At the start of 2024, I bought the wrong year planner. I want to tell you this because I think it’s the most honest possible beginning to a piece about technology and intentionality: I bought the wrong year planner, and I had already replaced it before January was over, and I still needed to figure out what I was doing with the seventeen other things I was using to track my life.

This is where I actually am. Not in a Ted talk about disruption. Not in a keynote about the future of work. In a room with too many tabs open and a planner that starts on Sunday when I am a Monday person, thinking about whether I want Alexa to keep yelling at me about things I have not done.

I don’t. A video I recorded on the big desktop in my office in 2024 as an apparent cry for help in the era of automation is the source for this post.

The Blind Spot Principle

Here is the framework I keep coming back to, which I developed in the car, which is where I develop most things:

I love the light on my dashboard that tells me someone is in my blind spot. I love it unreservedly. It augments something I genuinely cannot do — I cannot see my blind spot, that is why it is called that — and it does it without replacing my judgment or taking over the task of driving. The light tells me. I decide.

I’m definitely in charge of when I would like to have the brake slam on.

That is the line. That is the whole framework.

Technology that augments what I cannot do: yes. Technology that automates decisions I am capable of making and would rather make myself: harder sell. This is not a rejection of progress. This is being someone who decides when they turn on a machine and when they use it. Those are different things.

What Actually Compounds

I have been thinking about the word compound a lot lately, and not in the financial sense, though that too. I mean the way that things accumulate in a life without your quite noticing until they reach some critical mass that cannot be ignored.

Every additional service, app, subscription, platform, password, charger, login, notification setting, privacy policy you technically agreed to — these do not add up on top of each other. They do something math-like and it is compounded. The mental load of maintaining a digital life has a weight that is not proportional to the individual components. It is proportional to all of them in relation to each other.

I know this because I have been carrying it. I know this because I have headaches I did not used to have and a particular kind of end-of-day depletion that is different from tired. And saying that does not mean I used technology poorly. It means I am a human being who reached a point of saturation and noticed.

The noticing is the thing.

The Older Millennial Vantage Point

There is a specific and underused thing about being an older millennial — which I am, and so is Taylor Swift, and I would like that noted — which is that we have lived on both sides of almost every technology transition that matters. Pre-internet and post. Pre-smartphone and post. We have done things multiple ways. We have had jobs that used one platform, then another, then another. We have seen what happened when a thing that replaced something else turned out to have its own set of problems that the original thing did not.

That history is not nostalgia. It is data.

What I have now that I did not have in 2008 or 2012 or even 2018 is enough accumulated experience with technology to have opinions about it that are based on what I have actually observed, in my own life, over time. That is different from having preferences based on what I am used to. I am not attached to paper because I grew up with paper. I use paper in specific situations because I have noticed, repeatedly, that it does something for my thinking that screens do not.

The physical limitation of writing — the fact that you cannot write as fast as you think — is not a bug. It is the processing time. It is the friction that makes the thought land somewhere instead of passing through.

This is not an argument against typing. This is an argument for noticing what you are choosing and why.

The Key

I made a commitment at the start of this year that sounds very small and is not: I am going to know where I am going to write something down, and I am going to know where to look to find it when I need it.

That is it. That is the whole resolution.

Not a new system. Not a productivity framework. Not an app. The commitment is to have thought it through enough to have a consistent answer when I need to capture or retrieve something. To have made the choice rather than letting the environment make it for me.

Technology is a tool. I am not. That is the distinction I keep returning to. The Alexa can stop yelling. The planner now starts on Monday. I know where to find things.

That is, I think, a responsible place to start.