If you haven’t heard of Flock you might want to wait to try it (developer .5 prerelease), but keep an ear out as it might be a helpful tool to keep you on track in the next layering of the web.
“We started Flock to build tools that empower people and smooth out some of the more hairy parts of living and working online. As it is, we live and breathe this stuff everyday and wanted better tools to do the things that we love doing online.”
There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.
— Ernest Hemingway
My new Hipster PDA, aka hPDA, aka going analog is being spawned by the current disconnect between software, user-interfaces, and people/social context. Technology is at a level that can handle most everything but without clean engineering and interop with a lot of devices, most things have limitations. Limitations equates into irritations which means if you are perturbed by things you probably won’t want to use them to make progress.
Insert good ol’ paper. Paper has instant transmission (hand it off), easily jottable, drawable, sortable. You build little systems for handling your paper-data and it can flow in a myriad of ways that help faciliate getting things done.
I’ve currently invested myself in 3.5” x 5” notecards that have been printed with templates based off of David Allen’s, Getting Things Done. They were constructed by first gleaning 43Folders, and being pointed to a great new site D*I*Y Planner which hosts all sorts of templates/forums for classic daytimers or Hipster creations. Taking their Open Office Draw widget library I constructed a different variant which allows me to write more context in less pieces of paper. They’ve been color coded, Yellow are GTD-eske Projects, Blue’s Someday / Maybe’s, Green for Weekly, and extra White’s for note taking/scribbles/brainstorming. As well as using some of D*I*Y’s GTD Quick Sheet, Year Glance, & Shopping lists.
I’ve ordered a Moleskine Memo Pocket that has six dividers which will allow me to implement a micro-GTD foldering system. While I’m still working it out I’ll be able to have weekly, monthly, & tickler slots. I’ve also picked up a 3x5 Card Bleacher from Levenger. This should be able to hold a locations context sensative cards at or around the location for processing. Home projects? Chores? Better than making my cards all hole riddled via thumbtacks.
I’m quite excited to be going low-tech. The more I work on this the more it feels really intuitive. The setup like anything will take you a day, but I think the rewards with this will be great since I can easily share my world with others through the medium of paper where-as technology was stifiling progress due to lack of real solution or incompatibilities between hardware. I’ll post more as I go down this line of thought. With positive thoughts forward I know I can GTD more easily than ever.
-a
To make our way, we must have a firm resolve, persistence, tenacity. We must gear ourselves to work hard all the way. We can never let up.
— Ralph Bunche
Please no more spending of money on technology.. this stuff hurts.. but now we have I think the largest capacity home 110v APC Battery Backup. After wiring it all together and getting the server to acknowledge it we have probable statistics!
I can only hope that is the reality. One last thing to do system wise. Replace the broken harddrive for a boot-cd and the system should be set for quite a while knock on wood. I have so much other crap that needs attention than this beast. If I were really intelligent I’d have farmed out the services to a colo facility and just made a giant filestore at home. Maybe one day I’ll learn?
A peer just IM’d me that I wouldn’t. Laugh.
-a
