Technology

A Digital Native On: Ugmonk's Analog

I’m a digital-first Gen-Z-er and I am basically swimming in technology, but here’s a few thoughts on some of the low tech gear in my life

Sam Clemente

29 Jul 2025 — 2 min read

Source: Ugmonk

I’m a huge fan of digital tech, that’s nothing new. I have two different degrees in Information Systems and I spend a lot of my life working on them (literally my entire job is integrating information systems with other information systems). There’s one issue with information systems: they’re too structured for everything.

The hallmark of a good organization system is having a place for things that have no place. There’s no point in having a system that lets you capture ideas if you have to spend so much time capturing metadata about your ideas that you forget them. This is a problem that I have a lot at work.

My Work Day

I spend entire days in meetings sometimes, so if I don’t have a place to quickly put notes and things, then I’m going to forget them. If I forget them, then someone doesn’t get something done that needs to happen, and that can literally put people’s health at risk. I spent months trying to perfect an entirely digital productivity system utilizing many different pieces of software available to me, but there was always something missing. There was never a place where I could just put something.

Enter: Analog

Analog by Ugmonk augments my digital productivity system by serving as a catchall for anything I need to remember, but don’t want to take the time to actually file into my system. It suits the perfect in-between of getting ideas down without having to get them organized. I can write down enough information that I remember what I was trying to remember, and because it just sits on my desk, it’s always in my view so I don’t forget it’s there.

Digging Into my Use Case

The specific pieces I have in my collection are: Capture, Discbound Analog, and a Discbound Journal. Capture is what I use to—well—capture things. It’s the place where I write down the things that need to be taken down immediately. Analog is what I use to prioritize tasks. I have a lot of things that I have in Microsoft To-Do that come up in a given day, but I need some way to prioritize them. I write down the most important tasks that need to be completed on a given day there. The journal I use for writing down thoughts. There are some places where I can’t have my laptop up, like in particular meetings, so I write down my thoughts and the like in the journal.

Closing Thoughts

While I'm firmly a digital native and rely heavily on technology for most aspects of my life, Analog by Ugmonk provides a crucial complement to digital productivity systems. It affords me a frictionless way to capture thoughts without the overhead of categorization, metadata, or app-switching that can sometimes impede the flow of ideas. The physical presence of these tools on my desk serves as a persistent visual reminder of tasks and thoughts that might otherwise get lost in the digital ether.