How People Use Ensō

I was going to share a different note today but found it hard to focus on writing instead of working on Ensō (How to Balance Making vs. Sharing - working title), so I thought we could work on something together this time. By working together I mainly mean getting my shit together, or rather — getting all of my notes into one place so I could use them in the future and stop repeating myself. So, grab your favourite shovel and let's dig in!

Related: How I collect feedback for Ensō

First, this post is not about testimonials (although I do need to get organised about this as well: Ensō - testimonials), it not about how happy or dissatisfied people are with the tool. It's a list of use cases I'm trying to organise (How to turn ideas into objects?), describe in more detail, and share with people who might find Ensō helpful.

We're working with the garage door up, and I've kept you standing outside for 3 paragraphs already. OK, come in. Nah you can keep your shoes on. I'm not sure why, but yeah, sure, you can step on that.

How people use Ensō

The list is non-exclusive, how ≠ why, and the use-cases do overlap a fair bit. But, perfect is the enemy of published, so let's go!

Top-level

It feels like the use-cases fall into these three categories:

%% drawing %%

I don't feel happy with this classification yet. It needs to ferment in my head for a bit longer, and it's possible I'll drop it completely. For instance, the users

Journaling

That's the most common use case. Some people use Ensō for their morning pages (often mentioning The Artist's Way), some like to review/think-through their day in the evening.

I fall into the former group (Stream of Consciousness Morning Notes) although I also write in it every New Week.

Expressive Writing

A creative writing technique that allows us to process and understand emotions in a safe manner. Related: Expressive Writing.

I decided to separate it from Expressive Writing, because many of the examples on how Ensō is used involve other tools, used in CBT.

Disclaimer: Ensō is not therapy, it's a notebook (Ensō - Analogy Brain Dump).

I share most of my articles touching on mental health with mental health professionals (be my own therapist or my ex-colleagues) and I often reach out to them for feedback.

Thinking aloud, but with the mouth shut, thinking through writing

Examples: talking to a rubber ducky (possible project idea?), thinking through a problem by having a dialog with oneself (the ducky talks back). I like the latter one especially, for two reasons:

  1. I do that as well
  2. I believe it lets me harness the internal critic in my head and use them for good. Come to think of it, this is a common technique used in therapy and perhaps deserves a longer note.

Related: Writing is Thinking

Writing with eyes closed

Several Ensō users described writing in the app in this manner, some figuratively, one person in a literal sense of the word.

One of the inspirations for Ensō was an interview with a blogger who would dim their screen as much as possible when writing, so that they could see just enough to know that they're writing but not enough to make it easier for themselves to go back and edit.

Over the years I haven't managed to recall who they were, but I found even more examples of people like this, including Hank Green or Adam Savage. After watching this video with Adam Savage, and not having spent too much time thinking about what I was doing, I sent him a link to Ensō. I'm pretty sure his response got lost in my spam folder and he's feeling pretty bad about the whole thing.

Meditation

Writing, especially with constraints (length, editing, pace) can be a meditative process.

During meditation we learn to observe thoughts passing by instead of engaging with them. when the only way to go is to move forward, you sort of give up on control, and observe yourself thinking/speaking.

Writing a musical based on a German legend, to be followed by a novel about squirrels

Hi {name}
How’s the musical and what kind of squirrels we are talking about?

One of the best things about working on tools for beautifully weird people is that I can start emails like this.

One of the HN comments (TODO: link) on the new version of Ensō mentions script writing as a use case in which I'd need to add monospaced fonts, but didn't touch on structured writing. I find it surprising and somewhat funny because Ensō is the antithesis of the tools I thought normally were used for that purpose.

Drafting blogposts

This is the second or possibly first most common use case, even mentioned during a Say Hi call I had today.

It resonates with me because I used to write by creating giant, 5-levels deep outlines which then I dressed into sentences, largely out of a fear of missing something important. With time and practice I learned that this isn't how my mind works. I learned to use both modes of thinking/writing.

That said, I know of some bloggers who write the entire posts this way, with two direct messages I received just in the past two weeks.

Also I used Ensō for my latest - viral, ofc - blog article. It was extremely pleasant. Thank you!!!

ENSO is perfect to write blogposts

Writing YT video scripts

%% Venn diagram : blogs and squirrels %%

There's an overlap between this and the two previous categories. Some users fall into both as well.

I think the reason this works is that writing in a stream helps us tune into the natural cadence of speech, imbue text with rhythm. Editing breaks that flow for most people.

Taking notes

I used to keep Ensō pinned to the side of my screen when taking notes during meetings or Say Hi calls. This works for me because it let me focus on the person speaking instead of jumping between different sections of questions, find better moments in the conversation where I can ask a follow-up question.

I don't do that often any more because I got better at balancing being present with another person vs. the short-term context of the conversation. Related: How I take notes during say hi calls (note: you can request any dead-linked article by clicking on it).

Writing poetry

As a writer and a poet who was Stuck, and who no longer is, well, I have a few words for you (all good).

Enso has helped me write one poem per day

This is an interesting use case for me, because I see poems more as images or music -- I like to see the interplay between longer phrases. The current line limit is well-suited for haikus and I'm considering allowing to raise it -- say if you want to play a short game, where you're writing a poem/doodle of a certain length.

What did I learn (by writing this down)

Not a lesson but a reminder: User personas or broad categorisations are useless for me here. The product is small and hard to design, but it's not complex. It's a good exercise in coming up with good implicit UX affordances (easy to discover, but almost invisible at the same time) vs. reducing distractions.

More people than I expected use Ensō for the type of work that normally is associated with more structured writing (think: scripts, books, posts, videos).

I'm considering adding the option to control the number of lines displayed on the screen. Maybe following MISS, I can let people write poems in it... as long as they're 7 verses long!

I fall into most of the categories mentioned above. It's a double-edged sword, but it's also helpful. I am the statistical sample of 1, it's much easier to build and tests something you like and use. This is also great because seeing people using it to write a poem, a script or... a book about squirrels makes me want to do the same.

Being able to build something even marginally useful, learn from building it, learn from the people using it is a great place to be in. I know that these words have lost their meaning, but: I feel happy and grateful writing this. Thank you.

Speaking of squirrels, here's a tip from an old friend, a PM who could juggle:

The squirrels are not what they seem.

Thanks for reading!

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