There’s magic in mess: Why you should embrace a disorderly desk
timharford.com
timharford.com
Some people love to acquire new things. I love getting rid of old things that no longer serve a purpose in my life.
I didn't know to be alarmed or happy when I first saw that feature.
I'm not sure it's an official feature, but it works for photos which are about a week old.
Only prob I have is some places insist on original docs :-/
Although, I guess it doesn't have to rotate, I don't know why I wanted it to rotate.
You could slant the shelves inwards so the books would be less likely to slowly slip out while it spins.
Edit, I guess it could still be a staircase, several steps up and wrapping around a bit, that becomes the platform you ride up and down on.
The more I think about this, the less reasons I can think of for having the damned thing rotate - aside from the possibility of storing books inside the central cylinder, in which case rotation the staircase would give you access to more space.
Depending on the size of it, the whole column may be accessible without rotation, but may require you to stoop low for some items and maybe reach a bit for others.
You could get pretty nuts with bookcase staircases. Alternating tread double-helical staircases with books on the inside and outside faces of the stairs, and shelves on the underside of the treads above as well? Probably not to code, but it's would be pretty cool.
I used to be that guy. Then I got tired of hauling all that stuff every time I moved.
Now, if I can reasonably expect my library to have it, I don't keep it (unless it's a reference book I need to consult often). And when I buy new books, I prefer ebooks. They don't take up much clutter.
I do donate them. Or even sell them. But either way, I get rid of them.
I'm usually a mess of clutter. Some years ago I started attending workshops on tidying up. Every one of them points out: Before you even begin to organize stuff, identify stuff to throw out and get rid of it. Then organizing is easier.
The real problem is not that it's hard to organize. The problem is we have too much stuff.
For people interested in this, a recent bestseller:
https://www.amazon.com/Life-Changing-Magic-Tidying-Declutter...
I only started applying it, and it's not as quick as it may sound. Time will tell if the principles in it last, or if I become a mess again.
Basic ideas:
1. Get rid of stuff.
2. How do you decide what to get rid of? Keep only the things that bring joy to you.
3. What about utilitarian stuff (e.g. cutlery)? Well, keep some. Better yet, if they don't give you joy, buy ones that do and throw the current ones away.
4. Sentimental stuff you don't use? If you're cramped for space, take pictures and donate. These things may bring you joy when you look at them, but if your home is full, they are literally preventing you from new experiences.
The basic ideas:
1. If you surround yourself only with stuff that brings joy, you'll find yourself a lot happier.
2. This may be a bit expensive, as good quality stuff is pricey. However, if you follow this rule when you go out to shop, you pretty much eliminate buying a lot of stuff with this criterion: Am I buying it because it's a good deal or an impulse, or will this truly bring joy to me? This eliminates most of the useless purchases. Another thought: Do I have things in my home that I bought earlier and have not properly utilized/used? If so, why am I adding more stuff? If I buy this, what can I identify at home to get rid of?
Overall, buying pricier items may be cheaper in the long run.
Recently I went back to using fountain pens. I used to when I was young, but stopped when I entered university. Now that I use them, I wish I had never stopped. I threw away all my "freebie" ballpoints, and just use the fountain pen. Problem? A lot of paper doesn't handle it. So I now only purchase notebooks that have better quality paper. Is this cheaper? Probably never will be. However, I now just love to take notes on paper. I've added a joy to my life and removed something pedestrian.
I used to organize email into folders meticulously, later using tags and rules. What a complete waste of time. These days I refuse to spend even a second organizing email or reducing my inbox, as I can summon any email even from years ago in a few seconds with fuzzy search terms. Here's another heresy I'm testing that I think may turn out to be true: Spending any effort whatsoever organizing files on your computer is equally worthless.
Yet we attempt to emulate it.
Some people are horrified or judged based on a user's refusal to use filters and folders, carefully organizing content, and having an empty inbox.
Email would be considerably harder to organize in this fashion unless you run your own mailserver.
Perhaps it should be auto purged as things age. Most users probably instinctively move things to be kept elsewhere
I only use 4 main directories. One for code projects, one for design projects, ~/Downloads for transient files, ~/Documents for files that don't belong to an specific project.
Once in a while I create a YYYY-MM-DD folder, drop the current version of each of those folders, and start again with a clean slate. If I need to edit a file, I just search for it and edit it where it is; if I notice I'm having to edit it often, I may bring it back to its previous folder.
