Everyone’s showing you the tote. Nobody’s telling you what to put in it.
If you’ve been anywhere near TikTok this year, you’ve seen an analog bag. A canvas tote, usually monogrammed, packed with things that don’t need charging. Content creator Sierra Campbell coined the term in a video about lowering screen time, and it spread from there — fast enough that L.L.Bean now sells limited-edition “Analog” and “Off the Grid” Boat and Totes, and says tote sales are up more than 50% this year.
Yes, we’re aware. You’re reading a screen, about not looking at screens, and the whole trend went viral on the app it’s meant to replace. We’re choosing to find that funny rather than pretend otherwise.
Here’s the part most coverage skips. The bag is the easy half. You almost certainly already own a tote, and you don’t need us to sell you one. The hard half is what goes inside — because the honest answer for most people is “a coloring book I bought at the drugstore and never opened.”
So let’s talk about what actually works.
Why the bag works at all (and why most of them don’t)
The idea isn’t willpower. It’s substitution.
Reaching for your phone is a hand reflex before it’s a decision — you’re bored, your hand moves, and forty minutes disappear. A bag full of stuff doesn’t help because you’ve decided to be better. It helps because when the reflex fires, something else is closer.
Which means the contents have to meet the reflex on its own terms. Four rules:
It has to work in ten minutes. The bag lives in waiting rooms, on trains, in the twenty minutes before a friend shows up. Anything that needs a real sitting stays home.
It has to be genuinely self-contained. No water cup. No second pair of scissors. No “and also you’ll need.” This is where watercolor sets — which show up on nearly every analog bag list — quietly fail. They’re a kitchen table hobby in a tote bag costume.
It has to survive the bag. Loose beads and unboxed pieces become the reason you stop carrying it.
You have to be willing to do it in public. Underrated, and it rules out more than you’d think.
And one more that isn’t a rule so much as the whole point: it’s a solo bag. The thing it replaces is something you do alone. A card game needs a second person to be free at the exact moment your hand starts moving, which is precisely when nobody is. Games are great. They’re just not this.
What we’d put in ours
Polia ASMR Scratch Art
If you only take one thing from this list, take this one — it’s the closest thing here to a direct swap for the scroll.
You etch through a black surface and colour comes up underneath, with a scratching sound that people find genuinely satisfying. It’s immediate feedback for very little effort, which is exactly the deal your phone was offering. Except at the end you have a thing.
Two honest notes. Scratching produces shavings, so it wants a lap or a table rather than a moving bus. And the sound is the point, which makes a silent waiting room a judgement call.
The Executive Fidget Set
Most fidget toys are plastic, loud, and slightly embarrassing to be seen with past a certain age. This is the grown-up version — engineered, weighted, and quiet enough to use during a meeting without anyone deciding things about you.
It’s the answer for people who don’t want a craft. Not everyone wants to make something. Some people just need their hands occupied while they think, and this does that job without asking anything else of you. This set us luxe. Leave some pieces on your desk at home and toss a couple of them in your analog bag.
Mimbleball Mini
Soft, silly, and small enough to disappear into a pocket. There’s no skill involved, nothing to learn, and no way to do it wrong — which makes it the safest thing on this list to give someone whose hobbies you don’t actually know.
The mini is the one for the bag. The full-size version is a couch object. It is a comfy way to keep your hands busy.
Someday Scaries Journal
A prompt a day, 365 of them. Answer one, close it, done.
Guided journals earn their place in a bag because they remove the blank-page problem. Nobody opens an empty notebook on a train and has a thought. Being asked a specific question is a much smaller ask than being asked to be interesting.
Pair it with a pen you actually like. It matters more than it should.
What we’re still working on
This list is deliberately short, and it’s going to get longer. We’re in the middle of tracking down a few more things that pass all four rules — the letter-writing corner especially, which is having its own moment right now for the same reasons.
Check back. Or don’t, and go do something with your hands instead. Both are fine by us.