On Organization - 2020-11-04
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I've been thinking about organization for a long time. Lately it's
become even more important to me as I've realized how terribly
unreliable companies are. Yes, some of them are cool, but unless you
pay -- and sometimes even if you do pay -- you cnan't rely on features
staying there.
Services get sold, move, and all kinds of sadness. Ultimately what
I've learned is that if you want to do it right you have to do it
yourself. Relying on cloud services can be a bit easier. But when they
go down or when they're unavailable... boo.
On the other hand, if you host your own, if you have your own
applications on your wn computers then things are much, much better.
Yeah, use services when you need to for collaboration, but most of the
time you're not actually going to need that.
Recently I've discovered strongly that journaling - especially writing
with a physical glyph interface (say pen and paper) has been a really
great way for me to organize my thoughts. Reviewing those thoughts is
pretty useful, too.
The general idea behind organization is that things that are organized
are easier to find. Think about a messy room, with items just thrown
all around. Then think about your local library (though it's probably
been a few months since you've actually been there). Being able to
find those items whenever you want them is pretty fantastic.
We've seen cultural movements towards organization, with Marie Kando's
"spark joy". There's some other organization show on Netflix. Probably
more than one, but I know one of them was getting pretty popular.
What kinds of things can we organize? We can organize physical things,
obviously. We can organize digital bits and bytes. We can organize our
thoughts. We can organize by color, by shape, by size, by least
recently used or most recently used, or alphabetically, or by last
name, or any other number of characteristics. Sometimes we want to
organize by more than one feature at a time, and that can be useful,
too!
But ultimately, organization is super useful. I'm working on getting
my digital self and my physical self more organized. I guess I'm also
working on getting my mental/note self organized as well. So here are
some things that I have found about organizing different things. These
ideas work for me -- maybe they'll work for you, or be something you
can adapt to better suit your needs. We're all different and different
methods work better for different people.
Thoughts and Prayers
--------------------
Recently I came across a tool about notetaking called Zettelkasten.
From the form of the word you can probably guess that it's German in
origin. The basic premise of Zettelkasten is that you create notes on
2x5 cards and you can tag them and date them and what-not. But cartds
have notes on them to link to other cards, and then you keep them in
file boxes.. You might be old enough to remember looking up cards in a
card catalog in the library. Zettelkasten is built on this principle.
Generally speaking, I like that idea. There are a lot of software
tools that help you do your own Zettelkasten. I don't mind it, but
I've actually hit on something simiilar and more simple.
The Get-It-Done-Guy has a sweet podcast and in it he talks about his
master system and how he organizes everything. He has one single
notebook that he uses for work, personal, and whatever. This notebook
is where he writes down... well, everything. But how do you keep
things organized in a notebook like this? A table of contents! The ToC
occupies the first page in the notebook. Plans for World Domination? p
2. Band names? p 43. Recpies, p99. From there you can interleave ideas
by using threading. Similar to Zettelkasten where you link cards to
other cards, in this notebook system you link pages to other pages.
Starting the secrets to Life, the Universe, and Evertyhing on p42, but
you've filled up a page? No big deal, at the bottom of p42 you draw a
little arrow and add p45. At the top of p45, you put an arrow with
p42. Now when you're looking back through your notes you can easily
jump back and forth. And the table of contents you can also add the
other "start" pages. So Life, the Universe, and Everything would have
p42, p45-53 or something like that.
This idea has been pretty fantastic for me. I used to caaarry around a
journal, then I'd have other notebooks and what-not. By having one
single notebook, I never need to worry about grabbing another one. I
always have it with me. The part I have not yet successfully
implemented in my life is the Ritual of Transferrence. Under the GID
Guy's system, the RoT happens once per day where you take the things
in your notebook and you transfer them to your digital stuff, whether
that's Google Docs, Evernote, or something else.
The other system that I found intriguing was Derek Sivers - he talks
about keeping a Daily Journal and a Topic Journal. This idea appealed
to me. It's a bit of a hybrid of Zettelkaten and the master system.
Basically, like Zettelkasten you have topics that you write about, and
keep organized. But you also keep a daily record about whatever else
doesn't really fit into a particular topic.
This idea reonated with me. In the past, I was involved in the
original Wiki - Ward Cunningham's wiki on c2.com. Largely that was
because I used some professional Wiki software... well, Enterprise is
a better word for it. But Quick it was not. On Ward's site, all it
took to create another page was to write text in CamelCase/WikiCase.
Just mash your words together and capitalize each first letter.