If it looks like what a regular user would do, that's exactly why I started doing it. I don't want to care.
i cant imagine interacting, sorting, and deleting all those items. search works perfectly every time, never been unable to find a work email.
i also cant imagine using email as a todo list over some kind of team/projectmanagement inbox software such as https://www.enchant.com/, frontapp, intercom, missive, zendeskinbox, streak, trello, asana etc.
talking to the developers, thats not exactly how they intended the software to be used, and internally they close tickets aggressively and move longer term tasks to project management tracking in trello.
on the gmail front, their tabs or whatever are a lifesaver. i only check the primary and update tabs daily, the rest is pseudo-junkmail.
tldr: to answer your question simply. if i get an email asking for something or that i need to act on, and it didnt come FROM some type of tracking/pm/ticketing software, i forward it to the appropriate software so it is added to the todo list. if youre on a team using task software like https://glip.com/ for instance, you add the task directly in the software, you dont email the person.
human<>human communication is almost always through messaging apps.
producthunt had this today https://www.producthunt.com/tech/owlie
no matter what, i rely on search. if i need to find something in facebook messenger, i use search. gmail, search. outlook, search.
if an email is important, i star it. if i need to plan with mother and sister, i send a message to a family IM group.
virtually every message i send is 1) through a routing abstraction layer on one of the two ends 2) instant messaging 3) social forum. direct email to email chitchat isnt a regular practice, but that doesnt mean i dont use email. email for me functions as a 1)compatibility layer between otherwise isolated systems 2) old school notification tray
So you don't actually use email as a communication system, in case you misunderstood my meaning. I'd be interested to see whether this is generally true for people who argue that they don't need to worry about what's in their inbox.
if i did hold conversations directly through email<>email, that would not change my lack of folders. i could see using gmail tags more aggressively.
the closest thing i have to folders are saved, predefined search queries based on parameters and conditions. the contents of those sort automatically based on metadata, some of which i apply by hand.
If there's something I need to do I either write a note down on a scrap-of-paper/notepad/sticky-note or just you know, do it.
I am in fact hilariously unorganized but it's pretty unimportant because I'm not sure how having a bunch of folders for stuff is supposed to keep me from forgetting to do things.
As long as the proper files are in the backed up folders, I suspect your theory to hold true.
As an housing architect is crutial to have all documents in a predictable order, specially when I don't work alone. A team of architects normally work in the same large set of files, so to simplify collaboration a good file naming system is mandatory.
Oh, was she mad...
In most cases they are using the delete key something like a surrogate for the read/unread flag. Keeping the inbox 'clean' of old email. I tried testing with view filters set to only show unread email, but that didn't work because the read flag is toggled too easily. Effectively they want a button that says "I'm done with you go away" to an email in their inbox.
All in all, if it works for these users, I am not going to impose my style of organizing my mailbox on them. But using the Trash for that purpose seems dangerous for the same reason using the trash bin in the office as an archive is.
Absolutely. I've been practising this for more than 20 years. When the NT 4.0 Option Pack came out in 1998 I was delighted because it gave me a search engine on my desktop and I could stop feeling guilty about my lack of organisation. I don't have trouble finding things.
To most of us, it may seem obvious that piling is
dysfunctional while filing is the act of a serious
professional. Yet when researchers from the office
design company Herman Miller looked at high-performing
office workers, they found that they tended to be
pilers. They let documents accumulate on their desks,
used their physical presence as a reminder to do work,
and relied on subtle cues — physical alignment, dog-
ears, or a stray Post-it note — to orient themselves.
Removing the cognitive load of precise classification, using the physical space for physical items or multi-dimensional tag system for digital items, allows you to focus on the work itself and not on the items that make up the work.
If you really need a filing system, hire a librarian.
http://assets3.bigthink.com/system/idea_thumbnails/54803/pri...
And my actual work monitors, keyboard and mouse on a relatively tidy area.
One day, I carefully asked him if I could help him clean up some space. I was kind of nervous, because - while otherwise the best boss I ever had - he was not very good at taking what he perceived as criticism. To my surprise, though, he broke into a mischievous grin and said, "If I start to clean up here, it will take no more than five minutes for my boss to come in here and ask me if I have nothing better to do."
His boss was kind of a neat freak when it came to his own desk, but he was indeed the kind of boss who, when he saw you cleaning up your desk, would ask you if had nothing better to do. (Which suited me fine, to be honest, my current boss is more the "You should clean up your desk"-kind of guy...)
TL;DR - a messy desk can be fine, so long as it does not control you. I have seen people whose desks looked messy, but when asked for a specific item, they could reach for it without hesitation. Once you spend more time searching for things than you save by not keeping it in order, you have a problem.
