While I share his feelings about stuff and storage, I am not sure I totally agree with his take on the electronic “stuff” we save. I do love my lists…no secret there. I have at least three different notebooks full of lists right now. Plus a list sitting on my desk of things to do…and, we created a grocery list this morning over coffee.
Of course, I also have quite the growing list in my del.icio.us account.
The difference, for me, is that I can usually find what I want in those lists and in my electronic storage. Using tags and decent descriptions makes it easier to locate things later. I guess my inner librarian helped me out there.
Perhaps that is what we all need to keep up with these electronic dumps o’ info….an inner librarian who will take a little time up front to give enought metadata to make the stuff “findable” when that “later” from the “I might need this later” actually comes up.
Basement.org: Enough With The Lists
So do we throw it all out? Nope. We store it. The same goes for information on the web. There’s too much of it…and in a lot of cases the stuff is actually pretty good. So we collect it for umm…future consumption (at least that’s what we tell ourselves).
The result is the de-valuation of information. It’s less about the quality of any discrete piece of content and more about the numbing consequence of sheer abundance.
Image: ‘Grocery List‘
www.flickr.com/photos/59191149@N00/1222698881
The new traffic light is active and working! It is something else to not have to factor in the turning left time when we go somewhere at high traffic. Now, these warning signs have been up for almost a month – we wonder about their effectiveness since the light has been non-functional as long as they have been up.
Back in March 1999, this skinny scared dog showed up in our yard upon returning from a trip to Hawaii. We named her Haleakala and on April 22, 1999 (Earth Day) she came inside the house for the first time. So, we declared Earth Day as her unofficial birth day. She got some treats from a vendor at yesterday’s Earth Fest. She loves them!!!
I just joined a Flickr group on inspiration boards. It’s a great way to see how other folks surround themselves with materials/clippings/stuff to keep them inspired and upbeat. Here’s my window in my office. It doesn’t overlook the outside, rather a computer lab but I did have to decorate it.
We have been taking advantage of the free cooking classes offered at the nearby natural foods grocery store. But, the session called “The Wonderful World of Donuts” might be not has healthy as some of the others!!
It was still a lot of fun.
Okay…I have to admit that losing the camera really took the wind out of my blogging sails. I resolve to get it back on track now. I missed just at 4 weeks with the camera and filled in a few days with borrowed cameras. So, P365 will be more like a P335. Oh well. Here’s the archive for January showing the gaps. I’ll keep the following months filled, I hope.
And, I’ll try to keep track of my stuff as well!!
I fascinated by this fairly recent study (funded by Yahoo!, among others) about the overlapping of technlogies within a typical family. Doing that equals to more hours of activity per day. From the report:
While using the Internet, people are also doing two or three other things, often watching TV or talking on the phone,” said Mike Hess, global director of research at OMD, part of Omnicom Group
As I sit here, writing in my blog, listening to a record, waiting for two other sites to load in different tabs, heating up a pan to cook pancakes for breakfast, I think I get it!
How many hours do we need to cram in the day? Lately, I am being drawn back towards Voluntary Simplicity and the concept of montasking. Even John Mayer mentioned monotasking in a recent interview I read in Performing Songwriter magazine (of course, i was reading that while I was on the elliptical trainer at the gym – so much for monotasking!)
I am going to strive to focus on the task at hand…whatever that might be. We’ll see how it goes. Does technology help you do more or cause you to do more?
