For a couple of months now, I’ve been a semi-loyal reader of “43 Folders”:http://43folders.com, a blog by Merlin Mann which tends to dwell on organization habits, OSX, and Moleskines, all of which are things I like, either in theory or in practice. Mann is inspired, or something, by the “Getting Things Done”:http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/getting_started.html model, which is something of a “cult phenomenon”:http://www.43folders.com/2005/07/wired_interview.html involving, among other things, seriously overthinking your todo list.
I haven’t rushed out and bought the GTD book, or anything, but I like the idea of “patching my personal suck.”:http://www.43folders.com/2005/01/patching_your_p.html I happily used a 5×8 variant of the “Hipster PDA”:http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/introducing_the.html for a few months, which I called my “thighster.” And no, I haven’t had any success in getting anyone else to think this is funny.
I still have thighster; I just don’t use it as a proper PDA anymore — I use it as a mostly static reference for frequently-needed technical data related to work. As my workload has intensified over the last few weeks, I find it harder and harder to take the time to do the printing and maintenance necessary to keep it really useful. I was, however, totally enchanted at the news “that Thomas Jefferson used a somewhat hipster-like arrangement”:http://www.43folders.com/2005/08/ye_olde_hipster.html (but with erasable slices of ivory instead of paper) for his note-taking.
But the latest innovation 43 Folders refers to us is “taking your entire life and putting it in a big text file”:http://www.43folders.com/2005/08/life_inside_one.html. There’s some good reasoning here; a text file is, indeed, cross-platform, and it solves the problem of having to deal with competing formats and/or UIs, etc.; it’s no problem to move data from one area to another.
However, under no circumstances do I intend to even play around with this idea. Like the hipster, it has a certain lo-fi chic sexiness to it, but one of the things one gets from using the computer should be a higher degree of automation; if the only gain I get over using pen and paper is the ability to cut and paste strings, I’m not using my investment wisely.
Now, this obviously doesn’t hold true, as Mann points out, for power users of supernerd text editing programs; I’ll be interested to know if someone like “Chris”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com:2521/ugp/show/Chris, who is a much more serious _computer_ nerd than I, might be able to make something of it. As for me, though, such programs tend to have a very steep learning curve, and I’m not sure that’s where I want to put my efforts right now. No, wait, I’m absolutely sure it’s _not_. I have enough habits to make and break right now, with embarking on a new Quixotic Software Quest — I’m still smack dab in the middle of the quest for the wiki grail…