I prefer something like what the article called the "piler" strategy. I don't like spending precious time and energy organizing things. But the problem is if I have too many things in front of me, I can't concentrate. My anxiety builds up. My creativity vanishes.
The Inbox app lets me reach an optimal balance of order and productivity. It's changed my life. And ever since, I've been proselytizing it.
This post thinks that you have to trade off order and productivity, but why not both? It now sounds like a false trade-off to me.
(PS Using search rather than categories and folders for email and files also was a big win but I'm not as excited about that now because that was years ago.)
Search does work wonders, though, and I find myself using that a lot more to find emails, but it's so fast I consider it frictionless.
I did briefly try the Inbox app when it first came out but found the automatic sorting meant I occasionally missed important emails. If you use the regular inbox and the archive button you can at least see everything coming in and decide if it is important. I've been aggressive about disabling email from services that offer their own inbox (Facebook, Asana, Github etc) and unsubscribing from automated email lists - that helps limit how much I am archiving.
Also, I disabled bundling right away after I started using Inbox. The bundling is useful sometimes but I thought it more pain than it's worth. Perhaps that's why more people don't use Inbox.
Moving business requirements, obscure edge cases, performance concerns all seem to creep into an "orderly" codebase.
I don't think this applies to all software, things with a very long release/feedback cycle(aerospace, medical, etc) necessitate planning and careful deliberation but there's certainly a tension between order and shipping code.
I'm in a similar situation at my current job, we've got a few guys that want to go really crazy with OOP concepts (design patterns, going overboard with new technologies) from the first sign of a new issue/feature.
It really causes a lot of problems though, when your business requirements change (or you encounter an edge case) and you need to redesign the entire codebase to account for it. They are literally grinding everything to a halt with this stuff, and I think their issues arise from a need to categorize everything in the codebase prematurely, before the solution has "evolved".
Thoughts?
The only thing I've seen effective is prototyping a feature 2x and then taking the 2nd/3rd iteration. Finding time for that in a normal schedule is pretty hard though.
Another approach if you have the option is to build the feature as rapidly as possible(within reason here obviously) and deliver it out of band. It doesn't win you an immediate friends(and may even burn a few bridges) however if you can pull it off 2-3x then you can build a reputation of getting things done. This has the potential to backfire pretty significantly though if you can't get the rest of the dev team onboard so I would be very careful about employing it.
3/4 of the team is on-board with the getting things done in a good way, and the other 1/4 wants to be a slow pain in the ass.
Unfortunately the times I've seen that it was usually only solved by splitting the teams onto other projects or the minority leaving the company.
However at his desk he was also required to outline everything in tape. His stapler, keyboard, mousepad, laptop, wires running across were all outlined on the desk in tape. They would have desk audits, and any repeated deviation, where an item was outside its outline, would result in HR action.
It absolutely sucks when it's applied to the physical space of an office (well, overly) where information is the purpose. A digital 5S needs to be developed, the physical one is mostly irrelevant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System
As based on the Japanese principal of kaizen (the original CI):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
and I would also like to mention Deming:
L1 cache - stuff on my desk that needs to be paid or read in the next 30 days.
L2 cache - Bills that have been paid and docs that have been read, but things that might need to be referenced in the next year - in a banker's box next to my desk, completely unfiled. Just drop them in when paid/read.
RAM - At the end of the year, file the stuff in the banker's box into a small set of folders in a file cabinet or drawer.
Disk - At the end of the year, move last year's files into a banker's box and put it in the basement/garage/storage.
Also at the end of the year, take the box that's 7 years old to the professional shredder's place and destroy it.
I do have email folders for mailing lists. I find that if I don't, then searching brings up too many hits, and if I can narrow the search to a particular list, that will reduce the number of false positives. I have a rule per mailing list, so it's very easy to maintain.
No, side is more worth than the others, though the cooperate bureaucrats would be of another opinion, because you cant see, what has yet to be. You cant differentiate against what chaos will give birth too. Enjoy your day.
Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/crash-how...
One of the CEOs had his malfunction, and re-appropriated his son's a day later.
The image recognition and organization are decent, but I can see how relying on it, and having it fail, can be very disruptive to one's process.
File cabinets and file folders don't seem to suffer from such things.
Take that you neatniks.
Combining for memory palace?
For example, my CD/Vinyl/DVD/Book collections have never been alphabetized nor categorized, but I can find anything I want very quickly, because I seem to think spatially about the layout of the collection.
For some reason, I know instinctively that my copy of "In the Nightside Eclipse" will be on the upper left shelf while the Miles Davis records will be on the second-last shelf.