{"id":9663,"date":"2019-03-04T13:05:05","date_gmt":"2019-03-04T19:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/?p=9663"},"modified":"2026-02-24T21:54:27","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T02:54:27","slug":"the-vomit-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/the-vomit-book\/","title":{"rendered":"The Vomit Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"An
The perfect pen.<\/figcaption><\/figure>Inspired by Sunita\u2019s post<\/a>, and having sat on the idea of doing my own productivity post, I decided to take up the challenge. Today I\u2019m just going to talk about the most important piece of my productivity regimen.<\/p>\n

THE VOMIT BOOK<\/p>\n

My productivity keeper is a notebook. Not a simple one because why use a 20c spiral notebook I can get at Walmart during back-to-school month when I can get an expensive, hard-to-find notebook such as TOPS Journal Notetaking Planner (TOP63827)<\/a>? It\u2019s a version of the Cornell notetaking system.<\/p>\n

Why do I call it my vomit book? Because I vomit the contents of my brain all over it. The single most productive thing I do is vomit my brain all over the pages of my notebook. I cannot describe how mentally jumbled I get and what a short period of time it takes, and I cannot overstate how much more productive I become once I\u2019ve spent an hour (or 2 or 3) vomiting my jumbled thoughts.<\/p>\n

I have depression and anxiety, and I am ADHD and bipolar. My mother was pretty regulated, so she became my coping mechanism growing up without drugs. I am not nearly that regulated (or more likely, what was important to her is not important to me). But the coping mechanisms I developed during my childhood and adolescence, thanks to my mom, got me limping through early adulthood before I found better living through chemistry.<\/p>\n

I say this only to illustrate the most extreme of my vomiting: One day, I was so jumbled, I wrote \u201cangry\u201d over and over and over again. Two pages front and back. That was necessary so I could begin to put into words what I was angry about. That journaling session lasted nearly 4 hours, but it was 4 hours well spent.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t vomit every day. I do it when my brain is too full, which could be every day or it could be every week or it could be six months from now.<\/p>\n

I do use it for lists. In that period when I was so angry I had to write down my morning routine in a list (though it never changes): get up, shower, brush teeth, get breakfast, take meds. During that time, I also struggled with the everyday things like \u2026 making a doctor\u2019s appointment.<\/p>\n

I had to write down the list: pick up phone, dial the number, ask for an appointment, check the calendar, commit to the appointment. I tried twice to make the appointment, hung up when I got voice mail because the expected thing hadn\u2019t happened, and THEN I changed my list: pick up phone, dial the number, select the right key to go to voice mail, leave a message. And yes, I had to write the message down and read it.<\/p>\n

I realize now this was anxiety, for which I am now medicated. But that vomit book got me through some rough times. The rough times might change, but the vomit book is there for when I need to puke up a new pen\u2019s<\/a> worth of ink.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inspired by Sunita\u2019s post, and having sat on the idea of doing my own productivity post, I decided to take up the challenge. Today I\u2019m just going to talk about the most important piece of my productivity regimen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[578,317,413,424],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lovely-things","category-philosophy","category-productivity","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9663"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9663"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24116,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9663\/revisions\/24116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}