Analogue into autumn (or fall)

I was recently in Germany visiting family. As it happens, I was there in the first week of school and I really enjoyed seeing kids with their brand new school cases and backpacks walking and cycling to school with their parents each morning. It was a very picturesque kind of late summer feel. The leaves were just starting to turn and it took me back to the excitement of starting school and later university terms.

I still remember the really exciting moments of getting my first grown-up school backpack where in Germany we have a tradition of having a kind of a sort of cone-shaped bag to celebrate the first day of school. It’s called a Schultüte, a little bag for school treats, stationary and other treats. Later when I was at university I continued the tradition of celebrating the start of term, buying the university scarf on my first day as I first went to the University of London and signed up for all the libraries. I studied at different institutions across the University in London for a long time and each time I joined a new university I was so excited to get my library card on the first day of term, get to know all the new lecture halls and so on. I love the feeling of starting something fresh, a new learning journey. Now I’m very glad indeed to no longer be in formal education but I still work on in educational and education adjacent spaces and I still lean into that feeling of starting a new term. It’s a great excuse to some new stationary, new pens, new notepads – and a new pencil case 🙂

As you can probably tell, I absolutely adore this time of year and being more outside and offline always prompts me to spend more time away from the screens. So I returned from this trip (on which I set out with an analogue camera, notebook, pen &, journal) with a book which I seemed to have picked up along the way and I noticed that I had spent a lot of time offline in that week. I often do that when I’ve got time off work and it prompted me to reflect on just how much I use analogue habits and hobbies that I like cultivating to keep being as productive and as creative in my output as I can be when I am online – and that provided the inspiration for the episode.

Now that I am back in my very busy online world and I’m on social media, doing events and meetings online and working across a number of different organisations remotely whilst I’ve also got my own inbox to contend with. Over the course of days and weeks this adds up to so much digital noise and overwhelm that most of us have to work a bit harder to find a good balance. In this episode I share a couple of things that I find both effective and enjoyable strategies for balancing the demands of my digital ways of working with calm and (for me) fun. I share ideas that work on an individual, personal basis and also some ideas to try with a team or group of people if you are looking to blend a little bit of analogue activity, a little bit of being offline into these busy weeks as the new academic year starts… .

Listen to the episode