Program Yourself

I’m currently experimenting with life organization techniques (see previous entries).

There are two basic approaches: high tech and low tech.

The high tech approach implies keeping your schedule and todo list entered into a computer somewhere, requires explicit categorization, date and timeentries etc. The advantage is that computers are good at keeping track of the “meta” stuff — copying and pasting text, remembering appointments and reminders, and keeping track of categories and links.

But I’ve found that for capturing a thought quickly before it evaporates I prefer pen and paper. There’s no mental effort required to start writing, which is important to me when I have a complicated, half-formed idea that I want tocapture the essence of before it disappears.

Humans have a very small amount of short term memory buffer space (ie 7 plus or minus 2) It’s not a big deal to remember “Pay the phone bill” long enough to walk over to the computer, switch whatever organizational application I’m using this week and enter a new task, but when I’m working at the edge of my mental ability, if even a small amount of extra thinking is required, it can be enough to disturb the mental construct/structure/complicated thought/whatever that I want to record, causing it to evaporate.

For dumping large amounts of data into off-brain storage, typing is always going to be the best interface. Typing into a text editor is the smoothest, most direct path with the least friction from your brain to your computer (the alternatives being voice or handwriting. ESP would be perfect.)

The downside of the high-tech approach is a lack of flexibility, and the high overhead required to get started (ie. at least starting an editor, maybe booting your computer), and the very high coefficient of friction when it comes to free-form formatting, diagramming etc.

So for sentences and paragraphs, computer; for random scraps of data, pen and paper.

I’ve been carrying around a graph paper lined notebook for capturing random scraps I need to remember, and I set up a personal wiki for keeping track of larger stuff, and expanding on the random stuff I manage to scribble down in my notebook. This weblog is intended to be an extension of that; a place where I can put ideas once I get them into a shape that is comprehensible to anyone other than myself. So far that combination is working pretty well, I think, although I’m still experimenting. I’ll write more about this later.

I’m still trying to figure this all out. A related topic is text editors which I’ll also write about later.

(see Cory Doctorow’s synopsis of this year’s Life Hacks talk.
http://craphound.com/etech2005-lifehacks.txt for more useful and interesting stuff. It’s updated from last year’s)