It’s been eight months since I last wrote about what I pay attention to.

Throughout the year, I take notes of what I obsess over notice around me, and sometimes focus on. Notecards, photos on my camera roll, drafts in my commonplace notebook… put together, these things represent the working memory of my creative operating system.

Time to look at the data, triage it and save it on disk! Over the last three months, I’ve been exploring visual arts and writing regularly, and I read a few books about creativity (and around a thousand pages of Fire and Blood, courtesy of George R.R. Martin). I hit the stationery shops (again)… ah, and also, I want a typewriter, now.

Here’s a snapshot of ten things that caught my attention this summer:

1. Leaning into a different side of my creativity: I discovered artist Samuel Mead on Instagram, where he shares his creative process. He makes short videos where he shows “How To Begin” and demonstrates how to just follow your intuition and stop overthinking. Watching him helped me gain perspective and get past some creative blocks just when I needed it. I went to a “phone-free” workshop he led in Central London where I spent a lovely evening with other people in the basement of a Moleskine shop, making marks with various mediums on the table. I even got to chat with Samuel for a few minutes about my process. Over the past few months, I’ve been using drawing and painting as another way to feed my artistic cravings. It’s been a real pleasure. It’s probably the first time I get to do some art without actually having any expectations about the outcome. It is refreshing to not be worried about having to create something “good enough”.

2. I bought a date stamp! I’m obsessed! I date every notebook entry, so I get to use it a lot. The fixed character format (like typewriters) and the consistent look it brings to the pages as I flick back through them make me very happy. It’s like I am committed to playing 1995-office-supplies and owning every item you can find in a stationery shop. Hey, I love it, I feel like a kid and it makes me want to write more.

3. The Writing Log: During the summer of 2025 I started logging my writing sessions; whether it be drafting, editing, preparing publication or doing research. After a year of tracking that data, I now have a clear view on how much time I invest in writing. I even have graphs with my cumulative writing time for the year! I love a good dashboard. I find this motivating. It makes things tangible. It’s easy to dismiss our creative practice when we are being our worst critic. But time spent? That’s real. In fact I find myself wanting to write more. I want to see the line go up for this year. Since I’ve been logging my sessions, I’ve been going through more pages in my notebook (I started a new one in June!) and I’ve been writing more blog posts. I am really enjoying this!

4. I bought a new fountain pen: Surprise! I saw a cute fountain pen at the shop, and the next minute I wanted it. Luckily, it was an inexpensive pen. So I bought it a few weeks later! I’m now the proud owner of a Kaweco Sport, in this super cool orange colour. It’s great because now I can use another of my Pilot Iroshizuku inks as an accent colour. Or at least that’s what I tell myself to justify the purchase…

5. On July 30th I hit a milestone: I reached 200km total distance run this year. This was a goal I gave myself in the spring. The fact I reached it is proof that through accumulating small wins, I can get real progress in my life. In June, I ingested data for all my runs ever (more dashboards!!) and now I know that on my best year I ran around 380km in total. I think if I continue like this, I can beat it. But it’s not like a school test where I can study like a madman the night before and hope to get good enough results. Here I have to build up those kilometers over time!

6. How Bill Gates started writing code: This summer I read Bill Gates’ memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings. It’s one of those books that I was curious about the minute I saw the cover¹. His work has influenced society and technology in an undeniable way, whether you like Microsoft and Windows or not. I didn’t expect much from a Big-Tech-CEO-book though, so I was surprised when, about half-way through, I couldn’t put it down. It’s fascinating to read about how technology as we know it today was born. As a teenager in the seventies, Gates was trying to do something that wasn’t common at the time: build software. Back then, computers were rare and the size of a room, and you had to pay by the hour to access one. It’s also funny to picture young Bill dumpster-diving to find pieces of code – printed on machine paper – of the operating system of the PDP-10.

7. I wrote more code for fun. Earlier I talked about running… I have a small database where I store my runs and writing sessions, to make the incremental gains visible. In July I rewrote my CLI tool that injects those runs in the database from scratch. The old version was in Python, and I wrote the new one in Go. It’s funny that in this day and age where you can ask an AI agent to write this stuff for you, I decided to do it myself. I find the learning process of doing it manually extremely rewarding. And I think the knowledge sticks better. One thing I enjoyed was writing tests for it: it’s the extra step that makes me sure that if I try ingesting corrupted or wrong data, my code will fail gracefully. Writing tests is self-care!

8. Travel Journal and Stickers: I spent six days existing in Porto in Portugal. I didn’t write as much as I wanted there, but it made me feel happy to just sit and enjoy the sunset over the river, while reading a book. I also used this trip as an opportunity to start a travel journal. It felt like the best way to use this huge, leather-bound notebook with this thick fluffy paper that my parents got me for Christmas, years ago. It looks straight out of an Indiana Jones movie! It’s also a great excuse to use stickers!

9. Tools shouldn’t be precious: In July I went to the London Graphic Centre in Seven Dials and bought some soft pastels from Sennelier. I’m almost sure it was pastels like those that I used during Samuel Mead’s workshop, and I had so much fun with them. So I got them. But then, I realised they were super fragile. Given they are expensive, I started treating them like they were precious. I became scared of using them, more concerned about not breaking them than about having fun. This reminded me of my camera and my music instruments. Right now, I treat them like they have VIP status. I feel I should only pick them up to do something meaningful. And so, I don’t use them, and they stare at me in my living room. The minute you start treating your tools as precious, the minute you become scared of using them or you put them on a pedestal, that’s when you stop being creative.

10. Using paper makes me happy: In the past few months, I’ve used more paper than ever (save for my school years). I’ve cracked open two new Leuchtturm1917 notebooks, and started two sketchbooks (and finished one). I’ve been burning through more notecards than I can count, using them for ideas popping up in my head while I do something else. I’ve been finding it meaningful to spend the time to write by hand, and using my good quality tools to do it brings me joy. I am actually thinking about how I can write more letters in my life. Should I get a printer? Should I buy a typewriter???? Next obsession unlocked!

Every time I write one of those blog posts, I keep thinking I should do it more often. Let’s see if I can actually keep that promise!