Four years ago, for the first time in my life, I had edited a photo of a page from my diary with ‘Goals’ on its header.
I know, there’s nothing special there. All I had done was use the vignette tool to make the center of the page brighter.
Here’s that image:
Image I had used as phone wallpaper for thought management
The significance of this information is that it was the first time I had used a photo of a self-written-text as my wallpaper in order to remind myself what I was about and what I was to do. It was the beginning of thought management through phone wallpapers.
That particular photo is followed by other photos in my phone. There are a lot more photos with similar design: A page of a diary vignetted.
I guess that marked the beginning of a habit that still persists in me — Designing and using phone wallpapers for my thought-management. It has been more than five years within which I have collected some solid experience on it. That’s the reason why I wanted to talk about it.
Phone-Wallpapering for thought-management is a regular and natural activity for me. Whenever I have a new idea, new structure or a new paradigm, I either draw it in a paper, take a photo or use a photo editing app. It has proved to be useful. I like to call it: Mind-supplement-in-abstracto.
Phones are without a doubt the most useful and personal technological devices. We learn, work, communicate and entertain ourselves in them. We spend almost all of our time with them (around).
They now play a role no other technology ever has.
This possibly makes the phone screen the most viewed thing in our normal day, both in terms of frequency and duration.
Into the inner phone experience, the wallpaper or the background is the most general component. In terms of design, it is a base in which everything is built and exists. Apps come and go, change places. But the background remains!
This nature of the phone background and our high phone usage makes the background an ideal thing to replicate what we would like to have in the background of our minds.
Thoughts come and go. But the purpose remains!
This is why I used the term: Thought-Management. It is about using the phone wallpaper to manage our thoughts in the way they ought to be managed. In a way they will be managed!
That’s why the term Phone Wallpapers for thought management.
Almost everyone who uses a phone keeps a wallpaper which is supposed to inspire or remind the person of what s/he is all about. After that, they look for aesthetics. It is done for symbolism. Everyone does it naturally. But what I am trying to put across is that, our thoughts are not as simple as that. Therefore, this task of phone wallpapering for our thoughts has to be taken more seriously and methodically.
Our minds are not naïve. They won’t obey what we would want them to obey! Things don’t work that way. the mind likes to counter-reason, it likes to explore, it likes to confuse! Providing it with only one vision and trying to discipline it on it is absurd.
A way to control or manage it is by using the phone-wallpaper more effectively:
The wallpaper has to be designed in such a manner that it addresses all aspects of our life and mind. The wallpaper has to address the confusions too.
One of the most popular result that shows up when we search for ‘phone wallpapers’ is of the night sky with stars, constellations and all that. The reason for their popularity is because, one they are aesthetically pleasing and two, because they provide context of what and where we are in this cosmos and what magic is/awaits us.
Such wallpapers provide inspiration and context. But they won’t be able to address all of our questions and doubts. For instance, when a part of us is concerned with our current income and expenditure, such lofty inspiration can hardly be of use. What use of the information that we are here in this vast unknown, smaller than a speck of dust, when our bellies are craving the next meal!
Yes, I know they are supposed to provide metaphysical/spiritual base. But if we are talking about using phone backgrounds effectively, it surely has to do more than that!
If our human mind was to focus on a single thing, there wouldn’t be the need for thoughts and thinking.
I consider thoughts to be useful. Not something to suppress or extinguish — as others like to believe. Thoughts can and should be managed if we want to go to territories never gone before.
My pursuit is to open them up. To revolutionize human thinking.
If we want wallpapers to be our Mind-supplement we have to dig and design deeper.
We have to move beyond symbolism.
Here we are talking about using wallpapers to communicate to our mind all the things that we want to have communicated. A night sky wallpaper in the background with the current goals and obstacles written could be a good solution. This way our mind will notice the cosmic/metaphysical context along with the financial/moral whatever —just the way we want it!
What we can do is draw diagrams, make bullets — whatever we do to organize our mind — and set it as the wallpaper of our phone.
I have discovered space-effectiveness. Which is the art of placing certain components at certain parts of the wallpaper for the best effect. I also have my ideas about image placing, text placing, color-usage and all that. But I will talk about all that later.
My idea with this was to roughly talk about phone-wallpapering. I would love to hear how you use your wallpaper as I have no idea how others have been doing it!
