By Ruby Quince

A Bear in my Toolbox

The first time I was made to do yoga I had the most intense headache and then I slept for what felt like a week. Apparently, you open up nooks and crannies of your body and then pent-up toxins are released; hence the headache. Ten days into SCA and it’s apparent that something similar has happened to my brain. Previously dormant muscles have been stirred into action and there’s a sort of “oh, I haven’t felt that in a while” mixed with a “my brain hurts”.

New behaviours are part of the deal with SCA, and, while I can’t quite work out what’s happening in my noggin, I realise there are a bunch of new tools in my toolbox to deal with the changes. A bunch of them are useful tools for rustling up ideas, including the Divergent Thinking tools we worked on today, the lovely story techniques and methodologies like the SUCCES approach from Made to Stick. But I’ve noticed that the home screen of my phone has changed quite a bit since last month.

Gone is Outlook and management tools from work. Slack really should be a bigger feature but it’s largely dormant because the crew haven’t really adopted it. Contrary too all the research we used to read about millennials, Facebook – FB messenger in particular – has been where the action is. Of course, it’s ill-suited for capturing useful bits of information and plans for coursework are scattered within conversations of how to make Whetherspoons smell less like piss and 2am questions as to which floor of the club they’re in. I read these from the comfort of my sofa. Smaller group work happens on Whatsapp, email is used occasionally for docs and Google Drive is our Mecca.

Gratitude Garden has been a surprise hit: I thought it was going to be a load of guff, but it really does have an impact on your outlook and I’ve rather enjoyed feeding it. I still refuse to tend to a virtual garden though.

But the app that has really bloomed is Bear. I’ve fallen in love. A note-taking app that clusters content using embedded tags, shares notes across all devices, like Evernote, but the satisfyingly clean, warm texture and attractive font palette somehow makes writing a joy. I’m writing this in Word because I want to have my Bear notes as reference, and it feels cold and shouty. I’m done with Cambria (Body). No more scraps of paper and rifling through notebooks with scribbles I can’t read. $1.49 a month feels like a snip to have my shit organizized.