Being a low tech guy in the high tech world
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Update: the screenwriter of ‘Dune’ is using a similar trick (here)
What do Austin Kleon, a miniature movie set and an 80s logo animation have in common?
One word: analog.
If you are, as I am, in the world of digital marketing, you are permanently chased by the latest trends and tools. The Adobe suite offers us the updates pretty much every single month. Our feeds are covered with ads for some new productivity tools, organisational apps, project management softwares. And, of course, new phones and laptops are released every year.
This continuous novelty allied with a 100% connected and digital workflow can be paradoxically negative to your creativity. And I’m not only referring here to the so-called creative jobs. This applies to basically every job position: lawyer, gardener, non-fiction writer, restaurateur, pet food shop owner, and the like.
The three analog cases
Austin Kleon and his analog desk
Anyone who read Austin Kleon knows the importance of an analog desk. The author of Steal Like An Artist stresses out that each creator should have two desks: one with a computer obviously and the other “electronic free”, just paper, pens, carton boards,etc (check my post here).
The concept promotes free-of-distraction work, recovering the link between the brain and the hand — lost while using the mouse and keyboard. It allows for creativity to be expressed naturally and manually since you can’t go on the internet for benchmarks, templates and so on.
Thus, to effectively include this analog desk in your workflow, you need to identify your main enemies:
- FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)
- blank page or writer’s block
- boredom
For this hack to work at its best, it is crucial for you to “relocate“. You can’t simply put your laptop aside or away from the desk to declare it analog. You must embrace the fact your desk becomes a different space. Feel free to pick up any spot in your house, flat, garage or shed, set up a cheap board resting on trestles. It can even be two desks in the same room.