WangoFett for instance. Save the page, click on that link and either
you went and added content, or you could see the content that was
already there. This made it super trivial to link topics toether, like
ZettelKasten. But it didn't incorporate the daily journal aspect of
it.As you may have noticed - earlier I mentioned concern about the
permenance of gloud providers. So I didn't want to link my system to
any of those. But that left me with a challenge. I'm not using
Dropbox. I'm not using Google Docs. I'm not using Evernote. So what
now?
Th other thing that I've been a huge fan of for years is th command
line. The more things I can do with plain text files, the happier I
am. Plain text can be unicode or ASCII, and almost every singel text
editor there ever was will handle it properly. Sure, it's not really
compressed, but if you need compression it's easy to do that with a
number of tools.
That's when I struck on an amazing idea that has fit so perfectly for
me it's practically embarassing.
What works great with text files? Git! What is available basically
everywhere I could imagine? Git!
So I have a git repository with a file in it: journal.txt This file
contains both my daily journal and my topic journal. It's been utterly
fantastic. Vim is my favorite text editor, and it's easy to sort a
block of text. vip:sort<cr>
That's it. Vim also has a quick find. * will search the file for the
word that's under the cursor. Words like "the" are going to be pretty
common. So how do I make things easier to search for? Oh! WikiText
works great! Because when I'm talking about WikiText I'm going to
write it like that, not like wiki text. That distinguishes the two
very easiliy. So my table of contents are sorted - what about the
actual entries? Yep, sorted too. Kind of a sneaky way. This is my
process:
Add a value, e.g. OnOrganization - then * to find the next occurrence.
Usually that's just the one I'm on. If not, I just hit n to jump
around till I get there. Now vip:sort<cr> and my ToC has been sorted.
n takes me to the entry I just added. yy to yank that line. j* will
search for the topic that is just after the one I'm trying to add. A P
puts my new entry above the existing one. I actually use lists
like
- this
- one
When I'm doing my ToC. So I'll do a 2x on my line to remove that. Then
yypVr= will make my entry look like this:
OnOrganization
==============
Now I can just start adding more text beneath that - whatever I need.
I actally also add timestamps to my entries, too, because that makes
it easy to remember when I added information. ^r=strftime('%F %T')<cr>
will do that one for me. Then a yypVr- to put a neat little border
under it.
Then I just write whatever notes I need to make. And of course if I
want to follow the ZettelKasten link-to-other topics idea, I just add
WikiText to it. Occasionally I will link to topics that don't even
exist yet. But that's not really an issue, because if I go looking for
it I'll discover that it doesn't exist and I can then go add that
information to my topic journal.
For my "daily" journal, I just jump to the end of the file and add a
new timestamp - similar to the way you would do it in a rgeular diary.
Obviously, I can add WikiText entries to this, as well. This process
has been an epic winning fo me. Because I can edit my text on my
CyberWriter, I can edit my text on my computer, on my phone (termux
ftw!) and then I just use git to sync everything. I actually use
branches per device, because sometimes I forget to sync my repos. But
that's such a trivial thing - sometimes I'll have merge conflicts when
I forget and add daily journal entries on different systems, but
because I'm using timestamps, it's super simple.
This is the system that I use to organize my thoughts. I have the
physical notebook, and then I have my journal.txt that I sync with
git, across multiple devices and even back up to flash drives. This
organization has given me the best of all the worlds - wiki, plain
text, links from Zettelkasten, and a physical notebook.
The only thing that I have yet to incorporate well is transferring
things from my physical notebook to my journal.txt, especially the
journal entries.
Another thing that I have started using is a Work Journal. Basically,
i have a notebook where I keep entries of what I'm doing on a given
day. I'll add timestamps so I can remember when, but this allows me to
almost trivally go back and see what Ii was working on. But what I've
found is vastly more useful is that it allows me to process and
organize my thoughts about problems that I'm working on. Sometimes the
problems are particularly hairy, and keeping notes helps me think more
closely and carefully about what I'm doing. It helps me from avoiding
going down the same dead end 3 or 4 times. In general it's just been a
massive boost to my productivity. It also serves as a record, so I can
go back every period of time and actually talk about what I was doing
or working on. It may work well to keep this kind of log in a text
file as well, but at least for now I'm finding success keeping this in
my notebook. I do have a bit of a minor confession - I do have a work
notebook, because most employment agreements talk about returning all
notes and what-not. This way I can simply either destroy the notes or
return it to the company without having a lot of hullaballoo. That
leads me to the thought about just putting things in a digital note
format. The biggest challenge that I feel that I face in that arena is
simply remembering to do it. Something about the modality of switching
to pen and paper fits my brain better.
