A little known hack to get your notebook organized | Hacker News Reader

A little known hack to get your notebook organized

blog.highfivehq.com

14 pointstannerc7 comments

In terms of getting a notebook organized, I prefer the Bullet Journal method [1], which I've been using for some time now and which has been effective for me.

[1] http://bulletjournal.com

That is very cool, thanks for sharing.

That system is rather similar to “The Cycle System”, as recommended by the book Time Management for System Administrators¹, (also a series of lectures²) by Thomas A. Limoncelli, except the Bullet Journal uses months, where The Cycle System uses days.

1) http://everythingsysadmin.com/books.html

2) http://www.tomontime.com/

Of course this is a hack and not an organizational method, because hack is sexy (see: this site) and organizational method is not. It's also a little-known hack, because people don't like popular things, they like things that make them feel like they know something the experts don't (see: doctors HATE this!)

Don't do GTD; Trello is a little known hack for organizing your projects.

Hacks are sexy?

Man, some of my most functional hacks have been FUG-ly.

Either I've documented them in nauseating detail, carefully explaining why I did something so rude, so nasty, to save myself posthumous embarrassment and my heirs embarrassment by association on the off chance posterity should notice, or I've carefully hid them (Siri, how do I hide this fugly mess?) to prevent any and all returns.

This one is pretty cool, though. Pretty cool indeed.

The idea of being a hacker and hacking certainly is sexy. That's why we have hacker news, lifehacker, little known hacks, hack your [summer, brain, relationship, bible, etc], and so on.

Now, if you actually need to hack something together, that's generally frowned upon. If I duct tape my bumper back onto my car, people will not be terribly impressed. If I replace a damaged wall in my house with a tarp, my roommates will move out.

But oh lord, if I hack my headache by taking a cold shower, if I hack my plants by draining my air conditioner into the garden, hack my notebook by labeling it with tags, or if I hack on a multi-billion dollar startup that gets sold to Facebok due to the massive amount of money, talent, and polish I've put into it... now that's a sexy hack.

While I am given to argument for the sake of argument, especially with friends whilst consuming beverages hot or cold, I don't write this either to take issue or to initiate an argument (though I do have a 48IBU bevvie close at hand and am optimistic enough to believe your worldview and mine overlap sufficiently)....

I don't think I've ever thought of hacking as sexy. It has for me always been about a blend of intellectual curiosity and pragmatic delivery: I need to do <aThing>, how can I reasonably balance timely delivery, goal-appropriate level of effort, sense of accomplishment, and intellectual curiosity and fascination?

Or how I can so exaggerate one of those (usually the last) so as to justify the result as a truly great hack?

A duct taped bumper isn't a hack, it's a fugly kludge, no elegance or creativity at all. A bumper held in place by super powerful magnets? yeah, that's a hack. (Not a good one, that sucker's fallin' at a bump, but, dude, magnets!)

Your examples are all sexy hacks, this is true. But to me sexiness never entered into the input parameters of the hack, but was only ever an indicator of the hack's true elegance.

(Perhaps had I incorporated design thinking into my approach long before I would be violently in agreement with you on all points.... Hmm, cogitative nutrition.)

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