michael-dean-k/

For the last two years my lock screen clock has been set to Khmer, the language of Cambodia, with numerals I (still) can’t parse. The point is to not poison the flow of my day with chronos.

I started this experiment because I realized how obsessively I would check the time, as soon as I woke up, through morning and evenings and weekends for no real reason, in situations among friends where the hour was irrelevant. Time was a commodity, something to budget, forecast, control. Only when I got off the clocks did I notice a whole layer of quiet, instant calculations I’d perform to steer the immediate future (ie: it’s 9:43pm, which means I have 17 minutes until 10pm, which means I can only do 15-minute things until the 10pm-things start to happen). Chronological time alienates you from kairos, the ripeness of any given moment.

If we pick up our phone 96 times per day (the average), then we’re aware of the time every 10 minutes. We’re a society stuck in time. Lewis Mumford said that the clock (not the steam engine) is the central machine of the Industrial age, the thing that dissociates us from our natural rhythms.

Of course if I have back-to-back meetings or multiple trains to catch, then I need to be in manager mode and know time to the minute; but in all other moments, I strive to be temporally oblivious. I don’t know the time right now. I assume it’s somewhere 8-9am, and when Christine rings the doorbell I’ll assume it’s almost noon, and I’ll look outside to see the sun and shadows to confirm it’s no longer morning. When I’m hungry I’ll go eat, but unfortunately that brings me near the stove clock which breaks the spell (I’ve tried scrambling the stove clock, and that obviously annoys my wife). Whenever possible I default to removing clocks from UIs, or turning them to analog to create a second of friction, or, when iOS forces me to see ##:##, I revert to foreign numerals I can’t comprehend. Not every room in your home needs a clock. You should never know the time in the room you write.

V7. Analog editing is pretty fun. There’s something helpful in seeing your older frozen version beneath the new thing emerging. I do this a lot in Miro, but feels different on paper. Can’t quite articulate why yet, other than the ease/freedom of drawing. Just feels like there’s value in moving up and down the writing tech stack (voice, handwriting, typewriter, computer, AI). 

After this whole analog ordeal, I distilled my essay into a new question, and then ran it through a new vibe-coded essay interrogation app I made, before it one-shot generated v8, which sucked (as a whole), but also unknotted a lot of the big v7s issues. So next step is to make a digital outline for v9, where I’ll meticulously look through all the notes and scraps and refile the good parts into an new outline, and then maybe typewrite the final version in one huff. 

I think the point I’m arriving at is that every medium has its strengths and weaknesses, and it helps to shift around to get the power of each, until you find a version of the idea that feels right. (Of course, this is very inefficient and slow, potentially endless, but probably worth it for the few ideas you care about most, and so that’s why I’m trying to be more rapid with notes like this, so I’m less rushed on the whale essays.)

This helps clarify my stance on AI writing too, that it can be helpful for sketches that advance or challenge your thinking, but it should probably never be the last link in the process, because the essay you share should be the best articulation of your own thoughts in your own words. Typically AI is framed as a shortcut for slopjockeys (which is fair because that’s how it’s commonly used—I mean my wife and I just had to file a warranty claim for our broken stroller, and it’s not worth wasting prose on that), but if it extends your thinking, and points you to new regions of pondering when you shower or drive, which then inspires original ideas, is that cheating?

Recently found a book on my grandfather’s bookshelf by William Zinser (author of On Writing) from the 1980s on word processors. Apparently he started as a technophobe, but after actually buying an IBM and moving up the stack, he found it to be a pleasure that augmented his methods and habits from earlier mediums. I think the unique paranoia of AI is that it can easily replace and cheapen your whole process if you let it, but that’s your choice, independent of anyone else.

Go through all the apps on your phone, and make a list of their analog equivalent (ie: a digital camera book, a voice recorder, a flip phone, an MP3 player, a notebook, a calendar, a watch, a train ticket, etc.). You will need a backup to carry all those things around, but it's worth experiencing and remembering the analog experience of a tool. The goal is not to be 100% analog, but to slowly shift back to digital as you realize the value is not worth the friction. In some cases, you'll realize the friction is absolutely worth it, and you can keep those few things analog. There's little to gain from being pro/anti technology, but much to gain in a nuanced set of rules over how and why you personally do.