Paper First Life to connect the dots

I wanted to release a video about this. Honestly, video recordings have been off the shelf in 2026 so far for me, although my initial plans were different. So I decided to start with this lower friction way of presenting my ideas to the world, in the form of a traditional blog post. It is about how I am introducing the missing layer in between free with tech and Journal Companions directory, which I call Paper First Life.

---

With fwt. being the "Why" behind Journal Companions (or JCAs) which represent the "How", there had been the missing "What" for some time. What should you keep doing to achieve living free with tech? I had been trying trying to define this during my whole content journey in 2025. When I look back, it is obvious. For some reason, it was hard to realize it at the time of recording my first batch of videos! I even chose a thumbnail title "PAPER FIRST" for one of the videos I thought that at the time of writing this blog post but after checking my Figma, it was just one of the variants for this video.

The "What" behind fwt. philosophy

It's a practice I call Paper First Life. The practice itself is not about rejecting technology, rather placing it in the right order in the information infrastructure of our wellbeing. Let's dive into draft for official website that I am building right now, shall we? This is the kind of exclusive content people visiting my website can get from time to time (this is not published anywhere else!):

Paper First Life is a simple practice:
paper first, technology second.

It is not a product, a framework, or a system to adopt.
There is nothing to buy and nothing to migrate to.

Paper First Life defines the order of tools,
not the contents of your notebook
and not the method you use.

You can practice it with Bullet Journal, GTD, free-form journaling,
or a system of your own making.

The only requirement is this:
paper remains the foundation,
and technology is introduced intentionally, just when it helps.

1. fwt.: It is important for people to escape digital slavery to freedom.
2. PaFi: The way to do it is using Paper First Life that gives our tools the right order.
3. JCAs: Apps made simple on purpose so that journal remains central information system.

It is so obvious now

The dots have connected finally. This is what I've been looking for all that time. 769 hours, 47 minutes and 28 seconds in 2025 to be more precise. My task now is to give this a proper web presence, clean pointers that flow from root philosophy to the bottom and vice versa. What is even more important is to keep building what I started. There are 2 ideas in the works at the moment so I recommend you subscribing to the RSS or follow me on X for more updates.