov (aartaka,)
with one commit remixing Claude-generated code <codeberg.org/aartaka/pages/commit/a91befa>.
Any and all opinions listed here are my own and not representative of my employers; future, past and present.