I have discovered that A5 is the perfect notebook size for me. It's
not too small, and it's just big enough that I cannnn hold an open
notebook with one hand and write with the other -- but it's not too
large, either. I have been using webnotebooks (notebooks with a pocket
in the back of the book) for some years now, and that seems to work
well. But recently I encountered disk binding, which is a very
interesting form of notebook paper inserts that is better than a
3-ring binder, or coils or any other kind of approach. It's more
durable, and completely refillable. That offers some
interesting/compelling use cases - because I can then I could add work
and personal notes in the same notebook and simply take out the work
pages. The bigger trick would be the table of contents and page
numbering on a long-term basis. So I'm not entirely convinced yet.
So that's my thought organizer.
Digital Bits
------------
I have been a citizen of technology since the NES and the Apple
MacIntosh. I am old enough to remember diaing into BBSes, and when
graphics were CGE, EGA, and VGA (and SVGA, wow!). I remember the
SoundBlaster and 16-bit audio. I gre up with AIM, Yahoo Messenger,
MSN, and ICQ (I didn't do that much with IRC, since I didn't pirate
mIRC like all my friends). It's safe to say that I have a /lot/ of
bits floating around. I've been super lackadasical about actually
backing these up, and organizing them well. It's also become apparent
that for things like git repos, when Google Code, BitBucket's
mercurial hosting, and the most recent youtube-dl fiasco, that if the
repo does not exist on physical mediums that I control, they may as
well not exist at all.
I also have a significant number of bits hanging out on old hard disks
in random locations that I'm working on consolidating. I've realized
that what I need to do for my digital bits is what I call a Reverse
Kando. Specifically, with the Kando method you get rid of anything
that doesn't "Spark joy". Look at it, and if it doesn't immediately
spark joy, remove it from your life.
For digital bits, though, the reverse-kando looks like this: if the
data sparks dread, "Ew, gross, nope, I definitely do not want this to
ever see the light of another day", then you keep it. Because storage
is cheap, and always getting cheaper every day.
But I still need to figure out exactly what I need to do. One of the
most popular methods is 3-2-1, three copies (original+2 copies), two
different storage type, and one copy off-site. I've been thinking
about doing something like this:
- Get 3 USB drives
- Keep 1 plugged in and typically work from that. Back up data to
internal drive daily (minimum)
- At regular intervals (say once per week) copy the current drive to
the next drive and promote that to the primary drive.
- Take the now-backup drive to an off-site location and swap for the
drive there
- Bring the offsite drive in and double check that only expected data
was changed. That drive then becomes the new daily backup.
- Continue forever!
I plan to start this with some cheap flash drives, but will likely
upgrade to larger SSDs. I would also like to add some NAS to this mix,
following a similar strategy.
I'll have to update things here with progress on that front.
Organizing Atoms
================
This is one of the more difficult things. With information and
electrons there are a lot of flexiility. But atoms are *heavy*. It
takes a lot to move them around, and they take up a substantial amount
of physical space. We've managed to store more and more bits of
information in the same mass of atoms, and that's just getting better
and better. But we haven't come up with anything largely better than
what we've got before when it comes to storing atoms. And we've got a
lot of atoms. I have lots and lots of atoms. I have tools and
materials and scrap and... well, just lots of things.
I don't yet have a consistent story for organization there. I have
made huge inroads but it's not complete. The bigest thing that I've
discovered is that Sterlite Shoebox (6 qt) sized totes are perfect for
most of my needs. I can get a bundle of 10 from Walmart for usually
about $8 - I found them on clearance a few times which was amazing,
but right now they're all out of stock everywhere??
Anyway, these have been pretty perfect for my needs. They're clear so
I can see what's in them, and they're of uniform size. I've used my
label maker to print labels, but there are other options like a
permanent marker. But the black on white I've discovered is easier to
read. This isn't everything, however. I do have some things that are
larger than a single tote, or too many things to fit in one tote. And
currently I have more totes than I have shelving. Though I have room
for more shelving.
The other thing that I'm working on doing is converting some things
from atoms to electrons - that is, it's no tthe physical nature of the
object that is important, but the information on it.
Labels I've found to be important, an I'm a fan of Adam Savage's
"first order retrievability" - the idea that the most important
optimization is being able to get the tool or supply that you need
when you need it. Things that are in drawers are problematic because
you can't put your hand to them, and if you can't see it you don't
have it. I have a number of tools and supplies that are a testament to
this idea. So I'm working on that.
Anyway, this has grown pretty long, and taken several days longer to
complete than I had intended, so this is where I will end.
Feel free to direct questions/comments to
[email protected] - I
welcome VSRE emails -
http://vsre.info
